It’s October. It’s a beautiful month freighted with the dread of winter. It’s a pretty season cursed to bear the angst of our frenzied lives. September may have been a gentle start, but October sees us at full throttle. Work has become manic. School has resumed for children, and so have all their myriad activities. What may have begun as a delight in being busy again has become something more like a runaway train. We’re hanging on for dear life. History mocks poor October by pinning Halloween to its final day, a holiday that serves as a kind of witch’s mirror reflecting to us our distorted lives and our tortured souls.
In fact, it is a pretty season. The showers come and go, it’s true, but the girls and I have discovered big, glorious rainbows in the sky on a number of occasions. The temperatures are dropping, it’s true, but slowly enough for open jackets. We can still stop for ice cream. The days are getting shorter, it’s true, and that may be the worst of it. But the leaves are turning. Yesterday, the girls brought home three huge leaves they had found, fallen from a plane tree, leaves turned bright red.
And there’s a light to the air in this season that I love. It’s as though everything has a rose tint. The colours in our brick lanes come alive. I find myself entranced by this light and wondering if the architects in our past were inspired when they chose the colours for their work. Were their choices unconscious? Are the colours as much a part of us as they are of the autumnal air? It all seems part of a magical formula.
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Saturday, October 22, 2022
And why did Saul Goodman make me think of Socrates and the sophists? He was a questioner. Kind of like the sophists, but different. Overall, I would say the sophists had a positive impact. They may have been self-interested, but they concerned themselves with issues like the public good. The sophists tested the boundaries of tradition to expand the mind. It was an optimistic, expansive project.
There is a darker type of questioner, who preys upon the weaknesses in systems for personal gain. Saul, for example, tested the boundaries of the law in a pessimistic drive for self-aggrandizement.
What made the TV series work was the tension between his better and worse natures. His darker nature prevailed. That’s the nature of Gilligan’s enterprise. In Saul’s story and “Breaking Bad”, viewers understand things will turn out badly, but they are still transfixed by the prospect of redemption.
In America, the dark questioners flock to the law. It’s only natural. They’re taught on TV that the law is a matter of semantics. Twist a word here, compromise a phrase there, and they’re free on all charges. There’s an entire life of crime there in the questioning of legal boundaries. Donald Trump, a supremely cynical questioner himself, was tutored early in life by the sleazy lawyer Roy Kohn. In a matter of four short years, he found every curb to presidential power that for two hundred years had relied on tradition and honour. He found and exploited every flaw in the electoral system. The inherited norms were left in tatters.
Saul at least had the grace to own his selfishness and even to do the right thing once in a while. That was because other people were flesh and blood. To the Trumpistas, the world is a stage set and people have no feelings.
Trump’s 30% of the electorate are vulnerable to the grifter’s cynicism because they need scapegoats for their disappointments. The Reagan Revolution taught them that business was the model for life. ‘Business’ was code for authoritarianism. The social media revolution has taught them that rage is good business. If life lets you down, lash out. It’s philosophically sound. Rage is efficacious and, by extension, it doesn’t matter what you say or how consistent your rhetoric. Words have been proven by the grifter’s law to be unreliable. Emotion is reliable, and self-interest is the moral compass.
Friday, October 21, 2022
Healthy, robust, safe and secure. Prosperous. Growing. How often do we see all these descriptors put together? It’s a rare convergence, rare enough in the life of an individual, and even more so in the history of civilizations. Spinning the globe now, where do we feel comfortable putting a finger down, identifying the classic up-and-coming society? Even China, darling of every unoriginal prophet, doesn’t meet those criteria, with its new, house-of-cards look.
Greece in the fifth century BC fit the profile pretty well. Fresh from unexpected victories over the massive Persian army, they were feeling their oats. They were a successful civilization, accruing wealth and achievement and status. They looked outward rather than inward, curious about the world, building a cosmopolitan society. And that golden era was the heyday of the sophists.
I’m contending that it’s these societal phases that produce history’s great questioners. They captivate the zeitgeist in times of growth. They’re the pop stars. Everything is in expansion, including the collective mind. It’s an exciting time to be alive, and questioning is a stimulating exercise.
To be fair, broadly speaking, the sophists were everything their adversaries said they were, perverse corrupters of the minds of the youth. Yes, perverse in the sense that they undermined prevailing values and belief systems. Every society spends its youth under fairly ironclad regimes of religious and political belief. Those beliefs provided a foundation for their success. Suddenly, in times of prosperity and wider commerce, they become less necessary. The old beliefs also begin to seem faintly ridiculous in a cosmopolitan society, in which new influences are many and compelling. And of course the youth are particularly keen to break conventions.
Questioners don’t need to be reliable or provide answers. That explains their freedom of spirit. It also explains why we find them frustrating. It’s impossible to run society on questions. Eventually we need answers. The popularity of questioners has a short term.
One breed of conservatives perishes before the onslaught of the questioners, the ones enforcing tradition. A new breed arises, the ones who make new systems out of the mess. Enter Plato, the codifier.
Sunday, October 16, 2022
I can recommend having kids as a course in humility. Young children ask lots of questions. My girls are at an age where the questions are becoming intelligent and very urgent. They must have knowledge, and I am coming up short. It can be frustrating. The things they ask are often things I should know, things I tell myself I did know at one time.
We boil eggs; suddenly I’m on the spot. What is the difference between the yellow part and the white part? Which one is healthier for you? Where is the baby chicken? What does each part of the egg do for the baby chicken? How long does it take to hatch? What is the membrane just inside the shell? Why don’t we see it when we crack the egg before it’s cooked? Why would a chicken lay an egg without a baby inside?
“Look at the moon, Baby Jos!” Suddenly, I need to explain the phases of the moon, and why sometimes we see the moon during daylight hours and sometimes we don’t. She needs to know when the next eclipse is. She wants to know if I’ve seen an eclipse. I say yes. When? I can’t remember. Why not? “Where were you?” she asks. I’m embarrassed. “I don’t remember.”
Papa feels his hold on knowledge slipping: his hold on memory, identity, sanity. How could it have all been so fragile?
Socrates had children. Maybe the dialogues with his sons inspired all the later dialogues. The boys had convinced him he knew nothing. It inspired rather than humiliated him, and he turned it into a method of forming knowledge. Or maybe he was just embittered by his humiliation at the hands of his own children, and he looked to inflict the same on his friends. Who knows?
One has an opportunity in the Socrates story to see how adults who are not your parents react to intensive questioning. Not well. They convict you of perversity and sentence you to death by poisoning. That’s a very literal form of punishment, administering a deadly chemical to the human infectant.
As we age, we become comfortable being authority figures. We feel authority is our due. But to shoulder authority is to take on a certain vulnerability. Anyone honest feels insecure exercising authority. Humility bonds well with insecurity, creating a stable compound that won’t flare up or become corrosive. Then authority can alloy with innovation. Brittle pride, on the other hand, is unstable and doesn’t bond well. It repels anything new. It defends positions arbitrarily. It challenges all questions as irreligious or unpatriotic. It reduces itself to juvenile slogans some idiot has printed on a red baseball cap.
What makes the egg yolk yellow? What does “great” mean? Why isn’t the white part of the egg white? If you don’t know what “great” means, then how do you know America was great … or isn’t now … or can ever be again?
Friday, October 07, 2022
She was crying with such abandon. Her magnet set had failed her, providing one less bar than she had needed to complete a tower she was building. Then my sweet Baby Jos was in her mother’s arms crying. She had so surrendered to her heartbreak, that I could only marvel. She cried and cried.
Baby Jos was tired. She becomes easily frustrated, tears of protest coming to her during violin practice or when she is trying to learn something new. But this is heartbreak of a different order. She is grieving the humiliating state of being human, feeble and fallible. We all fell silent in the presence of this pain, even Little Ren, who is usually critical of Jos’s tantrums.
Some of this we retain in age. We throw on the ground some task our fingers are fumbling over, punch the pillow that will not take the right shape in the middle of the night. Is there any communication in that? I feel real protest in Baby Jos’s tears. It is so sad to realize that we are something less in the world than we had hoped. Adults can feel the same. We think we know our limits and powers, but they shift. When I am tired, I can barely walk straight, I bump into everything in the tight little space we call home.
We turn to our parents. We cry a question. It could be, why? It could be, what; like, what do I have to do? We know there are no answers.
But to question is our power. It expresses our true position in the world, as novice and suppliant and child. When humans give answers, there is something grey and impotent to them. The answerer is off-putting. The questioner is our friend and comforter.
That is why I think there is something to the rhetoric of the question. It is the tool of the teacher, like Socrates. It’s the tool of the counsellor, like Erasmus. It is also the tool of the charlatan, like Trump. The questioner in history leaves a mark.
It is a thought that came to me when “Better Call Saul” was over, and I mourned it. The character was a kind of tribute to the questioner. I want to explore the thought a little more.
Sunday, October 02, 2022
We start with stories; we move to the ring. We play a game, and then we snack. It’s all outlined in pictures up above Meester Jim’s smart screen. Each day follows the same pattern.
Last week was an opportunity for parents to sit in class and observe. Little Ren asked me to go. She was so happy I came that she held my hand in class most of the morning.
As other children came in, they had a choice among areas of the room, sectioned by activity. In one area, they could play with puzzles. In another, there were blocks. In another they could draw. Ren wanted to read. We read a story about little children (in animal form) deciding what they wanted to be when they grew up. The only one I remember is the bulldog who wanted to be a dancer. The book depicted her in a tutu, frowning like a bulldog and bursting out of her little costume. Was that meant as a joke?
The class gathered in a circle. It took a while. Meester Jim gently guided the children as they put toys away and they moved chairs into a circle. Once everyone was seated, the meester went through a series of little lessons, structured with questions, turning attendance into a math problem, reviewing the days of the week, and setting the agenda for the day. Nicely done.
Again, the class broke, and children chose their activity. Johanna had asked Little Ren as we walked in if they could play together, and so the two sought each other out. They decided to choose a game from the cabinets. They chose the game in which you make little frogs jump by pressing down on them with your finger, trying to land them all in a small bowl. My frogs always flew off the table, but I was enjoying myself. Johanna wasn’t great at the game, either. She became absorbed in arraying her little team of frogs in neat little lines.
The frogs taught me I need help with motor skills and teamwork. Johanna needs some help staying on task. Little Ren showed great team and leadership skills, picking up my frogs and encouraging me, gently reminding Johanna that it was her turn. And she won every game. I was proud.
Education is friendly questions and friendly frogs. Our Socratic heritage tells us that knowledge is in us; or, at least, the urge to knowledge is in us. The meester leads us with gentle questions; he creates an environment of learning opportunities.
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Out one café window, it was raining. Out the other, it was not. I swung my head one way and then the other, trying to make sense of it. The barista watched me out of the corner of her eye, wondering what new variety of strange behaviour she had to witness. But it was true: sunny one way and showering the other. Cross the street and you were dry. She shrugged and knocked the grounds out of her portafilter.
Life is a game of adaptation. Before I take the girls to school, I check the skies; I check the forecast; I gather our rain gear. I gauge the movements of the clouds. I time our exit like a surfer catching a wave, hoping the lull in the rain lasts just long enough for our trip. I have developed a fine barometric sensitivity for rain. I smell it coming. I search the skies continuously like a fugitive.
A skill is a measure of change. It was formed as a response to the world. The human, as a bundle of skills, is the measure of all things.
It was Protagoras who first said, “Man is the measure of all things.” He was a sophist, according to the historians. In two different dialogues written by Plato, Protagoras the Sophist was put in his place by Socrates, the Non-Sophist. I’m sceptical of the labels. I’m also sceptical about Plato’s Socrates. I don’t think it detracts from Plato’s incredible achievement to admit that he very likely created a version of Socrates that fit into his program.
This is what I think about the sophists. They have come down to us in historical record as somewhat despicable figures, having lost the long-term propaganda war. They are portrayed as relativists, if we can be allowed borrow a modern pejorative.
It’s not enough to accept the caricature. Young men wanted what they had to teach. In societies in which business and policy were decided in the marketplace and the forum, rhetoric was a necessary skill. The thrust of their teaching was skill-building: rhetoric and applied logic. Skills teachers focus on problem-solving and the solutions are pragmatic, not theoretical. Skills teachers focus on pushing boundaries and asking questions. They all had their different methods and their different styles, but they agreed on empowering students to handle debate, public speaking, and critical thinking. Several made extravagant claims about their own knowledge. Imagine, a teacher who lives on tuition fees bragging about his knowledge!
Let’s compare now the Socratic method, setting aside the conclusions that Plato forced Socrates to reach. The method consisted of questioning, defining terms, pushing boundaries, and applying logic. The outcome? He was charged in the courts of impiety and the corruption of the youth of Athens. I think the line between Socrates and his competition is less categorical and more one of branding. He was perhaps just the best of the sophists, after all, not the alternative to the sophists.
Saturday, September 24, 2022
I’m still reeling from the final episodes of “Better Call Saul”. No spoilers: it’s not because of any specific plot twist or surprise. It’s because the whole series was so affecting, and the final episodes so perfect in their logic. The writing in this series was truly impressive.
Result: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Saul. Surely more attention than a TV show deserves. Or is it? We are still a species that tells stories. Just because we tell them digitally doesn’t mean they are fundamentally more evolved than cave paintings. More sophisticated and complex doesn’t mean categorically different.
Reading about the ancient Greeks and watching Saul has led me to thoughts about the sophists. The sophists were public philosophers in sixth- and fifth-century BC Greece. History’s main charge against the sophists, Plato and Aristophanes here playing the part of 80s Republicans, was relativism. The sophists called themselves teachers, and what they taught was rhetoric, and what they taught about rhetoric was that any point could be argued. The conservatives cried foul.
The early sophist Protagoras famously said, “Man is the measure of all things.” When I first read that, years ago, I confess that I didn’t think too deeply about it. It seemed one of those cryptic ancient Greek aphorisms that read simply like a paean to humanity.
There’s more to it. Study the larger context, study the language of the passage, and it seems to be a statement that the individual human determines his or her truth. There’s apparently some debate about whether Protagoras meant that the human mind determines fact or determines value. For example, there’s a difference between declaring it’s winter and declaring it’s cold as winter. (If there are any real philosophers reading this and cringing, please forgive me.)
I’m a fan of Plato, and yet I find myself wanting to defend the sophist. Maybe it’s because they were teachers, among the first in history to make more than a fleeting appearance on the stage. And the impression they made was far-reaching. In some senses, the main thrust of all that beautiful Greek culture and wisdom that we have taken as foundational for two millennia was pedagogy. They were a race of teachers.
Monday, September 12, 2022
Starbucks wouldn’t have been our first choice. We were on our way to an evening hockey practice. We were running early, so between Metro and tram we stopped for a snack. As soon as we were in the open, we were caught in a rain shower. We ducked into the Starbucks at the central library.
We were among the first in the rain-shower line, and so we scored a nice table along the wall. Much of the place seems worn and sweaty. Starbucks cafes seem to age more quickly than other cafes. Is it an illusion of the décor, the dark colours and the wood? Best to keep café interiors bright, particularly in this climate.
Three weeks of perfect attendance for both girls is a big achievement. We’re celebrating. It’s been a very positive start to the school year. Of course, it’s only the beginning of the year, and the temps are still warm; three weeks now doesn’t mean what it does in November. But still. We’ve already had one near-miss. Little Ren’s teacher came down with COVID last week.
Baby Jos wanted a chocolate muffin. I wanted a chocolate cookie and an espresso. We watched the rain come down. We munched on our snacks. At some point, I had an alarming realization. I took another bite; I took another sip. I wasn’t tasting anything. I panicked. I called Menna. “I’m not tasting anything!” “Oh, no,” she cried. Should I pull out of the hockey practice and run home? Menna thought I should.
I mulled it over after the phone call. Baby Jos would be disappointed. And I didn’t want to set the wrong tone at the start of her hockey season. I had no other symptoms. The rain was passing. I resolved we should try. If at any point I felt feverish or short of breath, we would turn back, even if we were at the gateway of the hockey club.
The rest of the trip was uneventful. The rain had ceased. Baby Jos ran onto the field, and I snuck away to the clubhouse. There, I decided on an experiment: one coffee and one of their very tasty brownies. In fact, the brownie was yummy as ever. The coffee wasn’t bad, either. Aha, I thought. I was going to be fine.
The moral to the post-pandemic story: it’s not COVID; it’s just Starbucks.
Monday, September 05, 2022
Turning On the Lights
First there was light. That was on my mind. In summer, when I awoke, there was sunlight. Now I have to turn on the lights.
In the eastern windows there is some light in the sky, the faint start of the day. But outside my door, facing west, the sky is dark. This is my first sighting post-solstice of stars in the morning after I awake, when I open the front door. It’s sobering.
Today is predicted to be the last hot and dry day before storms move in. You feel the tension and suspense. There’s a crackle in the air. Hazy clouds are coming and going. People are enjoying the weather, riding their bikes to work, sitting on their balconies. With a change in the air, the Dutch are relishing the last of the ending period before preparing for what’s coming.
The news from Germany is the passing of a €65bn package to help families and companies with energy costs this winter. This tops the news on British news sites, but I have to scroll surprisingly far among the headlines of Nos, my usual morning Dutch source, to find the same. I have seen little about Dutch government plans for the looming energy crisis.
Sometimes, even in the presence of beauty, I marvel at the resilience of the human psyche that finds within itself as a mass, and within themselves as individuals, the motivation, the hope, yes the energy - the light on a winter’s morning, – to see their way to the front door, to the Metro station, to their workstations. The metaphor is the end of summer. Or, more likely, we are the metaphor for the season.
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
There’s a building on the water! When did that happen? Have I been gone that long?
I’m on the seventh floor, waiting for my students in the classroom, scanning the view out the window. Our building overlooks the Rijnhaven, an old and abandoned port that lies like a reflecting pool in the midst of this up-and-coming borough, high-rises and construction ringing it on every side, with a cute little pedestrian bridge connecting either side of its narrow passage to the River Maas.
And now there’s a building on the water! I looked it up online. Indeed, there is now a drijvend kantoorgebouw on the Rijnhaven, a “floating office”. It was placed there back in February. Have I been away that long? I’ve had to work at home, convalescing from long COVID. This is my first day back in the classroom.
It’s both heartening and amusing to work in this buzzing little buurt, amusing because we so clearly don’t belong here, the awkward little business faculty, placed temporarily among the dynamism while a humble building of their own is being raised in a sleepier district a few kilometres away. My less-than-fashionable students are down below, poolside, finishing their cigarettes, quite unaware of their awkwardness, while I self-consciously drink in the high-rent view that I don’t deserve, and noticing that there’s a building on the water! Amusing how the history of cities is written on the landscape. It’s an arcane script, decipherable only by the urban elites who read real estate like psalms and participate in perilous investment games.
The River Maas takes a turn here so that, looking out the mouth of the Rijnhaven, one looks downstream. It looks like every boat has come from the Rijnhaven or is approaching to enter it. And yet, the harbour is empty of ships.
Xenophon recites rivers as though punctuation for his march. Who knew Mesopotamia was so awash with rivers? I suppose the T&E need their tributaries. Every time they come across a river, he records how wide it is. It makes sense. They are formidable obstacles.
“After three days march, we came upon the Nieuwe Maas. It is three hundred metres wide.” What if he had written a chronicle of crossing the Netherlands and he described his progress according to bodies of water? It would have been a very long march. “After ten minutes, we came across the Herengracht. It was thirty metres wide. After ten more minutes, we came upon the Keizersgracht. It was also thirty metres wide. After ten more minutes …”
Saturday, August 27, 2022
Their competitive spirit is growing. Last year, when they were six, they ran more or less randomly around the field, knowing vaguely they had to hit the ball with their hockey sticks, knowing vaguely there were goals to aim for. Some had more sense of the game than others, and when they had the ball, they moved it in the right direction. Goals were haphazard.
This morning, the girls had more direction. Some still looked dazed or bored. Some spaced out mid-field while others gathered around the ball and swung sticks. But the ball was moving down field and up, and goals were scored. The girls celebrated their goals. Baby Jos scored twice herself.
They’re named after a famous king. This whole club, one of four major hockey clubs in Rotterdam, is named after a king. Guess his name. He was seventeenth in his family line. He was descended directly from Heracles. He succeeded a half-brother who went mad. He was succeeded by his son after ruling for ten years. He led his army against the superpower of the age, who were attempting to invade, and he was killed in battle. One of several famous quotes attributed to him is, “Come and take them.” (His response to the superpower king when that king ordered him to surrender his arms.) Can you guess yet? Final clue: this king was played by Gerard Butler on the big screen. How many kings can claim that? Furthermore, this king was married to a woman named Gorgo. In the same film, Gorgo was played by the actress who would later play Cersei Lannister in “Game of Thrones”. This kind of star power makes it real history. Can you guess?
Okay, yes, this is a continuation of my obsession with the Greeks. Clearly, the universe is speaking to me when my daughter’s hockey team is named after a famous Greek king and when the pro football club in my neighbourhood is called “Sparta”. The universe is clearly directing me toward a destiny that can only be fulfilled by a portion of ouzo on a Greek beach under a fiery Greek sun, and my order for that ouzo delivered in flawless Greek.
Isn’t it wonderful how friendly the Fates are? How much more clearly could they have spoken? The times are friendly ones. We are no longer forced to read the entrails of bird and beast to understand the divine will. Why, we need look no further than the names of local sports clubs for impartial prophecy.
For the moment, there is nothing more to be done than to celebrate Jos’s goals with a lemonade in the clubhouse with her teammates. We shout, “Yamas!” and “Death to the Persians!”
Wednesday, August 24, 2022
Everything Greek is in fashion at my house this summer. It started with news of a wedding in Athens. I entertained a fleeting thought that I might attend. I started playing Greek on Duolingo: modern Greek; I had (very casually) studied ancient Greek when I was younger. I began refreshing my memory about ancient Greek history. I read, I found podcasts. I found my copy of Pope’s Homer. I started reading about the history of Homeric manuscripts. (I suddenly wondered, how does a 2,700-year-old poem come to us?) I grazed among other classics.
Xenophon was stranded with an army of ten thousand in Mesopotamia when Cyrus, a contender for the Persian throne, died in battle. The only fight ahead of them after Cyrus was dead was to get out of hostile territory, pursued by a vengeful king under the hot sun of Tigris and Euphrates River Valley. It’s one of the greatest adventure stories in history.
Xenophon had consulted no less a personage than the philosopher Socrates about the invitation to join Cyrus’s army. Socrates had advised him to consult the Oracle of Delphi. After Xenophon asked the oracle the wrong question, Socrates washed his hands of the silly boy. Months later, Xenophon stood before the desperate army of Hellenes, when all seemed lost, to offer then a plan to get them to safety.
My own Anabasis involves getting two little girls back to school. It takes place under a hot sun in the Maas River Valley. We are attempting to escape the wrath of an angry taskmaster who feels betrayed: Summer itself. He is a god jealous of our attentions. He has no patience for those who turn their backs on him. His season, after all, is still in full swing. This was slated to be the year for corrections in the calendar, yanking forward the launch of the school year after a succession of years in which it drifted downstream toward autumn.
Summer’s tactics are ruthless. Turning one furious eye upon us, he bleeds us of energy; he burns the skin; he distorts even our thoughts and emotions, turning virtues into their opposite, patience into impatience and tolerance into aggression. Interior landscapes are as scorched as the brown grasses in the Dutch parks.
But being a parent is no ordinary responsibility. We must maintain the posture of virtue at all costs. We stand scattered around the schoolyard, waiting with our children for the doors to open, or waiting for the to emerge in the heat of the afternoon. Composure must be sustained. The stakes are high.
It’s a new school year, and there are new parents. These new faces are keen reminders of the passage of time. We were the new faces so recently. Now who are we, whose eager and proud smiles have faded with experience. Summer laughs maliciously from the glare of the sun off the car windows. This is what comes of defying gods. If only Socrates has warned us. But that’s not his way. When will they open those doors?
Monday, August 22, 2022
Yesterday was the last day of summer. The girls returned to school today, and I’m back to work. Vacation time is over, no matter how summery still the weather.
It was a happy summer. It was a summer of hot days, ice cream, and afternoons in the inflatable pool. It was a summer of visits to the beach. It was a summer of local museums and walks under canopies of tree leaves.
And still there’s a shame in returning to work without stories of international travel. It’s an autumn ritual here. Colleagues are comparing travel stories within minutes of first greetings. There is always a polite but gloating, “Oh!” awaiting any admission that my family and I stayed home for summer. I’ve learned to deflect the judgement with a threat of counter-judgement: “We chose to focus on the children.” I return the condescending smile while theirs waver, and the conversation moves along.
I think of Kant, who famously never travelled. I think of the stillness of the COVID years. I think of everyone re-evaluating travel now, post-COVID, while the climate has gone wonky. People are rediscovering the local. I count myself among this new breed, but cautiously and with lots of qualifications, like: well, it’s somewhat involuntary; and, well, I’ll travel when I can; and, well, I’m still travelling, even if locally. Our trips to the beach still consume some portion of the fuel burned by trains between Rotterdam and Den Haag.
On the final day of summer, I made one last trip to the beach. I can say with a touch of pride that my footprint was minimal. I cycled to the train station, rather than use the Metro. At the other end of the train trip, I rented a bicycle to pedal all the way from Den Haag Centraal to the beach.
The occasion was a birthday. The weather was lovely. My claim to be championing the environment was suspect, I admit, undermined by every degree in temperature and every minute of clear sunshine. The ride was short and easy and very pleasurable, leading through the elegant streets of Den Haag, through peaceful parklands after that, and through the posh outskirts of Scheveningen.
I discovered old Scheveningen, tucked into a pocket south of our usual tram stops, and south of the beaches we frequent. It was refreshing to see the historical town, still alive and kicking under the late summer sun, the old lighthouse standing red and tall on its hill, and the old church at the base of that hill, standing at the end of the town’s shopping street, so forgotten it displayed no plaque or sign describing its centuries of history.
Monday, August 08, 2022
I’ve been teaching in the afternoons this week, standing at the whiteboard in a stuffy third-floor room overlooking the busy Herenplaats square near the Blaak, while summer’s clouds mark the regular, muted progress of long middays.
I introduced conditionals into the muggy air of today’s lesson. We use ‘would’ in the future unreal; we use ‘would have’ in the past unreal. I had students imagine life after winning the lottery. They imagined what might have been had they done things differently. Lack of vocabulary keeps our dreams and regrets very tame. They were excited to learn the word for yacht.
Though I’m working, it’s still summer. In the mornings, I try to plan family fun. My plans do battle with summer laziness; occasionally they win, and we make it out the door. Today we made it to Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum. This small museum is housed in a nineteenth-century mansion that stands a stone’s throw from the much-larger modern art museum.
It’s an old-world museum, full of specimens and short on text. Rotterdam’s Maritime Museum is far more child-friendly, with its interactive exhibits and play areas. But my girls are quite entertained by it all. Seized by a kind of restless, galloping wonder, they dash from one animal to another, issuing comments and questions in a rapid stream. We struggled to keep up.
For my part, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a natural history museum. I’m enjoying it. In the same way that I find myself reading more biographies and history of late, I find myself appreciating the taste of reality. On my own, I’d only pay for a museum ticket if art were involved. Here I am, admiring nature’s creations. And I like it.
Afterward, I regard the city’s art and architecture with slightly altered sight. The products of human imagination appear as little more than distortions of nature’s. All we’ve ever come up with is interpretation.
Thursday, July 28, 2022
Early in the morning, I open the front door. It’s one of the first things I do. The fresh air is the ensoulment of the day; the day doesn’t start without it. I stand outside, and I breathe deeply. I listen for songbirds, and I gauge the clouds. The temp is 14˚C. I debate long sleeves for the first time in weeks.
I feel something like gratitude in the first moments of the day. I shouldn’t qualify; it simply is gratitude. I just can’t name exactly what I’m grateful for. I could say, “everything”. I could say, “for seeing another morning”. I think of the old prayer, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” I have been kept for another day. Maybe that’s enough.
I’m thinking there’s more. There’s the quality of things once taken for granted. It’s the air itself, refreshing and life-sustaining, that satisfies. When a youth enjoys the fresh air, the fresh air is a thing made wonderful by his or her attention. It hardly matters that the air was fresh before he or she came along. An older person has become more the grateful witness to a wonderful world. Every thing is discovered; every scene is entered in medias res.
By afternoon, the shape of things is set. The day is ripe. I’ve breathed the air. I’ve converted my time into good little achievements, and bad ones, too. I have an accounting to make.
It seems to me that the other side of the coin we call gratitude is a quality we call forgiveness. These terms I find slippery, so forgive the frequent qualifiers. Feeling blessed can come hand in hand with feeling unworthy, at least for some of us. Letting go is more than releasing. It’s acceptance, and it’s living with the things and people that don’t please. Forgiveness is not a process of getting rid of things, but a process of settling in with them. It makes a richer, rather than an emptier, more sanitized, existence.
The day has become populated by small thoughts and events. They are all with me as I sit on the terrace outside under the white, humid sky. The neighbourhood is quiet, even as it hums with all the thoughts and activities of the neighbours. We live with each other; we live with all our deeds together.
I’m thinking each quality loses definition without the other. The forgiving person understands and feels gratitude. The ingrate is stingy with forgiveness. World views built on power collapse in on themselves on this very point. Master races do not forgive. At best, they tolerate, look past, give calculated pardons. At worst, they turn to violence as a way to cleanse the world of what can not be accepted.
Monday, July 25, 2022
Last week’s heat wave has had aftershocks. Temps reached 30 again, and I was helpless. I could do little but nurse my humidity headache. I think I caught a pinch of Little Ren’s stomach virus. It’s funny how quickly we are brought low, made helpless.
We thought we had ridden the heat wave fairly masterfully. It had been predicted that we would have two bad days. The first day would be less intense. So we were up early and off to the beach. It was mid-July; all of us were finally on holiday.
It was perfect. The beach was crowded, but we arrived early and staked out a perfect spot on the sand. We waded into an unusually calm sea. The girls can’t swim yet, but they are not afraid to jump into the shallow waves. We ran back through the hot sand to our blanket. We were gone before the mid-afternoon rush.
The second day was the rough one, with temperatures reaching almost to 40. But we were forewarned, and we implemented every survival strategy. We had soft drinks in the fridge. We inflated the pool for the kids. We had placed two fans in opposite corners. We started the day early, and we surrendered all ambition in the afternoon, finding our places in the house to rest.
The aftershocks have caught us unprepared. We had plans, and we over-exerted. We didn’t drink enough water. We struggled to sleep at night. Because there were no headlines about the temperatures, we worked one more hour than we should have in front of the computer on the table set in the strong sun. Suddenly, we were dizzy and nauseated.
I’m a student of human behaviours on the street. I think all immigrants are. It’s a survival mechanism. The hottest days don’t bring out our better angels. I am no different. I study the change in myself. The heat drains my energy, and I have less patience with the people around me. It’s better to stay at home. It’s a reminder that hatred is a relapse. It’s the layer you find beneath fatigue.
Tuesday, July 05, 2022
“Her brother was not handsome; no, when they first saw him, he was absolutely plain, black and plain; but still he was a gentleman, with a pleasing address.”
It’s a fun introduction to a character. The passage is from “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen. I started in on Austen recently, part of an enthusiasm for eighteenth-century literature that was sparked by my fling with Alexander Pope. No: now that I think of it, I had a brief crush on Joseph Addison before Pope. I’m a fickle reader, with so little time for dedicated reading this spring.
Of course, Austen wrote in the nineteenth century, but she wrote during that very retrograde period we call Napoleonic. Her voice owed much to the classical style of the previous century. She was hardly a Romantic.
When I started in on “Mansfield Park”, I had to change gears a bit. There’s something very specific to Austen. I felt at first like I was reading a legal contract. That’s the crisp and precise air of the eighteenth century’s rationalism. Human beings may be irrational, but there was no reason to be anything but rational in describing their irrationality.
I noticed, especially when I contrasted Austen’s work with novels written only a generation or two later, that Austen was very sparing with description. Her prose is overwhelmingly dialogue or narrative, and her stories are driven by the pendulum swing between them. Put another way, we learn about characters through what they say and what they do. That’s what makes the passage above about Henry Crawford stand out. We know right away that this character is special, and that his character has particular importance to the plot.
Consider the rest of the passage, and note that we still do not get free-standing description, but we must see him through the estimation of others: “The second meeting proved him not so very plain; he was plain, to be sure, but when he had so much countenance, and his teeth were so good, and he was so well made, that one soon forgot he was plain; and after a third interview, after dining in company with him at the parsonage, he was no longer allowed to be called so by any body. He was, in fact, the most agreeable young man the sisters had ever known, and they were equally delighted with him.”
Wednesday, June 29, 2022
I haven’t been writing much. I haven’t been reading for pleasure much. Still I’m swimming in the written word. I’ve been labouring under piles of corrections for months. It’s the deal I’ve made with management this spring to have time to heal. My personal dose of Job this winter and spring has been long-COVID. I haven’t lost my cattle, but I’ve lost my health.
At 5:30am I start on student papers. If I ever get through this workload, I will convert the 5:30 timeslot into writing fiction. In midsummer, that early hour is a special one. The sun is up, and the birds are singing. I stand at the front door breathing in the fresh morning air, finding a pleasant way to wake myself up.
I sit at my desk, joining Sisyphus with Job, undertaking every day to roll the boulder of syntax and logic up the steepest hill in Holland, which is the tortured concept of business education. The routine is wearisome, and I don’t mean only the work routine, sitting in front of the computer hours per day, correcting dozens of the same assignments. I mean also the routines of human error. The students, bless them, seem to conspire to make the same mistakes as each other and the same mistakes time and again.
Somehow, my love of language survives. During my desperately short breaks from work and family, I play on Duolingo. I scribble passages for stories in the little notebook that fits in the palm of my hand. I look up poetry on my phone’s browser. A recent poetry project was to dive into Pope’s Iliad. I didn’t have the time to get far, but the poem is an inspiring enterprise. The story is timeless. The language is gorgeous. The old trope likening language to architecture is just right. The poem is Hawksmoor or Wren. Better.
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Travelogue 1047 – June 26
A Drizzle of Job
It’s been a bit Book of Job around the house, with ill health and ill fortune falling like a steady rain. Well, let’s call it a drizzle, and admit that ‘Book of Job’ is hyperbolic. But we’ve been tested.
One of our trials was the chicken pox. The pox took one girl down, and then, in a proud show of force, waited until the first girl was just healed to take down the other one. So this ordeal went on for a full month, and for a full month one of the girls was home while her parents tried to focus on their work.
Chicken pox in memory and in the public imagination is something almost adorable, a gentle children’s rite of passage, during which they get pimply and itchy, during which they stay home and watch TV in their pyjamas. The reality is more like a horror show. Little Ren had pox in her mouth and throat. She had pox in her nose and under her eyelid. Baby Jos had pox under her skin and on the bottoms of her feet. They were crying in pain during the worst of it and couldn’t sleep. Their parents were in shock. This parent was never very good around illness. Now he was monitoring pox that were leaking pus and pulling back eyelids to check his girl’s red, leaky eyes.
All things must pass, and these do. They have scars, but those will pass. We sink into the couch, and we stare vacantly at the TV screen, while bodies slowly heal.