Travelogue 938 – October 20

The Colours of Reason

 

I’m forced to watch a lot of children’s TV. I can’t say I resent it. Some of it’s pretty funny. There’s much more variety than when I was growing up. One thing that’s consistent with my time, that long-ago era, is the colour scheme, speaking literally and emotionally. The mood is upbeat and always cheerful. The colours are fantastic: bright worlds are painted for our children in glowing rainbows and pastels. One watches and one feels wonder that there could be worlds like that out there, in the ethers, in the imagination, in the art studios … somewhere.

 

Those colourful panoramas have the power to trigger something in me, something so old and so buried under worldly experience that the feeling survives only a second. I puzzle over those fragmentary sensations, trying to preserve a remnant of them, like a sweet aftertaste. It’s bittersweet, awakening a wistful sadness.

 

The colour schemes correspond to an air of hope in those imaginary worlds, hope like oxygen. In those worlds, love conquers. Kid-like characters learn lessons about the world, learn about the power of cooperation and the power of knowledge. Every character is unique and has apparent potential. Resistance and conflict exist in order to be overcome. Even as we advance into YA fiction, and some battles are lost, the characters are ennobled by every setback.

 

I wonder sometimes if we do our kids any favours with these stories. Children’s stories were notoriously dark before the modern era. If you count classical mythology as pedagogical in nature, then we can say they were extremely dark.

 

I grew up in an era of unprecedented optimism. There were reasons for it, I suppose: the defeat of the deadly Axis regimes, which were rather easy to label as evil; the establishment of the United Nations; the dazzling advances in science and technology; the seemingly limitless growth of world economies. Even with an abundance of reasons for optimism, the frame of mind is a choice, and, with some hindsight, I don’t wonder that a generation that had suffered unduly made a deliberate choice, and with the power of a grit and determination strengthened by years of struggle. I think of my parents as I write this. We were going to be happy! Reason and the rule of law would guide this planet forever more! Children would be raised to be cheerful and hopeful and ready for a peaceful world.

 

I’m a product of this superabundance of hope. Have I been ready for the world as it turned out to be, for the world of international terrorism and diplomatic chaos, for conspiracy theory and Trump? I haven’t been swallowed up yet, but I have been trailed through life by disappointment. The world was consistently darker than I had anticipated. My childhood was dogged by this dissonance between conditioned expectations and experience.

 

As a boy, I thought I’d discover a world outside like the one reflected in the TV screen, where kids were sweet and eager to learn; where schools were sunny and cheerful; where everyone tried their best and worked together in earnestness; where everyone revered books and the teachers who explained them. I never quite overcame this handicap. It held me for years. I entered work environments expecting smarts and polish and sweet dedication everywhere.

 

Alas, humans are jokers, barely domesticated apes. I’m one myself. There’s a beauty to be found in that, of course, unless you were raised to believe in reason, and to see the manifestations of reason everywhere, like lambs with their lions and fruit on the vines. My father was an engineer. His devotion to science and reason would be hard to exaggerate. It was a sign of his generation, a generation who foresaw the dawn of an age of reason, heralded by a world burning in its passions. They had seen the destruction; they were believers in hope.

 Travelogue 937 – October 16

Voting by Fetish

 

And so Americans choose between the personal vs the rational, much as the Romans did in Caesar’s time. Do they vote according to personality or reason? The difference is that Caesar’s constituency was largely made of soldiers and the urban mob, people who understood their interests, people who didn’t have many advocates. The ruling classes in Rome had devolved into competing personal interests, much as the real rulers of the Republican party have, (think Koch brothers and their ilk). And what is Trump’s constituency? We’ve seen them at Trump rallies, seen them in candid TV interviews, the interviews that seem like satire. We’ve been introduced to the inbred minutemen who plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan. We’ve seen the ghoulish couple who pointed guns at protesters from their manicured lawn. We watch them now, setting up fake ballot boxes in California with winks to the camera, as though life really were a never-ending frat party. We see the inoffensive white woman they want to size for Justice. Her brief at the moment is to say nothing about her intentions to attack civil rights and public health. Her agenda captures the right’s intellectual position neatly: cloak your motives, get set to attack people’s rights. The program is entirely negative. Immigrants and women and anyone that Obama helped, they must suffer. Anyone vulnerable, they all must suffer. Why? Purely because strength demands it. Their cynicism is like the sleep of Lethe; it can’t be bothered to disturb the sleep of reason. They reach for a principle once in a while: we protect the unborn; we protect the American worker, who is threatened by immigrants, threatened by China. But their attention wanders when the child is born, when the white worker is safe in her low-paying job that won’t cover expenses or healthcare. Those are complexities best left to the cruel ministrations of libertarian wizardry. “Life is harsh,” they say with a shrug. And we’ve circled back to their default position, which is a fetish for shows of strength. This fetish for strength makes the mind lazy. This fetish for strength doesn’t need reason. It is nihilistic and renounces hope. Catalogue the fetishists’ positions: relentlessly negative and founded on fear, relying on grievance, relying on ready hatred. They look to a fantastical past, as an ideal to protect. They don’t arm to protect people. They arm to protect delusions. There can be few more cynical movements in history. Their favourite conspiracy theory was dreamt up by a grifter who moved to the Philippines to design porn-sites. There is nothing of real value to find here, just the grotesque aping of strength, like the cartoonish gestures of the villains in silent films. The children cry. The teens applaud. The adults smile indulgently. It’s just a film.

Travelogue 936 – October 12

Clementia

 

Imagine Caesar shouting to his troops, “Make Rome Great Again!” Gauge the absurdity of that image, and you have a handy measurement of how far off the rails we’ve gone. If the comparison seems needlessly macho, be aware that this is Trump’s criteria. Everyone is a weakling or a loser, while he is the winner, and he will tell you in just those words. His magic power is the inability to be embarrassed. To those who are bankrupt in character, that shamelessness looks like strength. And that’s truly the extent of it; that’s Trump’s brand. He’s the guy at the party flexing a bicep. Those who question their impulse to laugh stick around and become followers.

America’s power would have staggered Caesar, even in its decline. Just as staggering would have been the court jester taken as king. Caesar’s adversaries for ultimate power were brilliant and fearless. The Late Republic bred a special kind of killer. Sure, the Empire had its crazies and fools, but the Republic burned its chaff thoroughly.

 

Trump would have held a particular cat-and-mouse fascination for Caesar, much like he does for Putin. I imagine the two of them brainstorming slogans. “Make the Sky High Again,” Caesar proposes. “Make the World Turn Again.” “Make Tigers Roar Again.” Try this experimental treatment, Donald, and we’ll start over.

 

That Caesar was tough was never in question. And it was certainly never his brand. Rome was great. There was little need to say it. Caesar was strong. So were dozens of others. That was not the case for supporting him. The branding was about other qualities. Caesar’s case was presented in many ways, and one way was the publication of his canny Commentaries, written to be his reports on military campaigns for the benefit of the Roman public. This was not “The Art of the Deal”, a bubble gum gossip column extended to dance length. This was a sophisticated piece of propaganda artfully composed for the ages. He showcased his brand, and one key element of that brand was Clemency. He portrayed himself as cool-headed and rational. He was the gracious winner and the calm loser. And, above all else, he was humane. He was humane with the barbarians. He was humane with the Romans who plotted his downfall. This was his most important message, perhaps more so than even “veni, vidi, vici”: “I am humane”. Examine this single chess piece for a moment, and you’ve travelled miles higher than Trumps’ escalator.

 

Next, we consider the quality of hope.

Travelogue 935 – October 10

The Strong Man

 

We know about Julius Caesar’s achievements, but do we understand his motives? It’s hard enough to understand how a contemporary Dutch person thinks; I’m not sure we’ll figure Caesar out. But I do think it’s safe to say that Caesar didn’t set out to be dictator for life and imperator. He was Roman patrician, and he pursued the cursus honorum faithfully. That was the traditional ladder of offices to reach high office. He imagined himself consul and proconsul one day, winner of the fierce competition among Roman aristocrats. One doesn’t imagine becoming grand master in chess by overturning the board, (fundamentally the Wonderland promise of almost every Republican since Reagan). The fact that Caesar did overturn the board doesn’t mean that the upset was his life’s ambition. That was a measure of his passion for the game that he felt was rigged against him.

 

Contrast Caesar’s example with the current president. Yes, I mean the one who registered as a candidate as an afterthought, as a tactic to gain leverage in his negotiations for a TV contract.

 

Caesar was no civic saint, driven by selflessness. He was proud and corrupt and greedy. He demonstrated he would stop at nothing to gain power. What we should find interesting is that behind that hunger for power were some ideas for what to do with that power. He had a sincere interest in governance. He was curious about the people he governed. He had ideas about how to make people’s lives better. He had ideas how to make the Roman government run more smoothly, even if many of his reforms were part of a campaign against the Senate. (Even his reform of the calendar was inspired by instances of senatorial corruption, exploitation of the ambiguity of the old calendar to manipulate elections and terms of office. Sounds a little McConnellish.)

 

One strong man is not the same as another. In a perfect world, we can do without all types, but let’s be clear what sort we’re dealing with. Let’s begin with a look at MAGA as a political program.

 Travelogue 934 – October 7

Commentaries on the Civil War

 

Though our Roman summer in Holland is long gone – it’s been raining for just about three weeks now, - I’ve carried on with my Roman literature project. Now it’s Julius Caesar. I’ve read ‘The Commentaries on the Civil War’; I’ve started re-reading the ‘The Gallic War’; I bought a textbook full of articles about his writings. This has turned into a big project.

 

Caesar is a fascinating historical figure. Years ago, I was challenged, as the history major at the party, to name the person who had had the biggest effect on history, and I came up with Caesar. I spent an inordinate amount of time in the days and years afterward thinking about that spontaneous, drunken answer to what is really a senseless question, and I’ve found my answer surprisingly defensible. So are dozens of others, of course. But here’s a truly remarkable character who did change the course of history. (And even changed the calendar.)

 

Studying Caesar seems appropriate while America struggles to deal with its wannabe strong man. But, in my humble estimation, there are more disparities between Caesar and Trump than there are similarities. And I don’t mean the toga. By extension, a lot might be said about the different historical moments they represent. I’m an amateur historian, at best, and so my opinions are probably worth about as much as Trump’s on the virus. But here goes.

 

Beyond the staggering vanity and ambition that both men manifested, I see very little to compare in their characters. Caesar was an intellectual and an accomplished orator from a noble family with an old and respected name. How many points of departure have I charted already? At age 40, he turned his attention to military glory and became one of the greatest military leaders in history. No draft-dodger. After fighting three years of civil war, ranging across the entire Mediterranean empire, Caesar took the reins of power and pursued reforms based on the populist agenda he had consistently pursued since he was a young man. For centuries, Roman leadership had generally fallen into two camps, one for aristocratic and senatorial power and one for more decentralized power. Caesar belonged to the latter camp. No doubt this path suited his ambitions as much as his ideals, but it appears his convictions were real, given his actions once he had power. ‘Convictions?’ Yes, that’s a word that has gathered some dust.

 

There’s more. It’s hard not to be astounded by the sheer energy and stamina of this man, if all the chronicles are accurate. This leads, in my mind, to the question of motive. What moves a person like Caesar?

 

"Nobody that's a leader would not do what I did," Trump said the other day. Aside from the tortured syntax, it’s a maddening statement, not least because it’s not entirely clear what he thinks he did. He contracted COVID-19. He left the hospital early. It doesn’t require Julius Caesar to provide a contrast. Maybe only the guy in the next bed, the one listening to his doctor and the one concerned about his family.

 Travelogue 933 – October 5

The One-Thing-After-Another Kind of Wisdom

 

Fall advances quickly. The sun’s retreat is perceptible day by day. It’s darker when we wake, and soon enough it will be dark when Baby and I go downstairs to get on the bicycle and head to school. I’ll need lights on the bike. Still there’s sunlight. We chat about the autumn as we cross to the bicycle. We count how many leaves have fallen so far, and we reflect on how chilly the air has become. I remember discussing the advent of fall with her last year, and still - even at her advanced age, - the seasons are mysterious.

 

An understanding that one thing follows another takes time to mature in the human mind.

 

My daily rotation of funereal lectures in the Zoom zone continues apace. Now advancing fall has carried us through the first of four terms, almost to its completion. Students fade even further from us among the ethers of remote learning, their voices arriving as though sent from across the galaxy. The communications are as garbled. They respond to simple queries in blunt utterances like ‘What?’, meant not to clarify but to challenge. In deference to all the light-years between us, I respond diplomatically. ‘Correct answer!’ I say, and I move on.

 

In truth, we teachers of teens understand that the most valuable wares we trade in are not the ones advertised in the name of the course, but are in fact those gathered under the repellent rubric ‘soft skills’, a group of qualities and skills that seem as depleted in the human character as ozone in the air. Those ‘soft skills’ centre around critical thinking and communications. They are as often cited by business leaders at job fairs as they are pushed aside by curricular committees because they are so darn difficult to measure in multiple-choice exams.

 

So here we are. I design lessons to be revolving review sessions. Course requirements must be reviewed relentlessly. Just today, six weeks into the term, a student interrupted an exercise to ask when the final exam was. I pass the question to another student, who had the privilege to recite for us that there was never a final exam for this course. They would be grade according to portfolio. Most of my feedback on writing assignments consists of rote repetition of the assignment instructions. Most protests on exam questions are rebutted by a review of the question instructions. It’s an odd sequence: we finish with instructions. We draw circles to the beginning.

 

A true understanding of sequence takes a long time to mature in the human mind.

 Travelogue 932 – September 28

Lecture in the Cemetery

 

The cemetery, I call it. That’s the Zoom environment when students won’t activate their cameras. Admittedly, that’s a grim moniker during a pandemic, but that’s what it feels like.

 

It’s class time. I open the Zoom session and start admitting students. Most pop up during the first three minutes of class. Stragglers will continue to request admission until the final three minutes. Once admitted, the students appear in my gallery as black tiles with their names in white. Occasionally, one or two will politely say, “Good morning”. The majority file in in silence. A few burst in with music or with a shouting match with their roommate. I mute them, and restore the peace.

 

I know my colleagues harangue students about cameras, drawing a line in the sand. I understand how they feel, but it does seem rather arbitrary. I agree that video is a sign of respect in the new age; it shows that the meeting or the class is worth putting clothes on for; it’s a way of demonstrating attention. But signs of respect should have mutual value. They don’t get it. They’re signing in for a lecture; they don’t see the relevance of video. We would like to teach them that you don’t act this way in a business meeting, but it’s not a business meeting. I’ve had this discussion frequently with my colleagues in the business program. I don’t think telling students to treat school meetings as business meetings imparts any real learning. It’s the usual dilemma in role play.

 

And so I start the lecture, speaking into the void. I have asked for video. A few have obliged. It makes little difference, really. It’s lonely for us all in the cemetery.

 

I have sympathy for this generation. Recently I had to go to the hospital for some tests. I stopped at a nearby café afterward. I sat by the window. Across the street from the hospital is a gymnasium, a secondary school. There was a group of kids sitting on the bus station bench, doing their best to goof around on a rainy day. For this generation, that means gathering around someone’s smart phone and laughing. It also means having masks at the ready, hanging off their ears. It seems strange. Teens should be careless and annoying. It feels wrong that they should have the spectre of illness hanging over them.

Travelogue 931 – September 24

The Me Game

 

Young people adapt quickly to new conditions. My students are entering their second school year with online learning, and that’s already a long time. They have internalized the pattern of online learning, made the routines their own, found their bad habits, and forged their online personae. They know how to enter the classroom just late enough to avoid attention. Too early, and the teacher engages them in hello’s and chit-chat. It really doesn’t matter what time of day it is, teenagers are still waking. They are groggy and irritable, and they can’t endure any pleasantries. If they come in late, the teacher has to admit them, and that teacher is likely to torment them with in-class questions, as just desserts for being late. They know how long to keep the camera on before surreptitiously switching it off, drawing minimum attention. They know how many times a teacher will insist on cameras back on before his or her will is broken.

 

Students have learned a hundred effective ways to be annoying. If they interrupt someone in Zoom, their voice drowns out all others, so they know they can stop a lecture cold with a question. The teacher can’t talk through them. They know that if they don’t speak for a long time, they will sink down into the gallery and be forgotten. That has its own rewards, but it’s also a great platform for the ‘me’ game. That’s when a student issues some brief, random comment and then responds to the teacher’s query about who that was with ‘me’. When the teacher calmly explains that ‘me’ doesn’t help, the student is indignant that education has become so impersonal. Another silly game adopts a very different strategy. The student keeps his or her camera on and giggles through the lesson with the mute on. The teacher naturally calls on this person often, in order to break up the competing conversation, but all that that accomplishes is to keep that student high in the gallery so that the perpetual giggling distracts everyone far longer. For many students, the simplest strategy is to keep camera and mic off, answering ‘I have no idea’ whenever a question comes their way, in a voice dripping with ennui. The teacher shudders with aversion and never comes round again. It’s often one of those students who invites the power struggle in the final minutes by shouting a question about something covered weeks ago, like when the exam will be. The teacher replies in a polite voice with his or her finger hovering over the mouse, cursor suspended above ‘End Meeting For All’. The politeness confuses the jester just long enough to make a quick exit.

Travelogue 930 – September 15

The COVID Cityscape

Part Two

 

There’s more construction going on in the city than I’ve ever seen, and it’s been a growing, vibrant city since before I arrived, a lively city within a culture that loves things in good working order, loves modern design and neat lines. Though I had been aware that construction plans for 2020 were ambitious – some urgent modernization that would require ripping up streets almost comprehensively through the city, - I couldn’t help but speculate idly that the COVID slowdown in traffic in spring might have encouraged a spike in road works that hasn’t been allowed to dip.

 

Meanwhile, the Dutch people persist round roads like mazes redrawn daily or weekly; they persist round the barren and antiseptic spaces indoors; they persist in putting on a show of normalcy, as though December 2019 represented a sort of gold standard in human behaviour; they persist, as new cases have reached totals nearly doubling the highs reached in April, and no change in summer public health rules is even on the table.

 

It’s odd to think that few had foreseen this twist in the over-population of our planet, that density would equal personal space in some inverse proportion; that the more there were of our species, the more we would be forced to isolate, physically and emotionally. We would be pushed into abstract boxes of space by regulation; we would be forced to live sedentary lives, experiencing the world through computer screens.

 

Well, we were having fun. After our ballet class, Baby and I stopped at our favourite café. The place retained some seating, but the space in the middle of the bottom floor was cleared, as though for a dance party. And so, dance we did. As the Ramones were played in the sound system, Baby showed me her ballet moves on the café dance floor. A set of young people sat at intervals around the long table by the windows, tapping away at their laptops. A few smiled to see the girl dancing; but even those tuned us out quickly. No one joined; no one clapped; no one sang along. The young barista, herself a picture of a generation’s downplayed hip chic, raised her eyebrows as she passed; not necessarily in the usual tight-lipped Dutch judgementalism, but in a kind of amused surprise. What seemed most silly to her was Papa clapping out a beat to the Ramones. I wondered whether she thought they belonged to her time. I wondered if she thought I was being undignified. I wondered if she thought it was too much a concession to enjoyment. It didn’t matter. Nothing much was meant by it. Baby danced, and I was happy for her.

Travelogue 929 – September 14

The COVID Cityscape

Part One

 

As hard as Dutch people try to treat the COVID-19 virus like they treat fellow passengers on the Metro or fellow shoppers on the Lijnbaan, willing it out of existence by the power of the averted eye, the cityscape and everyone’s daily experience still bear too many signs of the public health battle to support even the most stubborn Dutchman’s assessment that everything’s fine. Masks are compulsory on public transit; signs about social distancing proliferate; interior spaces are scarred, more or less irreversibly, by the mandate to keep people apart. The ad hoc has become permanent. Once pleasant waiting rooms and lobbies that were hastily emptied and rearranged six months ago now have the haggard air of the basement room quickly furnished for the prodigal son and finally abandoned to squalor. Seats are blocked by makeshift, laminated signs advising social distance. Cashiers mumble behind hanging plastic; customers are separated by small, hanging plastic windows at breathing height. Floors that should never have been bared have been exposed for months and given up on. Café and restaurant play areas for children have been cleared and left barren. All this was supposed to be temporary. Now, fatigue has made it all okay, the patchwork and the unadorned and the awkward.

 

The girls attend different ballet classes on Sunday because of the division made at age four. COVID rules allow only one parent inside, and so now we handle ballet day in teams. Yesterday was my Sunday with Baby. Parents aren’t allowed inside the class, so mamas and papas sit in the waiting room, avoiding each other’s eye in good Dutch fashion. I worked on a short story idea, scribbling notes in a notebook. I’ve returned to writing by hand whenever possible because I spend so much work time in front of a computer, and, thanks to that small diversion, I’m realizing how much society has been changed by its technology. There’s one parent in the room reading an actual book, and she looks odd. Who reads a book in public anymore? But me, the guy using a pen? In a ruled notepad? That is really beyond the pale. I feel very self-conscious. I worry it seems affected, as though I think I’m making a statement. Or it seems precious, as though the pad were my diary and I were cataloguing my failures to execute a worthy midlife crisis. Or it seems suspicious. If you see someone typing on a laptop, it would never occur to you to wonder what he or she is writing. See someone with a notepad and you wonder what it is they’re recording. Is it about me? Is this a police agent, a deep state mole? But I go ahead. On the rare occasion someone looks at me, I wink, just to fuel their paranoia.

 

The story I’m working on, by the way, is my shot at fantasy writing. I saw a call for stories about monsters, and I thought, why not? Monsters are fun. Why else are so many children’s stories devoted to them?

Travelogue 928 – September 6

The Wallabies

 

We started with the wallabies, and we finished with the flamingos. These are the two exhibits flanking the entrance to the zoo. We started the day heading left into Australia, and rounded off the afternoon in Asia, emerging by the flamingos.

 

We entered the zoo with tickets bought months ago for Baby’s birthday. It took us three months to find a suitable weekend, neither too hot nor rainy, when everyone was healthy. But the day finally came, and it was a beautiful one, pleasantly cool with scattered high clouds to take the edge off the sun.

 

The wallabies didn’t seem too energized by the weather. Maybe sleeping was their celebration. But morose wallabies didn’t get the girls down. After three months’ build-up, the girls hardly seemed to care about the animals at all. They were excited to be at the zoo, but not for the central attractions. The fun was in the opportunities to run and climb. I think Baby’s peak moment was climbing around in the big tower in the playground. The big tower is three storeys tall. You can only enter it by ladder or rope, and you can only exit by one of the high slides.

 

I was surprised. In earlier visits, Baby was entranced by the giraffes. They were her favourite animals for years after her first visit to the zoo. During this trip, I had the impression suddenly that my toddlers had become kids.

 

The flamingo pond was a good place to decompress. It’s peaceful. You can space out very effectively watching these oddball birds. Even hypnotizing: one of the colourful birds stood on one leg and swung his lowered head back and forth. I could have slept, if Little Ren hadn’t had mysterious reserves of energy.

 

Ren’s mission as a three-year-old has been to log as many miles as she can, running ceaselessly from one thing to another without apparent purpose, running without ever looking back. If your attention lapses for more than a moment, you might lose sight of her. I’ve had enough frights with her to know I must stay alert. But I’ve also had lots of practice describing small circles inside her larger ones. Conserving energy seems to be a priority among parental skills.

 

Predictably, Ren’s battery runs out once we’re out on the street. One strange lacuna in the admirable public transit plan in Rotterdam is the zoo. There is almost no way to get there without some walking. I have to accomplish that with Little (growing) Ren in my arms. It’s a beautiful day for a very slow walk.

 

The highlight this time was the aquarium. That exhibit never gets old, watching the fish glide across enormous windows or overhead. The diversity of them, the colours, the dreamlike motion, they’re always engaging.

Travelogue 927 – August 30

What’s the Score?

 

There’s the sound of a crowd on the wind. It’s not so common a sound as it once was. I can hear their cries hundreds of metres away.

 

The clouds have cleared, and I’ve decided on an evening walk. My usual route takes me by a set of community pitches. And there’s a match on. I can see their uniforms, yellow and scarlet. I can see the modest grandstand mid-pitch, where plenty of seats are still empty. These spectators have powerful lungs.

 

I circle the pitches in my usual way, passing close to one team’s net. I stop to watch, and it happens that I’m fortunate enough to see a goal. It’s the yellows, looking like bees with their black stripes, who swarm down the pitch to score. It’s not the prettiest goal, a ball that the goalkeeper gets a piece of and then quickly bounces among the players to dribble into the net. But the fans are happy, letting loose another surprising volley of sound.

 

I carry on with my walk, accompanied by the echoes of the cheering and jeering of the football crowd. Evening walks are made for trivial thoughts, and two lines of meaningless inquiry compete for the floor in the parlour of my mind. One is topical. I wonder at the vehemence of their enjoyment. That they’re excited is not surprising, considering the enforced general hiatus from sport. What I wonder is how much of their exuberance may be a show for the benefit of the community, which they may feel still disapproves of their gathering in this way. I wonder, also, how much might be attributed to unconscious fear, fear for their health and fear that this match might be one precious bit of joy between waves of illness and shutdown. In short, how exceptional is this occasion, and, looking deeper, how sincere?

 

My second line of thought is less topical. The sight of the match, small league play on a local pitch, strikes me as the essence of sport. It is exciting. And it’s timeless. The spectators know the teams, know some or all of the players, and their dedication to one of those teams may match their dedication to Manchester United, or whoever they watch at the bar. That’s how it should be. I notice, walking by again, there’s not even a scoreboard. Everyone just knows the score. It’s among the best forms of entertainment, a kind of theatre. The local theatre company doesn’t need to tell you which act of Hamlet they’re in. You remember, or it doesn’t matter. When the first image to come to mind of European football is one from a multi-million-euro match broadcast around the world, I think the sport is done a disservice. The local is the real.

 

I walk on. The skies have opened up. The clouds are glowing with sun. These are the skies I was encountering in early April, when the crisis was new, when we were beginning to wonder how serious all this was.

 Travelogue 926 – August 29

Windy Speeches for the Stable Genius

 

It’s still August, but it feels like the winds have blown summer away. Or maybe that’s the onset of the school year blowing away all leisure for teachers. It doesn’t take long before those two elements of a successful summer, lazy heat and lazy behaviours, seem far in the past.

 

Even though the Roman temperatures have been blown away by this week’s winds, I’m still pursuing my Roman reading. I miss the Emperor, the thoughtful and earnest and solitary Marcus Aurelius, who wrote to bolster his confidence with thoughts of virtue. I’ve moved on to reading history and drama.

 

The plays of Seneca are appropriate reading for stormy weather. By day, Seneca may have been a prominent Stoic philosopher, preaching the importance of a cool head and a cool heart, but, by night, he dashed off florid melodramas. The plays are all high rhetoric and wrenching emotion. There is no stage direction and little action. There is some debate about whether these plays were written for performance. If they were performed, it was probably at court, where Trump’s historical twin, the petulant Nero, lay on his side in a sumptuous room and watched a small set of actors sweat through their long monologues and their mortal fear of the critic.

 

In “Medea”, the protagonist writhes in jealousy and fury and self-reproach, finally resolving to call upon all dark powers in an impressively comprehensive manner in order to punish her husband’s new lover, the lover’s father, and finally her own children. This performance would have demanded extraordinary stamina from any actor, and perhaps Seneca the director counted on the actor’s fear for her life, performing in front of the stable genius who was emperor, for that extra shot of energy. In “Trojan Women”, the pervading emotions are horror and grief. There is plenty to go around, so no one actor would have been forced to carry the whole eight of Troy’s mortification.

 

It’s hard to reconcile the various sides of Seneca, the ambitious courtier, the sage philosopher, and the writer of grotesque stage plays, but no one can dispute his influence. I can’t read Latin. By all accounts his style was powerful and beautiful. His writings have survived as models for authors through the centuries, and even had their influence on Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre. You can find Seneca in the five-act structures, the charged rhetoric and the general doom and gloom. There is in much of that era’s writing the feeling of the proud student mimicking his don.

 

Seneca survived well through the centuries, in part because Christian scholars believed Seneca was pals with Saint Paul. I might have chosen other representatives of Roman culture to survive this well, but there’s something valuable and instructive to this man’s repellent complexity. He was a man of his time. I look forward to tasting from other Roman drama. I’d like to travel back into the happier times of the Republic, take a look at the comedian Plautus.

Travelogue 925 – August 22

Some August Heat

 

Summer effectively ends for me on Monday, but today I’m registering a mood that is something like optimism. That might be because I had the kind of good night’s sleep that has been rare in summer. And that might be because the temperatures are suddenly not so summer-like. The winds have blown in, heralding a change of season.

 

Riding my bike to the store this morning, I rode under blue skies and among cool breezes that could have belonged to autumn. I enjoyed that short ride. The skies were wide and bright, and the clouds high and noble. The bike ride could have been a moment of inspiration. Autumn always did awaken a sense of hope in me.

 

I’m not complaining about the summer. Days are supposed to be hot, especially in August. In recent years, summer has waned before August had fairly begun. We were fortunate with our August this year. And still, here it is, as though on cue: school is set to begin again and the winds pick up, carrying their teasing suggestions of chill and damp. The timing is uncanny. It makes one think that tradition was always a product of nature.

 

This year’s summer heat has meant a few more trips to the beach than usual. That’s been great for the family. It’s also meant a kind of atmospheric accompaniment to my readings in Roman literature. I’m not really sure why I continue to be drawn back to my writers from the days of polytheism and marching legions, but it’s nice to have something like the Roman climate as backdrop.

 

I finally finished my long and slow sojourn through the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius. I would be hard-pressed to say what wisdom or consolation I derived from that study. I might understand something more of Stoicism than I did before. I learned very little about the history of his time. But it’s not time regretted, any more than the time invested in good conversation would be. One doesn’t need an inventory of improvements to his character to give merit to an evening spent with a friend. And ultimately, it did feel a bit like a conversation, the confidences of someone I was getting to know.

 

I have my doubts that there was any real intention in the order of the thoughts in his book. I can’t be sure who determined the order given the editions that we know now. But I did think the last passage had a bit of class to it, in light of the thoughts already shared, beginning with, “O man, citizenship of this great world city has been yours”; and carrying on until its close: “Pass on your way then, with a smiling face, under the smile of him who bids you go.” There are a few little gems in even these two sentences for those who have participated in the conversation.

Travelogue 924 – August 11

Duindorp

 

Sun and sand are the two main ingredients for this summer’s magical formula. We have them both today. The morning sun is a miracle, hot and unrelenting, ready to burn my sensitive skin. We’ve brought along a little, blue paraplu, and I spend much of my time finding ways to gather all my limbs comfortably under its shadow.

 

We’ve returned to our new beach, the one at the western end of Den Haag. We’ve travelled here with some trepidation because the weather report was ambiguous. Will it rain on us or would the sun shine? We’ve been fortunate. Amorphous clouds gather just after midday, but then they disperse.

 

It’s not a journey to be taken lightly. It includes transport on three separate conveyances, one or all of which may be having issues with air circulation. During this heat wave, already one week long, train rides can be tortuous. It’s not uncommon to be trapped in a stifling train car during a delay, feeling as though your lungs have finally found their gasping capacity. And this is a journey we undertake with two children at the ages of maximum duress. Yes, we do take the weather report seriously. The trip had better be worth it.

 

The sand is plentiful. It rises in piles that are higher than those at Scheveningen. The sand rises steeply from the water and undulates from there toward the dunes that line this long stretch of sea, and that give the nearby Den Haag community its name, Duindorp. The dunes themselves are high, and on the other side of them lies a spacious park with many paths among the lush seaside vegetation. The first valleys among the dunes are green with low-lying shrubs and flowers. Beyond that are cool forests, which allow us to keep a promise to Little Ren, who has wanted to search through a wood for T-Rex eggs. We haven’t found any yet.

 

It’s high tide, and we set up our paraplu just above the surf. The waves are strong, and the shallows extend far, so the swimming is especially fun. I’m usually the seawater sceptic, hanging back, afraid of the cold water, wading before swimming. Today, I’m the first one in. The girls are becoming brave. They stand in the water now and battle the waves. Baby waves her hands high, and she sings to the sea, meeting the sound of the surf with her voice.

Travelogue 923 – August 4 Long Strand 

Distances are deceptive here. I hardly need reminding that the Netherlands is a small country, but standing there on the sea, it’s driven home. Looking one way, toward the north, the coast curves out toward the sea so we can see a long way. At the farthest reach of sight, there is what looks to be a small city skyline on the shore. I haven’t been able to figure out what town that could be. But the most conservative option puts it halfway to Amsterdam’s nearest coast. Looking the other way, we see all the way to the port. It looks like an industrial Emerald City, oil tanks and cranes and magic castles. It’s disorienting for me because in the map in my head the port near Hoek van Holland and Rotterdam and where we are now, near Den Haag, is a triangle encompassing a good deal of territory. We expended quite a bit of energy travelling along one side of that triangle today: the Metro to a train to a long tram ride. I’ve been cycling, spending hours on paths well within the confines of that triangle. Then we’re on the beach, and there’s the Hoek van Holland looking like a casual stroll away. It doesn’t seem right, even though I am enjoying the opportunity of long views.

It’s like it takes the sea to force some perspective on the mind. Like human roads are mazes, and we’re perpetually scurrying in tight little switchbacks, escaping the big minotaur of our small spaces.

We’re trying something new today. Every year, we make a trip to the beach at Scheveningen. It’s a family tradition. That mission has already been accomplished to everyone’s satisfaction, last week. It was a beautiful day when we went to Scheveningen, and we did a lot of swimming. It was high tide, and the waves were high and crashing. The girls were screaming almost constantly, running away from every new wave.

Today, we’re trying a new beach for the first time. It’s south of Scheveningen, though still within sight of it. We can see the Ferris wheel on the pier.

Travelogue 922 – July 26
Dawn Ride

At 5:30 in the morning, the clouds are grand in scale, drifting quickly across the screen of the sky. Maybe it’s the framing of the bedroom window that exaggerates their size. Everything is early morning grey. The background of the sky is pearlescent; the clouds more the shade of San Francisco fog rolling in off the Pacific, making only idle threats. With every day, the summer gets older, and sun’s light gets a later start. This was the tint of the sky half an hour earlier just a month ago. I’m going to get up. My mind gives the order a few times. Each time it seems to me the body obeys, but then I wake up in the same position. Finally, the order takes, and I’m out of bed.

The catalyst for rising this early is my new bicycle. My guy at the local bike shop put it together from an old frame and bits and pieces. It’s light and fast, but nothing like a high-end racing fiets that would cost thousands and excite all kinds of anxiety. No, this is purely for fun. I throw on the first old running clothes I can find, and I’m outside. The new bike rolls along so lightly and smoothly compared to my day-to-day omafiets with the child’s seat that I’m surprised how quickly I reach the outskirts of town and can look out over the open fields.

I’m rediscovering bike paths I haven’t seen since I first moved here. I had a lot of time for exploring back then, before Menna arrived. There are a lot of narrow little roads and even smaller bike paths that criss-cross these green strips of pastureland that almost float among a grid of little canals. These fields stretch west into what’s called the ‘Westland’, the lands lying between Rotterdam and the ports and the seacoast.

The peace and the chance to speed along under glorious skies are all I care about. The clouds have retreated to the horizons, and they are white with the day’s new light. These flat stretches of land make the skies seem vast, seem more than their hemisphere of space, seem like our true domain, seem like a domain of spirit and joy. The exercise hormones are obviously kicking in. The space and the pace are intoxicating. No stop lights.

Travelogue 921 – July 24
Hard Workers

It’s summer vacation at last. My last day at work for the school year 2019-2020 was last Friday, and it was rather anti-climactic. I was just cleaning up small tasks. That’s good time management; I had no pile of unfinished work; I had no disasters to resolve. I’ve earned a right to brag about that, since much of my work life here has been messy and poorly managed. I’m fortunate in my colleagues’ patience.

Speaking of messy lives, I watched an interview with Jim Carrey last night. He’s about to publish a memoir, which seems to be a crazy fictionalization of the truth. Should we be surprised? It’s a daring move for the actor and comedian. A book like that has to be genius to rise above the initial gotcha. His motion picture magic is sometimes genius, sometimes bathos, but always memorable. It’s likely the book will be a similar mix, leaving the reader unsure how to judge it, unsure whether he or she should have spent the time reading it. Just watching him in an interview provides that same kind of stress, the anxiety you get watching a tightrope walker. What’s missing is the grace or the sense you get with a tightrope walker that, well, he’s a professional and will not fall. Carrey pushes it every time. Watching him is to squirm with discomfort.

The self-own in the interview is his admission that a character in the book, named something like ‘Laser Eyes’, is in reality Tom Cruise, who he criticizes for his calculating intensity. The truth is, these are two men I admire quite a bit, and for the same reasons. They try hard. They take risks. Dial up both of those qualities, and you have the near-insane intensity that Carrey criticizes. The two of them don’t just take risks; they never stop taking risks. They don’t just try hard; their lives are continuous effort. I really admire them for that, and I enjoy the strenuousness of their performances. I know that isn’t a popular opinion, but I do think the intensity and commitment do pay off. They have made themselves into artists. And both of them, consciously or unconsciously, benefit from the high-wire tension of tempting failure.

I think people prefer artists who achieve their effects effortlessly. In many cases, that is an illusion, but some just have natural grace. Unfairly, the most careless artists are often the ones that achieve the sublime, a quality that a labourer like Carrey visibly yearns for all his life. If he did attain the sublime, it was early on, in his Fire Marshall Bill days, or maybe in “Dumb and Dumber”. I shouldn’t comment on comedy greatness.

Anyway, all that occurs in a realm far above mine, where corrected papers, quickly forgotten by author and teacher, have all been filed away; where the work email account has been programmed with an automatic reply; where purposeless time has urgent purpose. I have four weeks or so, just enough time to lose track of time. I wish the summer were more summer-like. The Dutch summer is already over, as far as I can tell. The weather has reverted to never-ending spring, intermittent cloudiness and cool breezes.

Travelogue 920 – July 5
Hard Lines

It doesn’t help that the winds are back. It puts me in mind of February, when the winds were hard and constant, when the winds were exhausting me. And ultimately those winds seemed to bring the virus in their malevolent persistence. Significantly, when March brought calm rains, the disease took hold and spread among those ominously cloudy and quiet times. What are these winds carrying?

I struggle on my bike against June’s winds as I take on February’s responsibilities again. Baby is back in school. Little Ren is going back to day care. The spring’s calm agenda is chopped up into rushes of activity.

It’s time to practice my Stoicism, practice humble (and uncomplaining) observance of duty. I am still reading Aurelius, by now in Book Twelve of the “Meditations”. I should derive strength from his guidance. Maybe I do.

But it happens that I’ve also picked up the latest book by Michel Houellebecq, “In the Presence of Schopenhauer”. Schopenhauer, in the English translation of Houellebecq’s translation, says of the Stoics that their ideal, “the Stoic sage, is described in a way deprived of any life or poetic truth; he remains a stiff, inert manikin.” Schopenhauer was Houellebecq’s hero when he was young. I certainly don’t see restraint and ‘submission’ appealing to the French author as philosophical principles to live by, especially as a young man.

There is some truth in what he quotes Schopenhauer as saying. I’ve reflected on the flat quality of Aurelius’s moralizing, mistaking it, as I think Schopenhauer does, for a world view. That would not be fair. I do believe these were the emperor’s notes to himself, whether they were published or not. Meaning, they were applied philosophy. His thoughts reference existing metaphysics; they don’t present new systems. Schopenhauer, heir to Kant, wants an explanation for everything. Aurelius wants a moral system that gets him through the day, a notion discredited among the Romantics of Schopenhauer’s day.

The times were very different. Schopenhauer’s call for ‘poetic truth’ gives it away. Nineteenth-century philosophers craved personality and passion, things that a Stoic would have found irrelevant. Perhaps the latter weren’t looking for Zarathustra or C.G. Jung so much as the measures of a good man, which could be applied to all manner of personalities. The Stoics talked a lot about the ‘indifferent’ things, the possessions, qualities and experiences that had no impact on human virtue. It’s tempting to say the indifferent things were the only ones nineteenth century writers were interested in. Think of Flaubert and Hugo and Dickens and Carlyle. So much detail, so much colour and personality. And these became moral principles in themselves.

Travelogue 919 – July 4
Gentle Calendars

The sheep are back. They’ve cycled through the chance plots of grass between here and Schiedam Centrum, and they’ve turned up here again, on a kind of organic schedule based on how fast the grass grows and how quickly a herd of sheep can eat it up. It is surprising how thoroughly they can crop the new growth. There’s no mistaking the path they’ve followed. On one side of the bike path I take every morning, the one that winds up the hill toward the Metro station, the sheep are reclining in the early morning chill, watching my slow progress up the incline. On the other side, the grass is uniformly pared down to yellow nubs.

The progress of the sheep around the neighbourhood form a friendly sort of calendar, nicer than the cruel work calendar, which milks the end of the school year with long days and prolix meetings. It’s nicer than the civic and news calendars, counting the nightmarish days since the corona virus hit and the hellish days until the American election.

There’s another sense in which the calendar has started up again for my family. Now that the Netherlands has the virus pretty well under control, primary schools have been back in session. We kept Baby home for a while longer because I was still getting my lungs checked out. Now she’s back, and I’m back on Papa’s bike duty every morning, lifting Baby up into the bike seat and chugging on that heavy bike all the way to the school in Delfshaven.

I’m afraid I have to report that I’m in horrible shape. How did that happen in just a few short months, since March, when the shutdown started? I look back at my schedule in the fall and winter with some awe. How did I maintain that routine, cycling kids to schools, cycling to work, sometimes cycling downtown for lunch in between classes? On top of all that, I was training for half marathons!

Now that all my road races have been called off, I don’t run much. And until Baby returned to school, getting on the bicycle was to leisurely pedal to the store, no more than a kilometre away. My experience in adapting back to Baby’s school schedule inspires a real dread of the return to ‘normalcy’ in the fall. Do I need to work out this summer, just to be in shape for my ‘normal’ life? That’s not likely to happen. I plan on employing my tried and true strategy of pooling all general anxiety into a reservoir for future nightmares and panic attacks. That works for me every time.