Travelogue 858 – July 7
The Count’s Castle
Baby Jos was very excited to visit a castle. It was our first stop in Gent, the Count’s Castle, or Gravensteen. We stood outside the high grey walls to take pictures together, documenting our first real castle. Inside the gates, the girls ran back and forth across the rough flagstones of the courtyard while Mama and Papa listened to audio guides. We entered the buildings of the castle, and we moved slowly from chamber to chamber, absorbing what we could of the setting and history while reining in the wild enthusiasm of the children.
Little Ren wanted badly to play the small harp standing in the countess’s tiny chamber. The instrument was likely a sturdy replica, but, no, we couldn’t let her play. Museum guests stood in semi-circle, frowning as they listened to the same audio passage, frowning at Little Ren in her distress.
Baby Jos wanted to race up the narrow, circling staircases, regardless of who stood in the way. At the top, between slats guarding the crenellations, we could see the sprawling town. At that height, our babies panicked us at every turn. They continued making dashes one way and then another, as though possessed. We captured them; we led them by hand back to the stairway. Down again we wound, down the cold, constricted wells of spiralling steps, where the air was close and smelled of ancient stone.
Standing at each vantage point, my task as papa was to track racing, tumbling babies. My task as writer was to see the living map, to make the floorplan come alive and speak to me. It’s a tremendous challenge, actually, seeing through time. It requires much more than a vacation day with the family. It takes concentration and imagination. It takes a freed mind, a capacity to daydream. That’s not easy while monitoring crazy children.
I sigh now to think, ‘I chose to write fiction.’ How foolish. That’s life: we choose things without knowledge of them. That’s how it works with time and matter. We choose, and then we learn. Fiction requires varieties of work and commitment that feel somewhat alien, alien to my character and alien also to the zeitgeist.
Of course it requires work. In these days of triumphalist and angry capitalism, it’s no great challenge to conceive of art as hard labour. Anything good must emerge from labour and pain. That’s quite easy to get. But there’s another side to creation that excites more suspicion. Stories also require time spent in active imagination. And imagination is known to keep company with lazy fellow-travellers like ‘reflection; and ‘daydreaming’. And who can abide all the time that authors spend reading? The only reading worthy of our age happens in airports. And frankly, it’s better if the books are Harvard-edited manuals of business management.
So it is that I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I love stories. I feel guilty that I would spend precious vacation time in a place like Gent. I should be more functional, building status with names like Ibiza or Tuscany. I feel guilty about moments stolen in medieval alleyways, when I ought to be earning money or muscle tone. I feel guilty even about the time I don’t have, the hours that exist only in longings, time I would invest in dreaming, contemplation, meditation, speculation, reflection and wonder.
Sunday, July 07, 2019
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Travelogue 857 – June 30
The Big Map
The first room in Gent’s city museum, or the STAM, as it’s called, is the map room. Laid out on the floor is an aerial view of the city, covering three hundred square metres. Available for comparison are smaller historical maps of the city from previous centuries. Several of these maps I’m already familiar with. In fact, there is a lot I recognize among the features of the city.
I’ve been studying maps of Gent, current and historical, since I started working on this book. In my odd relationship with this place, I can say the map has pre-dated the city. While it’s true that Gent is older than I am, and while it’s true that I had visited Gent before I started the research for this book, real acquaintance began with the maps. Previous trips had been too brief. It’d been impossible to form a coherent sense of the town based on the route from the train station to Sint-Baafskerk.
I circled the museum’s floor map, studying the details. The outline of things was familiar, the town’s shape determined by the course of rivers and canals; the town’s orientation according to the compass. I wanted to drill down into the picture, see the paths that became the streets, see the public buildings that shaped the centre and the rows of houses that rose and rose again among the areas less central. I wanted to follow the canals that had shaped the city’s history. I did follow the miniature of the long trench of the Terneuzen canal, dug in the nineteenth century to link the city to the Dutch port on the Scheldt estuary, twenty miles away. I was thinking it would be a nice cycle ride.
Of course, I could identify the museum in its own map, situated in the Bijlokesite complex, once a convent and, for centuries, a hospital. The large complex also houses a concert hall and an academy for opera. Each building seems to come from a different era. The museum building includes the old abbey church and a dormitory for the nuns.
Outside the map room, my interest waned. I enjoyed some of the artefacts, the medieval crossbows, for example. But the historical background was general and offered me very little that was new about my period of interest. I lingered in the rooms devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eras that I hadn’t studied as well, times of Spanish dominance, slow decline and decadence.
I also enjoyed the room dedicated to the mystery of the panel stolen from Van Eyck’s ‘Lam Gods’ triptych in the 1930s. It made for an engaging story. Seven months after the theft, the likely thief died of a heart attack, and only left a cryptic clue in his desk about the whereabouts of the panel. No one has ever found it. One theory ascribes the theft to the diocese itself, hard up for cash. I had a good time looking over the contemporary headlines and watching video clips from news reels and later documentaries.
The Big Map
The first room in Gent’s city museum, or the STAM, as it’s called, is the map room. Laid out on the floor is an aerial view of the city, covering three hundred square metres. Available for comparison are smaller historical maps of the city from previous centuries. Several of these maps I’m already familiar with. In fact, there is a lot I recognize among the features of the city.
I’ve been studying maps of Gent, current and historical, since I started working on this book. In my odd relationship with this place, I can say the map has pre-dated the city. While it’s true that Gent is older than I am, and while it’s true that I had visited Gent before I started the research for this book, real acquaintance began with the maps. Previous trips had been too brief. It’d been impossible to form a coherent sense of the town based on the route from the train station to Sint-Baafskerk.
I circled the museum’s floor map, studying the details. The outline of things was familiar, the town’s shape determined by the course of rivers and canals; the town’s orientation according to the compass. I wanted to drill down into the picture, see the paths that became the streets, see the public buildings that shaped the centre and the rows of houses that rose and rose again among the areas less central. I wanted to follow the canals that had shaped the city’s history. I did follow the miniature of the long trench of the Terneuzen canal, dug in the nineteenth century to link the city to the Dutch port on the Scheldt estuary, twenty miles away. I was thinking it would be a nice cycle ride.
Of course, I could identify the museum in its own map, situated in the Bijlokesite complex, once a convent and, for centuries, a hospital. The large complex also houses a concert hall and an academy for opera. Each building seems to come from a different era. The museum building includes the old abbey church and a dormitory for the nuns.
Outside the map room, my interest waned. I enjoyed some of the artefacts, the medieval crossbows, for example. But the historical background was general and offered me very little that was new about my period of interest. I lingered in the rooms devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eras that I hadn’t studied as well, times of Spanish dominance, slow decline and decadence.
I also enjoyed the room dedicated to the mystery of the panel stolen from Van Eyck’s ‘Lam Gods’ triptych in the 1930s. It made for an engaging story. Seven months after the theft, the likely thief died of a heart attack, and only left a cryptic clue in his desk about the whereabouts of the panel. No one has ever found it. One theory ascribes the theft to the diocese itself, hard up for cash. I had a good time looking over the contemporary headlines and watching video clips from news reels and later documentaries.
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Travelogue 856 – June 23
Solstice 19
It was approaching midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. I opened the front door to the flat to let in a breeze. The evening was cool.
There was still a tint of cerulean blue in the sky, making shadows of the rows of clouds in the west. I experienced a double sense of wonder, inspired by the lingering sunlight at that hour and by the beauty of the colour. I took in the fresh air, breathing out a wordless prayer of thanks for the season.
I’ve been taking the girls to the local park about every other day. We walk hand-in-hand to the canal. They run across the bridge to climb the stairs on the other side. These steps lead to a dirt path that runs along the ridge of a man-made hill. This once was a railway line that brought freight cars to the Van Nelle plant. Now it’s like a wall that divides one district from another. On our side there is a canal with its narrow margins of grass. On the other side is a playground and petting zoo. These days, we can’t see much on either side because of the spring growth.
Along our path, the wildflowers and berry bushes have been growing noticeably. Bees and butterflies flit among the flowers. We’ve seen the season’s first dragon fly. This is our little nature walk, and I try to make the most of it. We stop to call out the colours of the blooms. We stop to check the shade of green in the blackberries. The girls know they will get to taste them when they turn purple. If we spot a ladybug, we set it on Baby’s finger to crawl up her arm. Little Ren will squat over a train of ants, and she knows not to squash them. Further down the path, we descend another stairway, the stones of which are being pushed out of position by the roots and grass underneath, and we run to the playground on the corner.
That day, I told Baby Jos that it was the first day of summer. She’s been longing for summer, when she and her sister could play in the water. She never really got the concept of spring. Sunny days were summer, and cold days were winter. I pointed out the budding trees and the new flowers, attempting to link spring to fall, when the leaves fell. She repeated, ‘it’s summer!’ with some relief.
It was the solstice. I had watched the long day unfold, waking at four to briefly appreciate the brightening colours in the sky. I had enjoyed every hour of sunlight, morning into afternoon. And, as midnight approached, I stood outside my door to marvel at the final colours of the calendar’s happiest day.
Solstice 19
It was approaching midnight, and I couldn’t sleep. I opened the front door to the flat to let in a breeze. The evening was cool.
There was still a tint of cerulean blue in the sky, making shadows of the rows of clouds in the west. I experienced a double sense of wonder, inspired by the lingering sunlight at that hour and by the beauty of the colour. I took in the fresh air, breathing out a wordless prayer of thanks for the season.
I’ve been taking the girls to the local park about every other day. We walk hand-in-hand to the canal. They run across the bridge to climb the stairs on the other side. These steps lead to a dirt path that runs along the ridge of a man-made hill. This once was a railway line that brought freight cars to the Van Nelle plant. Now it’s like a wall that divides one district from another. On our side there is a canal with its narrow margins of grass. On the other side is a playground and petting zoo. These days, we can’t see much on either side because of the spring growth.
Along our path, the wildflowers and berry bushes have been growing noticeably. Bees and butterflies flit among the flowers. We’ve seen the season’s first dragon fly. This is our little nature walk, and I try to make the most of it. We stop to call out the colours of the blooms. We stop to check the shade of green in the blackberries. The girls know they will get to taste them when they turn purple. If we spot a ladybug, we set it on Baby’s finger to crawl up her arm. Little Ren will squat over a train of ants, and she knows not to squash them. Further down the path, we descend another stairway, the stones of which are being pushed out of position by the roots and grass underneath, and we run to the playground on the corner.
That day, I told Baby Jos that it was the first day of summer. She’s been longing for summer, when she and her sister could play in the water. She never really got the concept of spring. Sunny days were summer, and cold days were winter. I pointed out the budding trees and the new flowers, attempting to link spring to fall, when the leaves fell. She repeated, ‘it’s summer!’ with some relief.
It was the solstice. I had watched the long day unfold, waking at four to briefly appreciate the brightening colours in the sky. I had enjoyed every hour of sunlight, morning into afternoon. And, as midnight approached, I stood outside my door to marvel at the final colours of the calendar’s happiest day.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Travelogue 855 – June 22
Citadelpark
In Gent, we stayed at a hotel beside the Scheldt River, just inside the bounds of the medieval city, close to the city’s southern gates (demolished a long time ago). It was a neighbourhood that appeared to be more of a legacy of the imperial era of Belgium, when the industrial revolution had brought something of the old mercantile energy back to Flanders. The houses were snug and stolid, set with humble bits of Jugendstil ornamentation.
One morning, I woke early to make a museum trip on my own. I walked west across the breadth of old Gent, across the Scheldt and across the tongue of land between the two rivers. It only took me fifteen minutes to travel this distance. I traversed the Citadelpark, a generous tract of green urban park set on the site of a post-Napoleonic citadel built.
The park occupied part of a hill that rose like a ridge along the spine of that tongue of land between rivers, a hill that contrasted so starkly with the surrounding Flemish flatlands that it had a name, Blandijnberg, and a long history in the defences of the city. In the age of the Citadel, it must be said, history seemed to have found its rounding off. The French sent no more conquering armies. And the wars of the twentieth century made of the greatest nineteenth-century fortresses quaint hallmarks of futility.
Actually, the French did send one more army, in 1832. But it was in defence of the new Belgian kingdom, rather than in conquest. A year after Belgian independence, the Dutch king invaded. He wanted Flanders back. While the other powers dithered, it was restoration France that came to the rescue. No one outside of Holland objected. It seemed that neutral Belgium had quickly become a vital buffer for the countries in the region.
Well before the Kaiser’s generals projected campaigns across the Belgian frontier, the Citadel had become irrelevant. In the late nineteenth century, when Belgium was eager to count itself among the industrial and colonial powers of Europe, Gent re-imagined the district of the Blandijnberg. The park was planned. The university moved in with new buildings.
Crossing the park, I found a path that led behind a small, artificial waterfall. The park had that kind of moulded feel, like other urban parks surviving from the time before world wars, when park spaces had been designed as sites for the amusement of the city’s families, and the city’s lovers. Designers simulated and enhanced nature, dreaming up a kind of romantic pastoral. I’m sure it would have seemed absurd to simply allow nature to reclaim the hill. Nature for its own sake was not the point.
Crossing the park on the paved roads, I had to dodge cyclists careening around corners with the casual lack of concern for safety of students everywhere. I’m reminded with every adrenaline spike how this district is now, above all else, a university district.
Past the park and back in city streets, the rest of my way was downhill, past facades of the same era as eastward, down to the humble Leie River. The river was crossed in a minute, and I’d arrived at the Bijloke.
Citadelpark
In Gent, we stayed at a hotel beside the Scheldt River, just inside the bounds of the medieval city, close to the city’s southern gates (demolished a long time ago). It was a neighbourhood that appeared to be more of a legacy of the imperial era of Belgium, when the industrial revolution had brought something of the old mercantile energy back to Flanders. The houses were snug and stolid, set with humble bits of Jugendstil ornamentation.
One morning, I woke early to make a museum trip on my own. I walked west across the breadth of old Gent, across the Scheldt and across the tongue of land between the two rivers. It only took me fifteen minutes to travel this distance. I traversed the Citadelpark, a generous tract of green urban park set on the site of a post-Napoleonic citadel built.
The park occupied part of a hill that rose like a ridge along the spine of that tongue of land between rivers, a hill that contrasted so starkly with the surrounding Flemish flatlands that it had a name, Blandijnberg, and a long history in the defences of the city. In the age of the Citadel, it must be said, history seemed to have found its rounding off. The French sent no more conquering armies. And the wars of the twentieth century made of the greatest nineteenth-century fortresses quaint hallmarks of futility.
Actually, the French did send one more army, in 1832. But it was in defence of the new Belgian kingdom, rather than in conquest. A year after Belgian independence, the Dutch king invaded. He wanted Flanders back. While the other powers dithered, it was restoration France that came to the rescue. No one outside of Holland objected. It seemed that neutral Belgium had quickly become a vital buffer for the countries in the region.
Well before the Kaiser’s generals projected campaigns across the Belgian frontier, the Citadel had become irrelevant. In the late nineteenth century, when Belgium was eager to count itself among the industrial and colonial powers of Europe, Gent re-imagined the district of the Blandijnberg. The park was planned. The university moved in with new buildings.
Crossing the park, I found a path that led behind a small, artificial waterfall. The park had that kind of moulded feel, like other urban parks surviving from the time before world wars, when park spaces had been designed as sites for the amusement of the city’s families, and the city’s lovers. Designers simulated and enhanced nature, dreaming up a kind of romantic pastoral. I’m sure it would have seemed absurd to simply allow nature to reclaim the hill. Nature for its own sake was not the point.
Crossing the park on the paved roads, I had to dodge cyclists careening around corners with the casual lack of concern for safety of students everywhere. I’m reminded with every adrenaline spike how this district is now, above all else, a university district.
Past the park and back in city streets, the rest of my way was downhill, past facades of the same era as eastward, down to the humble Leie River. The river was crossed in a minute, and I’d arrived at the Bijloke.
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Travelogue 854 – June 11
Gefeliciteerd!
And I interrupt the Gent program again to report on events, momentous events. We celebrated a birthday on the weekend, the fourth birthday of my dear girl, Baby Jos, no longer a baby, but a tall and loud and forceful little girl.
Humans live to be surprised by each other. Habits are comfortable and efficient, but novelty is nourishment. Children have great versatility to surprise, growing so quickly, graced with such stores of energy. Discovery is continual, and it’s mutual. I mean that children’s discovery becomes conscious through the mirroring of adults. And children make the mundane new for adults.
Jos has grown so quickly this year. I am surprised by simple things. I am surprised by how heavy she has become to carry. I am surprised by the muscle in those lithe arms and legs. I am surprised by her humour, a child’s robust and subversive humour. She makes faces; she crosses her eyes; she makes up funny dances. Intelligence glints in her eye.
My Jos is passionate. She howls when she doesn’t get what she wants. She tells me she loves me, and then she tells me to go away. She laughs with joy when cartoon characters sing on TV. She cheers when I bring home treats. All of it I enjoy without reservation, encouraging her to enjoy.
My Jos is not shy. When the guests arrive at her birthday party, she greets them herself. If they have brought gifts, she asks about them right away. When it’s time for photos, she is quick to take a pretty pose. And when it’s time to blow the candles out, she’s excited and exhibits no stage fright. When people sing for her, she is openly delighted.
Baby Jos anticipated the party for days, thinking often of the cake and ice cream and gifts. She spent days reasoning forcefully with her younger sister about the privileges of birthdays. “It’s not your birthday, Ren. It’s mine.” Little Ren is unconvinced.
The two share everything, though not always peacefully. When there is peace, it’s often due to Little Ren’s idolization of her big sister. They play games together; they pretend. Baby Jos comes up with most games, and Little Ren repeats.
One morning, they’re playing dress-up. They’re rubbing Legos across their faces. It’s lipstick, they explain. They’re banging the Legos against their palms. It’s face cream. They rub their faces again. They apply the cream to their hair. They behind their backs and over their shoulders. They’re dressing, they say. They are perfect mimics, and it’s clear they have watched their mother putting on her bra.
Four years old and starting school soon. I am overcome!
Gefeliciteerd!
And I interrupt the Gent program again to report on events, momentous events. We celebrated a birthday on the weekend, the fourth birthday of my dear girl, Baby Jos, no longer a baby, but a tall and loud and forceful little girl.
Humans live to be surprised by each other. Habits are comfortable and efficient, but novelty is nourishment. Children have great versatility to surprise, growing so quickly, graced with such stores of energy. Discovery is continual, and it’s mutual. I mean that children’s discovery becomes conscious through the mirroring of adults. And children make the mundane new for adults.
Jos has grown so quickly this year. I am surprised by simple things. I am surprised by how heavy she has become to carry. I am surprised by the muscle in those lithe arms and legs. I am surprised by her humour, a child’s robust and subversive humour. She makes faces; she crosses her eyes; she makes up funny dances. Intelligence glints in her eye.
My Jos is passionate. She howls when she doesn’t get what she wants. She tells me she loves me, and then she tells me to go away. She laughs with joy when cartoon characters sing on TV. She cheers when I bring home treats. All of it I enjoy without reservation, encouraging her to enjoy.
My Jos is not shy. When the guests arrive at her birthday party, she greets them herself. If they have brought gifts, she asks about them right away. When it’s time for photos, she is quick to take a pretty pose. And when it’s time to blow the candles out, she’s excited and exhibits no stage fright. When people sing for her, she is openly delighted.
Baby Jos anticipated the party for days, thinking often of the cake and ice cream and gifts. She spent days reasoning forcefully with her younger sister about the privileges of birthdays. “It’s not your birthday, Ren. It’s mine.” Little Ren is unconvinced.
The two share everything, though not always peacefully. When there is peace, it’s often due to Little Ren’s idolization of her big sister. They play games together; they pretend. Baby Jos comes up with most games, and Little Ren repeats.
One morning, they’re playing dress-up. They’re rubbing Legos across their faces. It’s lipstick, they explain. They’re banging the Legos against their palms. It’s face cream. They rub their faces again. They apply the cream to their hair. They behind their backs and over their shoulders. They’re dressing, they say. They are perfect mimics, and it’s clear they have watched their mother putting on her bra.
Four years old and starting school soon. I am overcome!
Monday, June 10, 2019
Travelogue 853 – June 10
Processions
We had had good luck with weather. Our days in Gent had been the sort that make you want to sit outside, gathering the spring sunshine while you had it. Outside Sint-Baafskerk, as I’ve said, the square was bound on one side by a long line of cafes, and all of them had rows of tables outside. The tables and their wicker seats were packed tightly into partitioned areas nearly as big as the spaces indoors. And each café had outdoor heaters, installed above the storefront windows for the first row of tables or set upon poles for the tables further from the doors. I was quick to convince the girls they wanted juices and snacks, so I had an opportunity to have a beer and recuperate in the sun.
There’s a lot I wanted to see in this town. The trip was research. I’m writing a book set in Gent. But sightseeing was tiring work.
Fortunately, all was close at hand. Following the curving line of bars in Sint-Baarsplein, we passed the Lakenhalle into the next square, and then onto the street called Botermarkt that led up the slight hill to its intersection with Hoogpoort. Here, the Gothic broke out like ivy gone riot all over the buildings. Most of it was self-conscious nineteenth-century restoration. But I was not unaware that this intersection formed, in actual fact, one hub of the Gothic town itself.
I speculated that it was on the site of the kitschy old bar on the corner that the old guild of crossbowmen, Sint-Jorisgilde, had been housed. Through the town’s glory years, this guild, one of the oldest, had led in war and they had led in civic and religious processions.
I would have given a lot to have had a window opened in time so I could watch a medieval procession in this era, when the civilization of the Middle Ages was at its most codified, when ritual was most elaborate, and when the independent city states in northern Europe were at their freest and proudest. Originally processions were church occasions, but they evolved into expressions of local pride. The bridge between church and city was often the city’s patron saint. No self-respecting city could do without a relic of the patron saint, and some story linking the saint to the city’s history, no matter how improbable. On the saint’s day, the city and its mythos were celebrated.
The processions provided timely applications of glue to hold together enclaves like Gent, standing against titanic nation-building forces like the good dukes of Burgundy. I read recently about one of Gent’s many rebellions against the feudal authority, in 1467. Charles the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was making his first entry into the city after his father’s death. It was the ritual acknowledgement of his new authority over the town. Unwisely, he chose to make his entry during the city’s favourite religious festival, a two-day procession to the nearby town of Houtem to honour Saint Lieven. Hundreds of townspeople retuning the day after the duke’s entry, started rioting in the Vrijdagmarkt.
Processions
We had had good luck with weather. Our days in Gent had been the sort that make you want to sit outside, gathering the spring sunshine while you had it. Outside Sint-Baafskerk, as I’ve said, the square was bound on one side by a long line of cafes, and all of them had rows of tables outside. The tables and their wicker seats were packed tightly into partitioned areas nearly as big as the spaces indoors. And each café had outdoor heaters, installed above the storefront windows for the first row of tables or set upon poles for the tables further from the doors. I was quick to convince the girls they wanted juices and snacks, so I had an opportunity to have a beer and recuperate in the sun.
There’s a lot I wanted to see in this town. The trip was research. I’m writing a book set in Gent. But sightseeing was tiring work.
Fortunately, all was close at hand. Following the curving line of bars in Sint-Baarsplein, we passed the Lakenhalle into the next square, and then onto the street called Botermarkt that led up the slight hill to its intersection with Hoogpoort. Here, the Gothic broke out like ivy gone riot all over the buildings. Most of it was self-conscious nineteenth-century restoration. But I was not unaware that this intersection formed, in actual fact, one hub of the Gothic town itself.
I speculated that it was on the site of the kitschy old bar on the corner that the old guild of crossbowmen, Sint-Jorisgilde, had been housed. Through the town’s glory years, this guild, one of the oldest, had led in war and they had led in civic and religious processions.
I would have given a lot to have had a window opened in time so I could watch a medieval procession in this era, when the civilization of the Middle Ages was at its most codified, when ritual was most elaborate, and when the independent city states in northern Europe were at their freest and proudest. Originally processions were church occasions, but they evolved into expressions of local pride. The bridge between church and city was often the city’s patron saint. No self-respecting city could do without a relic of the patron saint, and some story linking the saint to the city’s history, no matter how improbable. On the saint’s day, the city and its mythos were celebrated.
The processions provided timely applications of glue to hold together enclaves like Gent, standing against titanic nation-building forces like the good dukes of Burgundy. I read recently about one of Gent’s many rebellions against the feudal authority, in 1467. Charles the Good, Duke of Burgundy, was making his first entry into the city after his father’s death. It was the ritual acknowledgement of his new authority over the town. Unwisely, he chose to make his entry during the city’s favourite religious festival, a two-day procession to the nearby town of Houtem to honour Saint Lieven. Hundreds of townspeople retuning the day after the duke’s entry, started rioting in the Vrijdagmarkt.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Travelogue 852 – May 29
The Strike
I interrupt the Gent journal to report on today’s transit strike. Rotterdam woke on strike day to persistent showers. The rain hasn’t abated yet, and it’s nearly noon. I’ve dug out my rain pants, and I’ve ventured out on the bike so I could experience the town on a day without trams or trains or buses. I found it a singularly and surprisingly difficult thing to imagine, a city without trams. It’s good once in a while to be made aware of the things you take for granted, and clearly I had taken the regular rumble and screech of rail transport all aboard into my psyche. Transit routes were cycles of nature, and train cars were as ubiquitous as canals and cows in their fields.
I can report that the streets were predictably quieter this morning. Life hadn’t stopped, but there was less activity. It felt like summer break. Cars sped by with all their former carelessness, but conspicuously absent was the network of sound underneath, the grumble, the bell, the whine of steel wheels.
I stopped by a Metro station. This seemed the ultimate test of the strike. I had never imagined the Metro stations as anything but open, at every hour and forever. The Metro station was a kind of community centre, where we met together to share our quiet disdain for each other.
Cycling by two Metro stations, I saw the proof. The stations were gated off, closed. It felt wrong. Those long train platforms silent and empty: it couldn’t be. Those were our sacred spaces, comprising a species of catacomb where we buried our sunlight and buried our individuality. Where would we find the day’s cold comfort, the shadowless, concrete dreamscape inhabited by sleepwalkers on smart phones? This was a blow.
I took a moment to stop at the grocery store. Here I found people. The aisles were alive with smiles and activity. There was an atmosphere of holiday.
I had originally thought that calling a strike that punished customers more than employers was a dubious strategy, but here I saw through my American bias. In America, the prevailing ethos is to punish the weakest person in any hierarchy. Wrath over a transit strike would be visited upon wage-earners who arrive late to work, sweaty and soaked by the rain. Here, all is viewed with a measure of indulgence. A strike is like a blizzard. The community shrugs and accepts it as a natural phenomenon, out of their control. That could never be countenanced in the America I remember.
Still, I wouldn’t recognize the attitude as support for the transit workers, either. I asked a few people about it in the days before the strike. Most only shrugged. Some were cynical. That was yesterday. Today, it’s a holiday.
The Strike
I interrupt the Gent journal to report on today’s transit strike. Rotterdam woke on strike day to persistent showers. The rain hasn’t abated yet, and it’s nearly noon. I’ve dug out my rain pants, and I’ve ventured out on the bike so I could experience the town on a day without trams or trains or buses. I found it a singularly and surprisingly difficult thing to imagine, a city without trams. It’s good once in a while to be made aware of the things you take for granted, and clearly I had taken the regular rumble and screech of rail transport all aboard into my psyche. Transit routes were cycles of nature, and train cars were as ubiquitous as canals and cows in their fields.
I can report that the streets were predictably quieter this morning. Life hadn’t stopped, but there was less activity. It felt like summer break. Cars sped by with all their former carelessness, but conspicuously absent was the network of sound underneath, the grumble, the bell, the whine of steel wheels.
I stopped by a Metro station. This seemed the ultimate test of the strike. I had never imagined the Metro stations as anything but open, at every hour and forever. The Metro station was a kind of community centre, where we met together to share our quiet disdain for each other.
Cycling by two Metro stations, I saw the proof. The stations were gated off, closed. It felt wrong. Those long train platforms silent and empty: it couldn’t be. Those were our sacred spaces, comprising a species of catacomb where we buried our sunlight and buried our individuality. Where would we find the day’s cold comfort, the shadowless, concrete dreamscape inhabited by sleepwalkers on smart phones? This was a blow.
I took a moment to stop at the grocery store. Here I found people. The aisles were alive with smiles and activity. There was an atmosphere of holiday.
I had originally thought that calling a strike that punished customers more than employers was a dubious strategy, but here I saw through my American bias. In America, the prevailing ethos is to punish the weakest person in any hierarchy. Wrath over a transit strike would be visited upon wage-earners who arrive late to work, sweaty and soaked by the rain. Here, all is viewed with a measure of indulgence. A strike is like a blizzard. The community shrugs and accepts it as a natural phenomenon, out of their control. That could never be countenanced in the America I remember.
Still, I wouldn’t recognize the attitude as support for the transit workers, either. I asked a few people about it in the days before the strike. Most only shrugged. Some were cynical. That was yesterday. Today, it’s a holiday.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Travelogue 851 – May 28
The Square
Outside Sint-Baafs cathedral, there is an open square. On one side is a line of café-bars with outdoor seating. That line drifts away in a curve to open the square wider at the opposite end, where stands the Lakenhalle, the Cloth Hall, which was built during the first half of the fifteenth century. The Lakenhalle is situated right underneath and adjoining the Belfry, Gent’s famous bell-tower.
Picture Gent in the 1430s. While the Vijds were finishing their chapel in the ambulatory of the church then called Sint-Jans, and while Jan Van Eyck was completing his masterpiece, the cloth merchants were busy building their hall across the square. Perhaps they were already using the space for business, storing cloth, conducting their inspections, negotiating daily. It’s hard to imagine how townspeople went about their business in a town centre dominated by multi-generational building projects. The square must have been a mess. Sint-Jans (later Sint-Baafs Cathedral) itself was in the midst of a slow-motion transformation from Romanesque structure to Gothic that would take the better part of two centuries.
The Belfry had only been completed some fifty to a hundred years earlier, so recently by medieval standards that the city watchmen hadn’t moved in yet. They still occupied the tower in the neighbouring Sint-Niklaas Church. These three towers, Sint-Baafs, the Belfry and Sint-Niklaas now form (as they did then, I suppose) a line of heights that give Gent its signature skyline. Tourists are advised to stand on or near the western Sint-Michiels Bridge crossing the Leie to get the finest view of these three towers standing together.
The imagination struggles to picture the city amidst all this change and growth. These days, there’s such generous space accorded these monuments in the centre of town, and there have been such extravagant efforts made to medievalize, that it’s hard to visualize the chaotic and crowded activity that would have been the fifteenth-century experience. It’s safe to say that business and life went on. The churches were open for business, regardless of the stage of building. The cloth trade carried on; it was the life blood of the town. If there was so much open space then, it was put to use, for markets or ceremonials. It’s hard to imagine Gentenaars sentimentalizing the open square, sitting for quiet beers at clean tables overlooking the well-swept flagstones of the square.
Today, the curve of Sint-Baafs Square continues past the Lakenhalle and into the next square, which is fronted by the old city hall and Sint-Niklaas. The square also contains a few curiosities from later times, including the modern City Pavilion, tall and intriguing, a structure that would have baffled the hard-bitten cloth merchants of old Gent. ‘What purpose does it serve?’ they might have asked. Well, it’s beautiful, and it provide shelter for concerts and events. They would have shaken their heads at the waste of space.
There is also an eighteenth-century gateway built into the corner between the Belfry and the Lakenhalle, an entryway into a city jail housed in the basement of the Lakenhalle. A very conspicuous relief was carved into the tympanum, depicting the Roman myth of Cimon, an old man sentenced to starvation but kept alive by his daughter, who breastfed him on prison visits. You can only stand below and laugh or scratch your head, wondering what the city fathers were thinking.
The Square
Outside Sint-Baafs cathedral, there is an open square. On one side is a line of café-bars with outdoor seating. That line drifts away in a curve to open the square wider at the opposite end, where stands the Lakenhalle, the Cloth Hall, which was built during the first half of the fifteenth century. The Lakenhalle is situated right underneath and adjoining the Belfry, Gent’s famous bell-tower.
Picture Gent in the 1430s. While the Vijds were finishing their chapel in the ambulatory of the church then called Sint-Jans, and while Jan Van Eyck was completing his masterpiece, the cloth merchants were busy building their hall across the square. Perhaps they were already using the space for business, storing cloth, conducting their inspections, negotiating daily. It’s hard to imagine how townspeople went about their business in a town centre dominated by multi-generational building projects. The square must have been a mess. Sint-Jans (later Sint-Baafs Cathedral) itself was in the midst of a slow-motion transformation from Romanesque structure to Gothic that would take the better part of two centuries.
The Belfry had only been completed some fifty to a hundred years earlier, so recently by medieval standards that the city watchmen hadn’t moved in yet. They still occupied the tower in the neighbouring Sint-Niklaas Church. These three towers, Sint-Baafs, the Belfry and Sint-Niklaas now form (as they did then, I suppose) a line of heights that give Gent its signature skyline. Tourists are advised to stand on or near the western Sint-Michiels Bridge crossing the Leie to get the finest view of these three towers standing together.
The imagination struggles to picture the city amidst all this change and growth. These days, there’s such generous space accorded these monuments in the centre of town, and there have been such extravagant efforts made to medievalize, that it’s hard to visualize the chaotic and crowded activity that would have been the fifteenth-century experience. It’s safe to say that business and life went on. The churches were open for business, regardless of the stage of building. The cloth trade carried on; it was the life blood of the town. If there was so much open space then, it was put to use, for markets or ceremonials. It’s hard to imagine Gentenaars sentimentalizing the open square, sitting for quiet beers at clean tables overlooking the well-swept flagstones of the square.
Today, the curve of Sint-Baafs Square continues past the Lakenhalle and into the next square, which is fronted by the old city hall and Sint-Niklaas. The square also contains a few curiosities from later times, including the modern City Pavilion, tall and intriguing, a structure that would have baffled the hard-bitten cloth merchants of old Gent. ‘What purpose does it serve?’ they might have asked. Well, it’s beautiful, and it provide shelter for concerts and events. They would have shaken their heads at the waste of space.
There is also an eighteenth-century gateway built into the corner between the Belfry and the Lakenhalle, an entryway into a city jail housed in the basement of the Lakenhalle. A very conspicuous relief was carved into the tympanum, depicting the Roman myth of Cimon, an old man sentenced to starvation but kept alive by his daughter, who breastfed him on prison visits. You can only stand below and laugh or scratch your head, wondering what the city fathers were thinking.
Sunday, May 26, 2019
Travelogue 850 – May 26
Hats Off
The canons from Sint-Baafs Abbey were made homeless by the emperor’s vengeance on the city of Gent. They were allowed to relocate to Sint-Janskerk in town. John the Baptist was the patron saint of Gent, and so for centuries the church was named for him. With this shift, the church became known as Sint-Baafs. Today it is still known as Saint Bavo’s, and it’s most famous as home to the Lamb of God triptych painted by the Van Eyck brothers.
When I’ve visited Gent in the past, I’ve gone directly to the cathedral. I’ve stood in that small, sacred room off the nave, where dozens of tourists shuffle around the masterpiece, listening to their audio guides. Now I’m back. I’ve heard the lectures before. I’ve read extensively about the piece. I’ve examined reproductions of the painting closely on the page and on the web. None of that makes me an expert, but this is no introduction. The triptych like an old friend, and I’m just happy to be in the same room. I circle it, looking closely at a handful of details. What you don’t get in books is a sense of the object’s dimension, the air it displaces.
We tour the cathedral, taking in the towering space of the interior and the rich decoration accumulated over centuries. We stroll back to the chapel where the altarpiece was intended to stand. The painting would have dominated this small space built by and dedicated to the Vijd family nearly six hundred years ago.
Much has been written about the adventures of the triptych since the fifteenth century, barely surviving the iconoclasm of the Reformation and subsequent wars. It was claimed by the Nazis and nearly lost among German caverns full of treasure and art. One panel was stolen in a high-profile, mysterious and still unsolved case.
We need reminding how fortunate we are to be able to see the piece. So many artworks from that era are lost. And among the ones that have survived, how many people have had had the privilege to view them? The triptych was produced to serve a specific purpose in religious ritual. Its panels were only opened on holidays.
After we first entered the cathedral, I was idly walking in circles, looking for a place to park the buggy and looking up into the heights of the space. A guard caught my attention and with a friendly wink, gestured a suggestion that I remove my cap. I nodded and complied, of course. How many times a day does he have to remind people that this is still a church?
Hats Off
The canons from Sint-Baafs Abbey were made homeless by the emperor’s vengeance on the city of Gent. They were allowed to relocate to Sint-Janskerk in town. John the Baptist was the patron saint of Gent, and so for centuries the church was named for him. With this shift, the church became known as Sint-Baafs. Today it is still known as Saint Bavo’s, and it’s most famous as home to the Lamb of God triptych painted by the Van Eyck brothers.
When I’ve visited Gent in the past, I’ve gone directly to the cathedral. I’ve stood in that small, sacred room off the nave, where dozens of tourists shuffle around the masterpiece, listening to their audio guides. Now I’m back. I’ve heard the lectures before. I’ve read extensively about the piece. I’ve examined reproductions of the painting closely on the page and on the web. None of that makes me an expert, but this is no introduction. The triptych like an old friend, and I’m just happy to be in the same room. I circle it, looking closely at a handful of details. What you don’t get in books is a sense of the object’s dimension, the air it displaces.
We tour the cathedral, taking in the towering space of the interior and the rich decoration accumulated over centuries. We stroll back to the chapel where the altarpiece was intended to stand. The painting would have dominated this small space built by and dedicated to the Vijd family nearly six hundred years ago.
Much has been written about the adventures of the triptych since the fifteenth century, barely surviving the iconoclasm of the Reformation and subsequent wars. It was claimed by the Nazis and nearly lost among German caverns full of treasure and art. One panel was stolen in a high-profile, mysterious and still unsolved case.
We need reminding how fortunate we are to be able to see the piece. So many artworks from that era are lost. And among the ones that have survived, how many people have had had the privilege to view them? The triptych was produced to serve a specific purpose in religious ritual. Its panels were only opened on holidays.
After we first entered the cathedral, I was idly walking in circles, looking for a place to park the buggy and looking up into the heights of the space. A guard caught my attention and with a friendly wink, gestured a suggestion that I remove my cap. I nodded and complied, of course. How many times a day does he have to remind people that this is still a church?
Monday, May 20, 2019
Travelogue 849 – May 20
The Heir
I mentioned how once upon a time – actually, for nearly a millennium, – an entry into Gent from the east would have taken one past the lands of Sint-Baaf’s Abbey. Now it doesn’t. Only the meagrest vestiges of the ancient abbey remain, buried among the streets of a rather dreary district.
The story of why the abbey doesn’t stand where it used to – why not even a real ruin survives to greet us – is a dramatic one. It leads us back, like so many threads in European history do, to the disappointing figure of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and first Habsburg king of Spain.
This energetic and earnest, yet somehow inadequate, man poses a kind of riddle in history. I’ll be forced to return to him, reconsider him from a few perspectives. In regard to Gent, he serves as a figure from Greek tragedy, born in the city but returning to it as destroyer.
Gent was perennially in rebellion. Resistance against their lords was a kind of sickness among cities in the Lowlands. Charles’s response in 1540 was vicious and decisive. City rights were revoked, city walls torn down. and the abbey was torn down to make way for a Spanish fort with a permanent garrison. Gent never really recovered. It was to be Antwerp’s time in the sun.
Charles is one of those totemic figures made possible in cultures mesmerized by blood lineage. At birth, with no bigger challenge before him than survival to an age of majority, Charles embodied the intersection of so many bloodlines with so many properties and allegiances attached, that he was destined to inherit a kind of leadership over most of Europe. He was the culmination of centuries of alliance and breeding. No one would ever inherit so extensive a European empire again.
Charles took his role seriously, probably to his detriment. He might have achieved as much and been better loved had he lived the life of a medieval monarch, drinking and jousting, leading picturesque campaigns for booty, and planting rebel heads on pikes as cautions.
Charles apprehended himself an emperor from another time, perhaps Hadrian’s or Charlemagne’s or Frederick the Great’s. But it wasn’t to be. The fact was, though he was feudal lord to all, he was king or conqueror to none. Where he saw an empire with far borders to defend (or expand), his people saw the patchwork quilt for what it was, hundreds of loyalties and alliances concluded on individual terms. This disparity in perception may account for Charles’s impatience with Gent.
The old man failed, somehow having had the worst instinct for nearly every occasion. He quietly acknowledged as much when he abdicated and retired to a monastery after forty years’ rule. Circumstance was not kind to this Caesar. The Reformation began under his reign, breaking out with the vehemence and unpredictability of a California forest fire. He waffled when he should have been ruthless; became ruthless when the Protestants had use for martyrs. He eventually resigned to it as a permanent affliction, like his gout.
The Heir
I mentioned how once upon a time – actually, for nearly a millennium, – an entry into Gent from the east would have taken one past the lands of Sint-Baaf’s Abbey. Now it doesn’t. Only the meagrest vestiges of the ancient abbey remain, buried among the streets of a rather dreary district.
The story of why the abbey doesn’t stand where it used to – why not even a real ruin survives to greet us – is a dramatic one. It leads us back, like so many threads in European history do, to the disappointing figure of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and first Habsburg king of Spain.
This energetic and earnest, yet somehow inadequate, man poses a kind of riddle in history. I’ll be forced to return to him, reconsider him from a few perspectives. In regard to Gent, he serves as a figure from Greek tragedy, born in the city but returning to it as destroyer.
Gent was perennially in rebellion. Resistance against their lords was a kind of sickness among cities in the Lowlands. Charles’s response in 1540 was vicious and decisive. City rights were revoked, city walls torn down. and the abbey was torn down to make way for a Spanish fort with a permanent garrison. Gent never really recovered. It was to be Antwerp’s time in the sun.
Charles is one of those totemic figures made possible in cultures mesmerized by blood lineage. At birth, with no bigger challenge before him than survival to an age of majority, Charles embodied the intersection of so many bloodlines with so many properties and allegiances attached, that he was destined to inherit a kind of leadership over most of Europe. He was the culmination of centuries of alliance and breeding. No one would ever inherit so extensive a European empire again.
Charles took his role seriously, probably to his detriment. He might have achieved as much and been better loved had he lived the life of a medieval monarch, drinking and jousting, leading picturesque campaigns for booty, and planting rebel heads on pikes as cautions.
Charles apprehended himself an emperor from another time, perhaps Hadrian’s or Charlemagne’s or Frederick the Great’s. But it wasn’t to be. The fact was, though he was feudal lord to all, he was king or conqueror to none. Where he saw an empire with far borders to defend (or expand), his people saw the patchwork quilt for what it was, hundreds of loyalties and alliances concluded on individual terms. This disparity in perception may account for Charles’s impatience with Gent.
The old man failed, somehow having had the worst instinct for nearly every occasion. He quietly acknowledged as much when he abdicated and retired to a monastery after forty years’ rule. Circumstance was not kind to this Caesar. The Reformation began under his reign, breaking out with the vehemence and unpredictability of a California forest fire. He waffled when he should have been ruthless; became ruthless when the Protestants had use for martyrs. He eventually resigned to it as a permanent affliction, like his gout.
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Travelogue 848 – May 15
From Dampoort
The view of Gent from the Dampoort train station is not the most flattering. You see the skyline from the train platform. It’s not a big-city skyline with glass towers. It’s not a Gothic skyline, except for the tops of the three famous towers of medieval Gent. It’s a common view on Belgian towns, plain and perhaps tired, rows of high, windowed boxes in various faded colours with roofs slanting steeply away, their gables turned toward the narrow cross streets, flat and square building fronts turning rather blank looks outward.
In medieval times, the traveller in this spot would have looked westward into the precincts of the old Abbey of Sint-Baaf. I imagine that in the fifteenth century, it would have presented a more inspiring view than this one, the abbey being a complex of ancient buildings, gathered around its own steepled church, nestled in an estate surrounded by canals.
The medieval buildings we see are beautiful, but I question how attractive medieval towns would have been in their own times. I sense that, glimpsed from a distance, perhaps seen first as one rode horseback over the last hilltop, those towns would have been quite pretty. The picture of the town would have been dominated by the biggest and most enduring of structures, the churches, monasteries, guild halls and castles. Houses would have presented only rows of tiled or thatched roofs.
Closer acquaintance with the town might have been a different experience, confronted with the poverty that is hidden by distances, and with the ephemeral quality of most human production, like the ramshackle shelters built into the city walls and into the walls of the cathedral; or the oddly enduring footpaths become roads, still made of mud, mixed with all sort of excrement and waste.
We made no slow entry into town, at the packhorse pace of medieval pilgrims. We sped in a taxi past the twentieth-century squalor occupying the land of the old abbey and across the Scheldt. The centre of old Gent occupies a bit of land caught between the Leie and the Schedlt. The former river circles coyly around a peninsular jut of land before joining the Scheldt on the east side of the town centre. We wound among narrow streets, past old Sint-Jacobskerk and the famous Vrijdagmarkt, and then across the Leie to arrive underneath the walls of the twelfth-century castle of Gravensteen.
Below the castle is the Veerleplein, a square surrounded by historical facades, including the venerable gateway to the Fish Market, an institution probably as old as the castle, even though the rococo façade dates to the late seventeenth century. The square retains no atmosphere of the Middle Ages, though, with trams trundling by and troops of tourists choosing among the outdoor cafes. Baby has been excited about seeing a castle all day, so we pose for selfies in the busy square.
From Dampoort
The view of Gent from the Dampoort train station is not the most flattering. You see the skyline from the train platform. It’s not a big-city skyline with glass towers. It’s not a Gothic skyline, except for the tops of the three famous towers of medieval Gent. It’s a common view on Belgian towns, plain and perhaps tired, rows of high, windowed boxes in various faded colours with roofs slanting steeply away, their gables turned toward the narrow cross streets, flat and square building fronts turning rather blank looks outward.
In medieval times, the traveller in this spot would have looked westward into the precincts of the old Abbey of Sint-Baaf. I imagine that in the fifteenth century, it would have presented a more inspiring view than this one, the abbey being a complex of ancient buildings, gathered around its own steepled church, nestled in an estate surrounded by canals.
The medieval buildings we see are beautiful, but I question how attractive medieval towns would have been in their own times. I sense that, glimpsed from a distance, perhaps seen first as one rode horseback over the last hilltop, those towns would have been quite pretty. The picture of the town would have been dominated by the biggest and most enduring of structures, the churches, monasteries, guild halls and castles. Houses would have presented only rows of tiled or thatched roofs.
Closer acquaintance with the town might have been a different experience, confronted with the poverty that is hidden by distances, and with the ephemeral quality of most human production, like the ramshackle shelters built into the city walls and into the walls of the cathedral; or the oddly enduring footpaths become roads, still made of mud, mixed with all sort of excrement and waste.
We made no slow entry into town, at the packhorse pace of medieval pilgrims. We sped in a taxi past the twentieth-century squalor occupying the land of the old abbey and across the Scheldt. The centre of old Gent occupies a bit of land caught between the Leie and the Schedlt. The former river circles coyly around a peninsular jut of land before joining the Scheldt on the east side of the town centre. We wound among narrow streets, past old Sint-Jacobskerk and the famous Vrijdagmarkt, and then across the Leie to arrive underneath the walls of the twelfth-century castle of Gravensteen.
Below the castle is the Veerleplein, a square surrounded by historical facades, including the venerable gateway to the Fish Market, an institution probably as old as the castle, even though the rococo façade dates to the late seventeenth century. The square retains no atmosphere of the Middle Ages, though, with trams trundling by and troops of tourists choosing among the outdoor cafes. Baby has been excited about seeing a castle all day, so we pose for selfies in the busy square.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Travelogue 847 – May 14
The Break
I’ve grown to enjoy the ritual of the European break. You get the feeling that the whole population takes its holidays together. It’s not true. Business chugs away in offices and shops and train stations all year round. But most everyone in university and everyone with kids has a plan for the breaks. The timing does vary slightly region to region, at least in the Netherlands, but all school, universities, daycares centres and dance schools close their doors, and my city grows quieter.
I used to reserve a measure of contempt for this phenomenon, the conformism of spring breaks and mass migrations to the sea in August. But after all, there is something appealing about the idea that we share cycles, follow the rotation of the year together. I suppose it has grown very naturally from calendars based on communal experience, whether religious or seasonal. Holidays are signposts in a narrative. It might be the narrative of nature, or a New Testament narrative.
Consumerist and individualistic America sees vacations as personal choices only. Holidays on the calendar are party dates, but vacations are personal possessions. In that group mind, all experiences are individual.
I think my own resistance to travel during communal break times has had less to do with dogma than with habits of mind. Travel makes me anxious. Imagining travel at the same time as many thousands of others across the country was enough to raise my heart rate. But I’ve found, with conservative experimentation, that it’s not so bad.
Sitting at home, all the people out there, the atomized mass of action, emotion, instinct and will, all surging just outside the door, might be a cheery and reassuring notion, or it might be depressing, or even frightening. But the experience of humanity is more complex. Contact is an alloy, never satisfying any purity test, emotional or intellectual.
On the way home from Gent, we boarded a fast Thalys train in Antwerp to find that some English boys on their way to Amsterdam had taken our seats. They were a large group. The tables were littered with beer cans. We expected the worst, but there was nowhere else to sit. They were polite, though, vacating two seats for us. We were supposed to have two more for the girls, but no matter.
The lads continued their fun, their loud conversation and laughter, but I did mark that their language was censored for the family. They had adjusted. And the conversation was rather entertaining, after all, a discourse among public school lads about old teachers, about rugby, and about the what had happened to old friends and acquaintances. They indulged in an interesting digression about boys on steroids, pausing to shake their heads drunkenly about bad choices.
I was fond of the lads by the end, though the trip was short, and though no words had been exchanged after we had sunk into our seats in Antwerp. God knows what sort of outrages they performed upon the weary carcass of old Amsterdam, but they were (relative) gentlemen on the train.
The Break
I’ve grown to enjoy the ritual of the European break. You get the feeling that the whole population takes its holidays together. It’s not true. Business chugs away in offices and shops and train stations all year round. But most everyone in university and everyone with kids has a plan for the breaks. The timing does vary slightly region to region, at least in the Netherlands, but all school, universities, daycares centres and dance schools close their doors, and my city grows quieter.
I used to reserve a measure of contempt for this phenomenon, the conformism of spring breaks and mass migrations to the sea in August. But after all, there is something appealing about the idea that we share cycles, follow the rotation of the year together. I suppose it has grown very naturally from calendars based on communal experience, whether religious or seasonal. Holidays are signposts in a narrative. It might be the narrative of nature, or a New Testament narrative.
Consumerist and individualistic America sees vacations as personal choices only. Holidays on the calendar are party dates, but vacations are personal possessions. In that group mind, all experiences are individual.
I think my own resistance to travel during communal break times has had less to do with dogma than with habits of mind. Travel makes me anxious. Imagining travel at the same time as many thousands of others across the country was enough to raise my heart rate. But I’ve found, with conservative experimentation, that it’s not so bad.
Sitting at home, all the people out there, the atomized mass of action, emotion, instinct and will, all surging just outside the door, might be a cheery and reassuring notion, or it might be depressing, or even frightening. But the experience of humanity is more complex. Contact is an alloy, never satisfying any purity test, emotional or intellectual.
On the way home from Gent, we boarded a fast Thalys train in Antwerp to find that some English boys on their way to Amsterdam had taken our seats. They were a large group. The tables were littered with beer cans. We expected the worst, but there was nowhere else to sit. They were polite, though, vacating two seats for us. We were supposed to have two more for the girls, but no matter.
The lads continued their fun, their loud conversation and laughter, but I did mark that their language was censored for the family. They had adjusted. And the conversation was rather entertaining, after all, a discourse among public school lads about old teachers, about rugby, and about the what had happened to old friends and acquaintances. They indulged in an interesting digression about boys on steroids, pausing to shake their heads drunkenly about bad choices.
I was fond of the lads by the end, though the trip was short, and though no words had been exchanged after we had sunk into our seats in Antwerp. God knows what sort of outrages they performed upon the weary carcass of old Amsterdam, but they were (relative) gentlemen on the train.
Saturday, May 11, 2019
Travelogue 846 – May 11
Train Travel
It was May Break. Teachers and students had a week off. Our plan was to spend only a few days in Gent. The purpose was two-fold: have fun and do some research. I’m writing a story based in Gent during the fifteenth century. We’ve been to Gent before, but too briefly to see more than a few tourist spots. Too briefly to get a feeling for the geography of it.
We packed our clothes and we packed our babies and we headed to the train station. It’s fortunate I had recovered from my April case of pneumonia. I was going to need all my strength. Train travel with babies can require something of the stamina of a half marathon. I had cancelled my spring half marathon because of the pneumonia.
This trip would be my contest. Ren was still travelling in the buggy. Standing on the platform behind a buggy while the train pulls in can feel like waiting for the sound of the starting gun on a hot day, with twenty-one kilometres ahead of you.
When the train pulled into the station, we manoeuvred anxiously for a door. People are nice, but there’s a powerful herd instinct that takes over. People press in, and they jockey for position. They want you out of the way. Rushing things with babies gets the adrenaline going. It always feels like you might lose your grip on the buggy, or like you just might end up with one child on the other side of the closing doors.
Making it onto the train was more than negotiating the first stairs. We signalled each other and split the team, like TV cops entering a dangerous building. Menna and Jos headed for seats. I pushed the buggy out of the way, while people continued to stream in. It was like weathering a sudden flood. Once they were all in, I could position the buggy safely and take Ren out.
We had to change trains in Antwerp (Anvers). An hour’s rest on the train, and then we were piling out again. We rode the interminable series of escalators up into the terminal. Though we had another train to catch, I pushed the buggy as far as the grand waiting room of the station, a magnificent space that I wanted the girls to see again. We have a lot of memories here, coming to Antwerp to see Yohannes and his family.
We should be greedy for beauty. I exhorted the girls to look, soak it all in. They stared for a moment, not sure what I was so excited about. Then they returned to their own occupations. Menna and I stood on the marble floors and looked into the depths of the dome, rising some sixty metres above.
W.G. Sebald made of this station a meditation in his book ‘Austerlitz’, its monumentalism and strange eclecticism, combining medievalism with Renaissance styles, Muslim with Byzantine, and adorned with references to “the deities of the nineteenth century – mining, industry, transport, trade, and capital”. Laughable, he says. But haunting in its grandeur, inspiring the kind of impulse to reverence that a cathedral does.
Train Travel
It was May Break. Teachers and students had a week off. Our plan was to spend only a few days in Gent. The purpose was two-fold: have fun and do some research. I’m writing a story based in Gent during the fifteenth century. We’ve been to Gent before, but too briefly to see more than a few tourist spots. Too briefly to get a feeling for the geography of it.
We packed our clothes and we packed our babies and we headed to the train station. It’s fortunate I had recovered from my April case of pneumonia. I was going to need all my strength. Train travel with babies can require something of the stamina of a half marathon. I had cancelled my spring half marathon because of the pneumonia.
This trip would be my contest. Ren was still travelling in the buggy. Standing on the platform behind a buggy while the train pulls in can feel like waiting for the sound of the starting gun on a hot day, with twenty-one kilometres ahead of you.
When the train pulled into the station, we manoeuvred anxiously for a door. People are nice, but there’s a powerful herd instinct that takes over. People press in, and they jockey for position. They want you out of the way. Rushing things with babies gets the adrenaline going. It always feels like you might lose your grip on the buggy, or like you just might end up with one child on the other side of the closing doors.
Making it onto the train was more than negotiating the first stairs. We signalled each other and split the team, like TV cops entering a dangerous building. Menna and Jos headed for seats. I pushed the buggy out of the way, while people continued to stream in. It was like weathering a sudden flood. Once they were all in, I could position the buggy safely and take Ren out.
We had to change trains in Antwerp (Anvers). An hour’s rest on the train, and then we were piling out again. We rode the interminable series of escalators up into the terminal. Though we had another train to catch, I pushed the buggy as far as the grand waiting room of the station, a magnificent space that I wanted the girls to see again. We have a lot of memories here, coming to Antwerp to see Yohannes and his family.
We should be greedy for beauty. I exhorted the girls to look, soak it all in. They stared for a moment, not sure what I was so excited about. Then they returned to their own occupations. Menna and I stood on the marble floors and looked into the depths of the dome, rising some sixty metres above.
W.G. Sebald made of this station a meditation in his book ‘Austerlitz’, its monumentalism and strange eclecticism, combining medievalism with Renaissance styles, Muslim with Byzantine, and adorned with references to “the deities of the nineteenth century – mining, industry, transport, trade, and capital”. Laughable, he says. But haunting in its grandeur, inspiring the kind of impulse to reverence that a cathedral does.
Monday, May 06, 2019
Travelogue 845 – May 6
Spelling Issues
What’s in a name? I’m set to write about a family trip during the May Break, but I’m stuck on the name of the city. I’m struggling with the spelling.
In English, the name of the town is Ghent. In Flemish, it’s Gent, pronounced with a hard initial ‘H’. In French, it’s Gant, pronounced something like ‘Gone Girl’ (without the girl). We recover the G sound, lose the T sound. The latter goes some way toward explaining the origins of the Shakespearean name, ‘John of Gaunt’. The place name descends from a Celtic designation, Ganda, that refers to the confluence of the two rivers, Scheldt and Leie.
Americans find it surprising that names in other parts of the world can be mutable. A name to us is something beyond debate or interpretation. Place names in our country were dreamed up by some pioneer while planting his claim, certified by the state, and that was that. There’s something essential in a name. You don’t mess with it.
I’ve observed this mental struggle while I worked in Ethiopia. For one thing, some places in Ethiopia had several names, according to which ethnicity claimed it. For another thing, the main Ethiopia language, Amharic, used a different writing system, so all names were transliterated before we learned them. And we were living through a time when Ethiopians were periodically adjusting spellings in the Roman alphabet. You could date an American’s entry into Ethiopia by the spellings they insisted on.
In Europe, a name exists in a set of overlapping fields, overlapping in time and geography. The French might feel a right to the city. It was founded in the times of the Frankish empire and came of age under the Count of Flanders, who was a vassal of the French king. Modern Belgium is bilingual. The English, too, might have some rights to at least a nickname. They were key trade partners with Ghent for centuries. If they didn’t feel ownership, they felt kinship. This is Europe; many old towns have a set of names.
So I struggle. I want to spell the city’s name ‘Gent’. That feels most natural to me. But will it seem pretentious or arbitrary? Does it matter that I live in Dutch-speaking territory? And won’t Gent have other associations for English speakers, as in ‘ladies and gents’. (The Gent Ladies, by the way, is the name of the women’s football club in Ghent.)
I could simply opt for ‘Ghent’ because I’m writing in English. That makes the most sense. But I do find that spelling grating. While anglicizing the sound, we affects an Italianate or French spelling, ‘gh’ for the hard g sound, something unnecessary for English. I don’t ghet it.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to go for ‘Gent’.
Spelling Issues
What’s in a name? I’m set to write about a family trip during the May Break, but I’m stuck on the name of the city. I’m struggling with the spelling.
In English, the name of the town is Ghent. In Flemish, it’s Gent, pronounced with a hard initial ‘H’. In French, it’s Gant, pronounced something like ‘Gone Girl’ (without the girl). We recover the G sound, lose the T sound. The latter goes some way toward explaining the origins of the Shakespearean name, ‘John of Gaunt’. The place name descends from a Celtic designation, Ganda, that refers to the confluence of the two rivers, Scheldt and Leie.
Americans find it surprising that names in other parts of the world can be mutable. A name to us is something beyond debate or interpretation. Place names in our country were dreamed up by some pioneer while planting his claim, certified by the state, and that was that. There’s something essential in a name. You don’t mess with it.
I’ve observed this mental struggle while I worked in Ethiopia. For one thing, some places in Ethiopia had several names, according to which ethnicity claimed it. For another thing, the main Ethiopia language, Amharic, used a different writing system, so all names were transliterated before we learned them. And we were living through a time when Ethiopians were periodically adjusting spellings in the Roman alphabet. You could date an American’s entry into Ethiopia by the spellings they insisted on.
In Europe, a name exists in a set of overlapping fields, overlapping in time and geography. The French might feel a right to the city. It was founded in the times of the Frankish empire and came of age under the Count of Flanders, who was a vassal of the French king. Modern Belgium is bilingual. The English, too, might have some rights to at least a nickname. They were key trade partners with Ghent for centuries. If they didn’t feel ownership, they felt kinship. This is Europe; many old towns have a set of names.
So I struggle. I want to spell the city’s name ‘Gent’. That feels most natural to me. But will it seem pretentious or arbitrary? Does it matter that I live in Dutch-speaking territory? And won’t Gent have other associations for English speakers, as in ‘ladies and gents’. (The Gent Ladies, by the way, is the name of the women’s football club in Ghent.)
I could simply opt for ‘Ghent’ because I’m writing in English. That makes the most sense. But I do find that spelling grating. While anglicizing the sound, we affects an Italianate or French spelling, ‘gh’ for the hard g sound, something unnecessary for English. I don’t ghet it.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to go for ‘Gent’.
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Travelogue 844 – April 28
King’s Day
Yesterday was King’s Day. It’s an annual holiday in the Netherlands to celebrate the monarch’s birthday. Since 2013, that monarch has been King Willem-Alexander. When I first came to Rotterdam, the holiday was Queen’s Day. It had been for many years, through a succession of three queens. Actually, the tradition started with the first of those queens, so I don’t think there was ever a King’s Day until now.
We celebrate it like most Nederlanders, going to the local flea market. The one we like is at the Heemraadsplein in Rotterdam West. Every walkway of the park, and every pavement surrounding the park is occupied by locals setting up stalls to sell second-hand goods. In the centre of the park is a temporary bandshell, where a band plays family-friendly tunes, and parents hold the hands of their toddlers and bounce.
The vrijmarkt is a King’s Day tradition. Permits are not required to sell, and no one pays sales taxes. I suppose it’s the job of a monarch to find indulgences for the people, and this is a popular one. They say one of five Dutch families set up shop on King’s Day, and half the population come out to buy. They even come out on chilly days like this one, during which showers come and go.
The swings are the highlight for my girls, and they are disappointed that the rains disrupt their fun. Jos is old enough to want to go as high as possible, laughing to see the sand speeding under her feet and the sky overhead. Ren is quiet. She holds the chains of the swing tight, and her wide eyes look on with concern and curiosity. She watches other children at play with something like suspicion. We run for shelter when the light rain turns to hail.
It’s an odd way to celebrate a birthday, the vrijmarkt. Of course, it’s not the only activity on King’s Day. There are concerts and parties. But the markets are the most popular, and they bring together the broadest cross-section of the population. It’s an odd variety of patriotism: the opportunity to make or save a few euros. Very pragmatic. But it all works. There are Dutch flags flying. People are wearing orange. The mood is buoyant.
Occasions like this always raise questions for me. What is patriotism? When it looks like people in funny orange hats holding up second-hand clothing for inspection, what is patriotism? Certainly, I prefer this variety to the American sort, which seems to require noise and anxious shows of aggression.
But more interesting to me is the question of national identity. In any setting, it’s a curious fiction. At the Heemraadsplein, most of the women cover their heads and the men greet each other with the salaam. In America, where neighbours are descended from peoples around the globe, they debate a wall to dissect desert land in the southwest. It’s an odd fiction, this idea of national identity.
It’s particularly interesting in this part of the world, in this part of Europe, where borders and allegiances have shifted continuously for several millennia. It’s nearly always been a place where peoples and goods meet, the mouths for busy rivers, ports for a busy sea. And yet, amidst the movement and change, there emerged very quickly a unique culture, easily recognizable as from this part of the world. It’s been durable and relatively constant through the centuries, crossing borders and language groups. It follows the River Meuse, for example, south into France. Primarily, though, it’s a Dutch-and-Flemish creation.
I’ve been studying this culture. I’ve been reading about its hodgepodge history. I’ve tried writing about it, setting stories in medieval Flanders. I continue to examine the question, what is this place?
King’s Day
Yesterday was King’s Day. It’s an annual holiday in the Netherlands to celebrate the monarch’s birthday. Since 2013, that monarch has been King Willem-Alexander. When I first came to Rotterdam, the holiday was Queen’s Day. It had been for many years, through a succession of three queens. Actually, the tradition started with the first of those queens, so I don’t think there was ever a King’s Day until now.
We celebrate it like most Nederlanders, going to the local flea market. The one we like is at the Heemraadsplein in Rotterdam West. Every walkway of the park, and every pavement surrounding the park is occupied by locals setting up stalls to sell second-hand goods. In the centre of the park is a temporary bandshell, where a band plays family-friendly tunes, and parents hold the hands of their toddlers and bounce.
The vrijmarkt is a King’s Day tradition. Permits are not required to sell, and no one pays sales taxes. I suppose it’s the job of a monarch to find indulgences for the people, and this is a popular one. They say one of five Dutch families set up shop on King’s Day, and half the population come out to buy. They even come out on chilly days like this one, during which showers come and go.
The swings are the highlight for my girls, and they are disappointed that the rains disrupt their fun. Jos is old enough to want to go as high as possible, laughing to see the sand speeding under her feet and the sky overhead. Ren is quiet. She holds the chains of the swing tight, and her wide eyes look on with concern and curiosity. She watches other children at play with something like suspicion. We run for shelter when the light rain turns to hail.
It’s an odd way to celebrate a birthday, the vrijmarkt. Of course, it’s not the only activity on King’s Day. There are concerts and parties. But the markets are the most popular, and they bring together the broadest cross-section of the population. It’s an odd variety of patriotism: the opportunity to make or save a few euros. Very pragmatic. But it all works. There are Dutch flags flying. People are wearing orange. The mood is buoyant.
Occasions like this always raise questions for me. What is patriotism? When it looks like people in funny orange hats holding up second-hand clothing for inspection, what is patriotism? Certainly, I prefer this variety to the American sort, which seems to require noise and anxious shows of aggression.
But more interesting to me is the question of national identity. In any setting, it’s a curious fiction. At the Heemraadsplein, most of the women cover their heads and the men greet each other with the salaam. In America, where neighbours are descended from peoples around the globe, they debate a wall to dissect desert land in the southwest. It’s an odd fiction, this idea of national identity.
It’s particularly interesting in this part of the world, in this part of Europe, where borders and allegiances have shifted continuously for several millennia. It’s nearly always been a place where peoples and goods meet, the mouths for busy rivers, ports for a busy sea. And yet, amidst the movement and change, there emerged very quickly a unique culture, easily recognizable as from this part of the world. It’s been durable and relatively constant through the centuries, crossing borders and language groups. It follows the River Meuse, for example, south into France. Primarily, though, it’s a Dutch-and-Flemish creation.
I’ve been studying this culture. I’ve been reading about its hodgepodge history. I’ve tried writing about it, setting stories in medieval Flanders. I continue to examine the question, what is this place?
Monday, March 25, 2019
Travelogue 843 – March 25
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part Three
I’m healing from the fevers. This is familiar, Ethiopia in convalescence. It’s more common to the end of my trips than the start of them, but I’m ready enough from habit to slip into the routines of tending to the debilitated body.
I’ve rarely been deathly ill, and nearly as rarely in perfect health. I think the story of biological life is little more than the dialectic between Platonic health and mortal defect; than degrees of suffering; than the various narrative arcs of our illnesses. The story of a virus may reveal more truth than our own. But that is neither here nor there.
It’s morning. The place has only just opened. I sit on the terrace. The ladies are sweeping. It’s a long process. They are steady, methodical. Their motion together and the sound of the straw brooms are comforting. I’m not going to move for a while. The morning sun is just what I need.
The quality of the Ethiopian sun is something I’ve written about before. I can afford to write about it again, since it’s impossible to capture in a few words. But there is certainly that which is healing about it. It’s gentle and strong in a reassuring ratio. It soothes. It counsels lentezza. It makes one feel blessed. It might be one long note, one sustained breath on a bass flute, low and tremulous.
The mountains add their melody, something as strong as the jagged stone that marks the sky, something as genial as the hectares of eucalyptus that cover the mountain slopes. I know the spaces under those trees, the little valleys that gallop down toward the plains, the red mud and jutting rocks. They feel close to me.
In this country of perpetual poverty, it’s hard to feel altogether lost. In prosperous Holland, one might sense in grey winter one has been lost to God’s sight.
The ladies continue their slow progress across the terrace, sweeping up the fallen fruit from the spreading shoa tree that shades the tables. Their presence and their work are a solace of sorts.
Sometimes it can seem like old women have no place of value in Ethiopian society. It may seem as though they are trapped at home, ageing before their time, gossiping, nagging and complaining. Few have the active and public lifestyles that European pensioners often have.
If they are underestimated from a Western perspective, it may simply be a measure of the extent that Western societies have given up on solace. We see action. We endure our pain. We value diversity, if diversity falls in line with our worship of productivity.
I’ve received much solace and comfort from the old women I’ve come to know in Ethiopia. I’ve seen rare equanimity and keen observations. I’ve seen strength in resignation. It’s occurred to me to question the Western devotion to hustle. Health for us is movement and speed and noise. There is more to lose with the loss of reflection than we are inclined to admit. One might look no further than the mounting insanity in the political sphere.
That’s not to say that all old women here are the same. That’s not to sentimentalize hard lives and complex conditions. These women sweeping the terrace would no doubt rather be somewhere else, and my taking solace from their work has no little scent of hypocrisy to it. But complexity has no prejudice. It extends equally in all directions. Within that complexity, I find beauty. It’s a compromised beauty. We’ve learned there is no other.
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part Three
I’m healing from the fevers. This is familiar, Ethiopia in convalescence. It’s more common to the end of my trips than the start of them, but I’m ready enough from habit to slip into the routines of tending to the debilitated body.
I’ve rarely been deathly ill, and nearly as rarely in perfect health. I think the story of biological life is little more than the dialectic between Platonic health and mortal defect; than degrees of suffering; than the various narrative arcs of our illnesses. The story of a virus may reveal more truth than our own. But that is neither here nor there.
It’s morning. The place has only just opened. I sit on the terrace. The ladies are sweeping. It’s a long process. They are steady, methodical. Their motion together and the sound of the straw brooms are comforting. I’m not going to move for a while. The morning sun is just what I need.
The quality of the Ethiopian sun is something I’ve written about before. I can afford to write about it again, since it’s impossible to capture in a few words. But there is certainly that which is healing about it. It’s gentle and strong in a reassuring ratio. It soothes. It counsels lentezza. It makes one feel blessed. It might be one long note, one sustained breath on a bass flute, low and tremulous.
The mountains add their melody, something as strong as the jagged stone that marks the sky, something as genial as the hectares of eucalyptus that cover the mountain slopes. I know the spaces under those trees, the little valleys that gallop down toward the plains, the red mud and jutting rocks. They feel close to me.
In this country of perpetual poverty, it’s hard to feel altogether lost. In prosperous Holland, one might sense in grey winter one has been lost to God’s sight.
The ladies continue their slow progress across the terrace, sweeping up the fallen fruit from the spreading shoa tree that shades the tables. Their presence and their work are a solace of sorts.
Sometimes it can seem like old women have no place of value in Ethiopian society. It may seem as though they are trapped at home, ageing before their time, gossiping, nagging and complaining. Few have the active and public lifestyles that European pensioners often have.
If they are underestimated from a Western perspective, it may simply be a measure of the extent that Western societies have given up on solace. We see action. We endure our pain. We value diversity, if diversity falls in line with our worship of productivity.
I’ve received much solace and comfort from the old women I’ve come to know in Ethiopia. I’ve seen rare equanimity and keen observations. I’ve seen strength in resignation. It’s occurred to me to question the Western devotion to hustle. Health for us is movement and speed and noise. There is more to lose with the loss of reflection than we are inclined to admit. One might look no further than the mounting insanity in the political sphere.
That’s not to say that all old women here are the same. That’s not to sentimentalize hard lives and complex conditions. These women sweeping the terrace would no doubt rather be somewhere else, and my taking solace from their work has no little scent of hypocrisy to it. But complexity has no prejudice. It extends equally in all directions. Within that complexity, I find beauty. It’s a compromised beauty. We’ve learned there is no other.
Monday, March 18, 2019
Travelogue 842 – March 18
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part Two
I boarded the plane without reading material. It’s the first time I’ve done that. My packing was haphazard. I decided on the morning of travel that I would just pick something up at a bookstore at the airport. Check-in took a long time. I was rushing. I couldn’t find a book shop.
Routines are fragile mechanisms, thrown off so easily. It had been a while since I made the trip to Ethiopia – almost three years. The day of the flight had come on too quickly. I had been struggling with a cold for weeks, repeatedly falling behind at work. I find it funny how rigid modern travel schedules are. It’s unnatural. We book flights months ahead of time, without any idea what our state of mind, health, or occupation will be; without any idea about the weather or political conditions. Travel never looked like this in history. One’s departure date happened when signs were propitious.
I did find a place at the airport to buy books. I chose a few items in a hurry, paid, and then, within the short half hour before boarding, managed to lay those items down somewhere and forget them. I boarded with nothing to read. I was really off my game.
I took my seat, and I spent he coming hours getting sicker than I was before. I sneezed and sniffled and battled a mounting fever. I shrank into my seat, trying not to be too annoying to the person next to me. It’s a seven-hour flight.
By the time I settled in at the hotel, my fever was high enough to disrupt my sleep. It seemed as though I was having a bad reaction to the yellow fever shot I had had a few days before. I’d had a mild cold when I went to the travel clinic, and the shot morphed the cold into a monster. The next day, I stayed in bed as long as I could. But I had one meeting.
Yenebeb made it easy for me, bringing the athletes to the hotel. We strolled outside, into the pleasant Ethiopian sunshine, and we chatted. I took photos of them. Our charity supports them in exchange for community service. We all agreed to meet a few days later at the school for autistic children where they volunteer.
I was exhausted, but I urged Yenebeb to take me one more place, to a bookshop. I wasn’t sleeping, I couldn’t go out, and I had nothing to read. I wasn’t going to survive. He thought about it, and he guided me across the harrowing streets of Megenagna toward one of the ubiquitous malls.
These malls are hallmarks of the past decade of financial growth in Addis. Everyone with a birr to rub together invested in real estate and construction. This resulted in dozens of uninspired glass-faced buildings lining every street in the newer districts of the south. They all rent out to retail and bill themselves as ‘malls’. Megenagna has more than its share of these ugly emporia.
We were searched at the doors to the building by listless security people. We entered the central atrium, stepping across the polished tile, looking into the shops on all sides and open to view behind glass walls. We found out there was a book store on the third floor. There were escalators, a measure of affluence, even though they only worked from the ground to the first floor. It was a sign of my despair that I agreed to climb stairs. Muscles were screaming.
The store was humble, occupying a corner spot on the outside circuit. It was a collection of cheap metal shelves pushed against the walls and filled with long banks of uniform colours in the distinctive local bindings. Almost everything was in Amharic or Oromifa, but there were a few selections in English.
I chose a history of modern Ethiopia, written some time ago by a historian at the University of Addis Ababa. In the coming days, I would spend quite a few hours suffering fevers in my hotel room and reading about the nobility and peasantry of nineteenth-century Ethiopia; reading about Emperors Tewodros, Yohannes, and Menelik; reading about battles, taxes and tributes. It made for good company while I recovered.
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part Two
I boarded the plane without reading material. It’s the first time I’ve done that. My packing was haphazard. I decided on the morning of travel that I would just pick something up at a bookstore at the airport. Check-in took a long time. I was rushing. I couldn’t find a book shop.
Routines are fragile mechanisms, thrown off so easily. It had been a while since I made the trip to Ethiopia – almost three years. The day of the flight had come on too quickly. I had been struggling with a cold for weeks, repeatedly falling behind at work. I find it funny how rigid modern travel schedules are. It’s unnatural. We book flights months ahead of time, without any idea what our state of mind, health, or occupation will be; without any idea about the weather or political conditions. Travel never looked like this in history. One’s departure date happened when signs were propitious.
I did find a place at the airport to buy books. I chose a few items in a hurry, paid, and then, within the short half hour before boarding, managed to lay those items down somewhere and forget them. I boarded with nothing to read. I was really off my game.
I took my seat, and I spent he coming hours getting sicker than I was before. I sneezed and sniffled and battled a mounting fever. I shrank into my seat, trying not to be too annoying to the person next to me. It’s a seven-hour flight.
By the time I settled in at the hotel, my fever was high enough to disrupt my sleep. It seemed as though I was having a bad reaction to the yellow fever shot I had had a few days before. I’d had a mild cold when I went to the travel clinic, and the shot morphed the cold into a monster. The next day, I stayed in bed as long as I could. But I had one meeting.
Yenebeb made it easy for me, bringing the athletes to the hotel. We strolled outside, into the pleasant Ethiopian sunshine, and we chatted. I took photos of them. Our charity supports them in exchange for community service. We all agreed to meet a few days later at the school for autistic children where they volunteer.
I was exhausted, but I urged Yenebeb to take me one more place, to a bookshop. I wasn’t sleeping, I couldn’t go out, and I had nothing to read. I wasn’t going to survive. He thought about it, and he guided me across the harrowing streets of Megenagna toward one of the ubiquitous malls.
These malls are hallmarks of the past decade of financial growth in Addis. Everyone with a birr to rub together invested in real estate and construction. This resulted in dozens of uninspired glass-faced buildings lining every street in the newer districts of the south. They all rent out to retail and bill themselves as ‘malls’. Megenagna has more than its share of these ugly emporia.
We were searched at the doors to the building by listless security people. We entered the central atrium, stepping across the polished tile, looking into the shops on all sides and open to view behind glass walls. We found out there was a book store on the third floor. There were escalators, a measure of affluence, even though they only worked from the ground to the first floor. It was a sign of my despair that I agreed to climb stairs. Muscles were screaming.
The store was humble, occupying a corner spot on the outside circuit. It was a collection of cheap metal shelves pushed against the walls and filled with long banks of uniform colours in the distinctive local bindings. Almost everything was in Amharic or Oromifa, but there were a few selections in English.
I chose a history of modern Ethiopia, written some time ago by a historian at the University of Addis Ababa. In the coming days, I would spend quite a few hours suffering fevers in my hotel room and reading about the nobility and peasantry of nineteenth-century Ethiopia; reading about Emperors Tewodros, Yohannes, and Menelik; reading about battles, taxes and tributes. It made for good company while I recovered.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Travelogue 841 – March 11
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part One
My view is west along the line of the mountains. The mountains are near. I’m sitting on a terrace situated in the foothills. These are friendly mountains, green and accessible. These aren’t the Alps, sheer and snowy. They’re not imposing at all. Down in the city, at the base of the mountains, you’re already standing at more than two thousand metres above sea level. So the peaks don’t need to soar above the Ethiopian highlands to challenge the Alps in altitude.
The terrace is situated under the sky, under a tall blue sky. The morning sun is strong, and I’ve positioned myself to collect some of its glorious light on my face and shoulders. I’m well-practiced in this art.
These are my mountains. They are as familiar as the streets of any American city. I lived in these foothills for years. My neighbourhood was further west, just below the famous peak of Entoto. But I did spend time in the hills of Megenagna, even at this very terrace. The restaurant has been here for years. It’s an Italian restaurant that occupies the location of a house built at the end of the nineteenth-century by one of Menelik’s generals, just after the epic battle against the Italians. Addis Ababa was the new capital of Menelik’s empire, still unrealized, an open plain below these mountains.
I’m staying just down the hill, in a hotel that didn’t exist the last time I was in Addis. I walked up the steep incline early in the morning. The street curves around the base of a high bluff and then turns and climbs up behind it. It’s an old asphalt switchback with crumbling shoulders and dirt margins. We pedestrians walk in the dirt, while trucks and SUVs creep by in low gears. This neighbourhood might be the Hollywood Hills of Addis; the residents live in mansions. Some of them are famous athletes who trained in the mountains above in their youth.
The restaurant has only just opened for the day. The terrace is being cleaned by three women. They are sweeping up the mess left by the towering shoa tree in the middle. The tree drops messy fruit onto the terrace in surprising quantities. The ladies are sweeping the entire time I’m sitting there, from the top of the stepped terrace to the bottom. I’m staying a while. It’s not right to rush while in Ethiopia.
That sky, pale blue and suffused with sunlight, has no boundaries and so is more or less the same sky as the one that hangs so low over northern Europe. The clouds there, so like a grey ceiling, are here like white adornments, so big they make the sky look bigger.
But it’s the same sky. I arrived from out of that sky, descending from it like a leaf drifting to earth, rebelling against gravity a while before settling in to become a part of the mulch.
Recollections of a Visit to Ethiopia in February
Part One
My view is west along the line of the mountains. The mountains are near. I’m sitting on a terrace situated in the foothills. These are friendly mountains, green and accessible. These aren’t the Alps, sheer and snowy. They’re not imposing at all. Down in the city, at the base of the mountains, you’re already standing at more than two thousand metres above sea level. So the peaks don’t need to soar above the Ethiopian highlands to challenge the Alps in altitude.
The terrace is situated under the sky, under a tall blue sky. The morning sun is strong, and I’ve positioned myself to collect some of its glorious light on my face and shoulders. I’m well-practiced in this art.
These are my mountains. They are as familiar as the streets of any American city. I lived in these foothills for years. My neighbourhood was further west, just below the famous peak of Entoto. But I did spend time in the hills of Megenagna, even at this very terrace. The restaurant has been here for years. It’s an Italian restaurant that occupies the location of a house built at the end of the nineteenth-century by one of Menelik’s generals, just after the epic battle against the Italians. Addis Ababa was the new capital of Menelik’s empire, still unrealized, an open plain below these mountains.
I’m staying just down the hill, in a hotel that didn’t exist the last time I was in Addis. I walked up the steep incline early in the morning. The street curves around the base of a high bluff and then turns and climbs up behind it. It’s an old asphalt switchback with crumbling shoulders and dirt margins. We pedestrians walk in the dirt, while trucks and SUVs creep by in low gears. This neighbourhood might be the Hollywood Hills of Addis; the residents live in mansions. Some of them are famous athletes who trained in the mountains above in their youth.
The restaurant has only just opened for the day. The terrace is being cleaned by three women. They are sweeping up the mess left by the towering shoa tree in the middle. The tree drops messy fruit onto the terrace in surprising quantities. The ladies are sweeping the entire time I’m sitting there, from the top of the stepped terrace to the bottom. I’m staying a while. It’s not right to rush while in Ethiopia.
That sky, pale blue and suffused with sunlight, has no boundaries and so is more or less the same sky as the one that hangs so low over northern Europe. The clouds there, so like a grey ceiling, are here like white adornments, so big they make the sky look bigger.
But it’s the same sky. I arrived from out of that sky, descending from it like a leaf drifting to earth, rebelling against gravity a while before settling in to become a part of the mulch.
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Travelogue 840 – February 24
The Dutch Ceiling
They are sitting along the wall, like rooks, if rooks could cross their legs or could draw their knees up to embrace them. If rooks could drink beer. The outdoor tables are all occupied. Undeterred, the human rooks pull themselves up onto the low brick wall and they order their beers. The wall is higher on one side than the other. On this side, the drinker’s toes may still reach the brick of the narrow alleyway, this roadway running the length of the canal that gives the district of Delfshaven its historical purpose, constructed in the seventeenth century to connect the Schie and the Maas Rivers. On its other side, the same brick wall extends down to the surface of the quiet canal waters, waters glinting today with reflected sunshine.
Cross the few metres of the canal-side brick road, and you find my regular pub. I’m cheered by the high spirits of the rookery along the wall. The Dutch are a race particularly sensitive to sunlight. Sunny days, especially in winter, never fail to release good cheer. Who doesn’t enjoy the sight of people enjoying a fine day?
Inside, tables are empty. I choose a place by the window, and I abandon my work almost immediately to stare out at the bright sky above the Dutch gabled roofs across the canal, above the masts of the old-fashioned little barges. A few months ago, the sun would have been getting ready to set at this hour. I feel real, palpable relief at the lengthening of the days.
The sky fills the top of the window frame, smiling down on the rooks on the wall. The smiles of the rooks are an acknowledgement of that wide open sky, but no one looks at it. The sky is like a parent. We love it, but we find enjoyment elsewhere, with friends and conversation. Or with our phones. There’s no point to staring into the void, I suppose. Though I admit that I do it often enough.
The breadth of the sky, harbouring all this air and the architecture of complex chemistry, the structures of condensation, white and insubstantial, and as big as downtown’s buildings, this breadth of the sky I find the best sort of meditation. It provides beauty. It provides awe. It provides a hint of eternity.
I wonder about the psychological effect on the Dutch of having a finite roof of cloud cover over their heads so much of the time. Our small homes are compact spaces inside nature’s confined space, and everything appears finite. The country is crowded. Land is limited. The landscape is geometrically simple, flat and divided by straight canals. The lack of light might be depressing, but it’s a world with its psychological comforts. Borders are clean and close. There’s a kind of certainty in that.
I’ve lived in a number of places, all different. Everywhere, there is geometry and space. Above every place is the limitless sky, tall as space. It’s this formal imposition of dimension that I find puzzling, humbling, suggestive of awe. Formal in that it follows consistent, unchanging laws. Laws that never abate. I find this hard dimensionality an effort – an effort to live with, an effort to imagine. Conjecturing gods ruling us, I see them straining to hold dimension together.
In fact, it’s lack of effort, it’s inertia, holding it together, lazy dimension entire lying in our path, making us step over it all the time. I step over it to get to work, counting the same kilometres every day, climbing the same stairway six flights to the offices, returning by the same rigid route home. No shape, no stretch of it ever wavers. I wonder at the commitment. I wait for the glitch, the lapse, the tell giving away the game. But it never comes.
Just days ago, I entered the sky itself. I flew south to Ethiopia.
The Dutch Ceiling
They are sitting along the wall, like rooks, if rooks could cross their legs or could draw their knees up to embrace them. If rooks could drink beer. The outdoor tables are all occupied. Undeterred, the human rooks pull themselves up onto the low brick wall and they order their beers. The wall is higher on one side than the other. On this side, the drinker’s toes may still reach the brick of the narrow alleyway, this roadway running the length of the canal that gives the district of Delfshaven its historical purpose, constructed in the seventeenth century to connect the Schie and the Maas Rivers. On its other side, the same brick wall extends down to the surface of the quiet canal waters, waters glinting today with reflected sunshine.
Cross the few metres of the canal-side brick road, and you find my regular pub. I’m cheered by the high spirits of the rookery along the wall. The Dutch are a race particularly sensitive to sunlight. Sunny days, especially in winter, never fail to release good cheer. Who doesn’t enjoy the sight of people enjoying a fine day?
Inside, tables are empty. I choose a place by the window, and I abandon my work almost immediately to stare out at the bright sky above the Dutch gabled roofs across the canal, above the masts of the old-fashioned little barges. A few months ago, the sun would have been getting ready to set at this hour. I feel real, palpable relief at the lengthening of the days.
The sky fills the top of the window frame, smiling down on the rooks on the wall. The smiles of the rooks are an acknowledgement of that wide open sky, but no one looks at it. The sky is like a parent. We love it, but we find enjoyment elsewhere, with friends and conversation. Or with our phones. There’s no point to staring into the void, I suppose. Though I admit that I do it often enough.
The breadth of the sky, harbouring all this air and the architecture of complex chemistry, the structures of condensation, white and insubstantial, and as big as downtown’s buildings, this breadth of the sky I find the best sort of meditation. It provides beauty. It provides awe. It provides a hint of eternity.
I wonder about the psychological effect on the Dutch of having a finite roof of cloud cover over their heads so much of the time. Our small homes are compact spaces inside nature’s confined space, and everything appears finite. The country is crowded. Land is limited. The landscape is geometrically simple, flat and divided by straight canals. The lack of light might be depressing, but it’s a world with its psychological comforts. Borders are clean and close. There’s a kind of certainty in that.
I’ve lived in a number of places, all different. Everywhere, there is geometry and space. Above every place is the limitless sky, tall as space. It’s this formal imposition of dimension that I find puzzling, humbling, suggestive of awe. Formal in that it follows consistent, unchanging laws. Laws that never abate. I find this hard dimensionality an effort – an effort to live with, an effort to imagine. Conjecturing gods ruling us, I see them straining to hold dimension together.
In fact, it’s lack of effort, it’s inertia, holding it together, lazy dimension entire lying in our path, making us step over it all the time. I step over it to get to work, counting the same kilometres every day, climbing the same stairway six flights to the offices, returning by the same rigid route home. No shape, no stretch of it ever wavers. I wonder at the commitment. I wait for the glitch, the lapse, the tell giving away the game. But it never comes.
Just days ago, I entered the sky itself. I flew south to Ethiopia.
Friday, February 08, 2019
Travelogue 839 – February 8
Kites in the Wind
The water is choppy in the Rijnhaven. I’m in a third-floor classroom, looking out the window. It’s warm day, so I’ve opened a window. Though I’ve opened it only a crack, the wind is whistling in with some force. It’s that kind of day, a taste of spring, blue skies and gusting winds. The surface of the harbour is like a miniature sea, accented by ranks of little whitecaps.
I like this view. There are reasons to miss the school’s previous location downtown, its convenience mainly. But this site has its charms. It’s across the river, in the south of Rotterdam, in neighbourhoods that are discovering themselves in the new century.
The world goes on. Humans sweat in their sleep, dreaming about the end of things. The world serenely sails along. It might be sailing along this river, the one I see out the window, the river lined with old and new city. The old city looks like the port city, the spooky silhouettes of cranes lining the river to the west. The new city is just below, represented by the buildings of revitalized districts. Only a dozen years ago, these city blocks along the southern bank of the city were humble and decayed.
Rijnhaven is an open and domesticated body of water, shaped somewhat like a damaged kite, abandoned on the ground in the middle of a bustling city, usually placid green water now driven by the winds inside its basin lined with clean stone. On one side the water is bound by the Wilhelmina Pier, a long strip of land that stands by the river and hosts Rotterdam’s second and most modern skyline. On the other side is Katendrecht, another pier and a district once famously unsavoury, where sailors and longshoremen sought their sordid entertainments. It has been undergoing a regeneration of late. From this window, it looks like an extended construction zone. Where the harbour opens to the river, a pedestrian bridge connects the two districts. On the Wilhelmina side, there stands the New York Hotel, a vestige of nineteenth century steam traffic to America. On the Katendrecht side, there is a warehouse converted into a kind of foodie dream mall, stalls with specialty items and a micro-brewery onsite. These two installations on ether side of the bridge describe the contrast well, between an area established as class and an area hip and aspiring.
The city centre has many of these little harbours, many now hosting pleasure boats and lined with restaurants and bars, crossed by fanciful bridges that were designed by one of the many firms quartered here in a city known as a destination for ambitious architects. I enjoy it, fond as I am of open water and of architecture. A minute by the window is restorative, looking over the broken green kite and the high-rises by the wide river.
Kites in the Wind
The water is choppy in the Rijnhaven. I’m in a third-floor classroom, looking out the window. It’s warm day, so I’ve opened a window. Though I’ve opened it only a crack, the wind is whistling in with some force. It’s that kind of day, a taste of spring, blue skies and gusting winds. The surface of the harbour is like a miniature sea, accented by ranks of little whitecaps.
I like this view. There are reasons to miss the school’s previous location downtown, its convenience mainly. But this site has its charms. It’s across the river, in the south of Rotterdam, in neighbourhoods that are discovering themselves in the new century.
The world goes on. Humans sweat in their sleep, dreaming about the end of things. The world serenely sails along. It might be sailing along this river, the one I see out the window, the river lined with old and new city. The old city looks like the port city, the spooky silhouettes of cranes lining the river to the west. The new city is just below, represented by the buildings of revitalized districts. Only a dozen years ago, these city blocks along the southern bank of the city were humble and decayed.
Rijnhaven is an open and domesticated body of water, shaped somewhat like a damaged kite, abandoned on the ground in the middle of a bustling city, usually placid green water now driven by the winds inside its basin lined with clean stone. On one side the water is bound by the Wilhelmina Pier, a long strip of land that stands by the river and hosts Rotterdam’s second and most modern skyline. On the other side is Katendrecht, another pier and a district once famously unsavoury, where sailors and longshoremen sought their sordid entertainments. It has been undergoing a regeneration of late. From this window, it looks like an extended construction zone. Where the harbour opens to the river, a pedestrian bridge connects the two districts. On the Wilhelmina side, there stands the New York Hotel, a vestige of nineteenth century steam traffic to America. On the Katendrecht side, there is a warehouse converted into a kind of foodie dream mall, stalls with specialty items and a micro-brewery onsite. These two installations on ether side of the bridge describe the contrast well, between an area established as class and an area hip and aspiring.
The city centre has many of these little harbours, many now hosting pleasure boats and lined with restaurants and bars, crossed by fanciful bridges that were designed by one of the many firms quartered here in a city known as a destination for ambitious architects. I enjoy it, fond as I am of open water and of architecture. A minute by the window is restorative, looking over the broken green kite and the high-rises by the wide river.
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