Travelogue 598 – January 22
Esprit

I’m running in the fog. It masks my path. It masks the river. It designs little mysteries from the stuff of everyday life. Things will emerge in a day or two, wearing the aspect of the normal again.

My joints vaguely ache. I should have worn more gear, something over my legs. But the ache is something for me of Europe. I take it into the body, with the damp air of the mornings. It tells me I’m here, tells me also I’m older. I’m ageing, and this is the place for these years, gliding among sea salt skies, the continent named not for the charging bull, but for the submissive cow.

This is the grim timelessness I’ve inherited in returning to European winter. Europe endures, somewhat like the blinded will in a fog, pushing time aside in its tortoise progress through the mud of continuity. There is even in the perishing of things a continuity. I think I have found it here. There are marshes still here, in this land of drained marshes. The sea gulls find it, and they fight over it, winging crazy circles around each other.

Since returning from Africa, I’ve been revisiting the sites of my European hometown. I’m writing a report on projects in Ethiopia, sitting at a table at the Hopper Café, when ‘Purple Rain’ starts to play, the measured sad strains of it, sweaty little ballad made of Minneapolis in the 1980s. I’ve been reading academic anthropology, about identities of mobility, the slippery notion of community in the post-modern era. I’ve also been reading biographies.

There was a boy once who was captured in the woods while duck hunting. His captors kept him, raised him, and taught them their language and their ways. He eventually broke free again, rejoined his people, forged a new identity among the frontiers. He was an adventurer. He was a trader. He entered villages with his hands raised in the air, and he spoke their languages. He hunted in forests far and wide. Young Pierre-Esprit explored, and he collected furs.

This boy is acknowledged to one of the first white men to set foot in Minnesota. His family name is Radisson. In the 1660s, Radisson with his brother-in-law did much of the early exploration of the Hudson Bay, collecting boat loads of fine furs, and laying the foundations for the Hudson’s Bay Company, established in 1670. The French and English were tussling then over the expanses of land and resources in North America, and Radisson played one side against the other and switched, as best suited him, but he had the wisdom to approach the Brits about business matters. Eventually, trading days over, he ended up in London on a pension.

It was the heirs to the British Empire in North America who established a luxury hotel in Minneapolis in 1909 and named it the Radisson. The boy was nearly forgotten, but his name and memory fit the branding well. The name has now arrived in many cities around the world, raising flags and speaking all languages.

In 2015, I am one weary traveler loitering on the grounds of one Radisson, not to stay, but only for nourishment and for wifi. This is the Radisson Blu in Addis Ababa. This is Kasanchis, a grubby section of the capital, just down the hill from the prime minister’s palace, where the old Hilton set a standard for fine hotels in the day.

While I savour a real espresso, I’m reviewing days spent in the south, where coffee is a heady and gritty elixir, brewed in clay and delivered into any old cup of plastic or glass at hand. It is delicious and powerful, but I am comforted by the dainty little espresso.

We have traveled to far Kembata-Tembaro, where we entered the villages with our hands held high … while children clamoured around us, showering us with shouts and smiles. We wade through them toward the school buildings. The teachers are wearing the white lab coats, as is the fashion among teachers here. They lead us inside the library, under high ceilings of corrugated iron laid on beams of slender eucalyptus, and we are treated to local avocados and bananas, and to some amazing honey collected from village hives.

We are working in this village because one of its own children now lives thousands of miles away in America, being taught our language and our strange ways.

Other children remain, all along this road forever under construction. They shout at us from the side of the road as we make our way back, along the long road laid covered in deep layers of fine dust. They shout at us, and then they pull their shirts up over their noses as the dust overtakes them.

It’s a place of accidents, this world.

‘Being persuaded in the morning by two of my comrades to go and recreat ourselves in fowling, I disposed myselfe to keepe them Company,’ writes the boy from Trois-Rivières, writes the man years later, after the twist of fate – twist that left his two companions dead – has written a story for him. ‘… Wherfor I cloathed myselfe the lightest way I could possible, that I might be the nimbler and not stay behind ….’

Travelogue 597 – January 21
Impenetrable

Where does the fog come from? It might rise from the river. It might rise from the sea. I can indulge in idle thoughts. The fog has robbed me of time. It has rolled in for a long stay. It stays for days. It’s a cold fog. My fingertips burn in a mild but icy wind.

I’m taking a run along the river. The fog hides the other side of the river. It hides most of the river itself. What is left is the one river bank at my side, and the spirals of squealing gulls and terns above, challenging the heights of the cold lamp poles and the heights of the fog itself.

My thoughts spiral like the birds, among my travels and my readings. My readings have led me through the ravages of the French Revolution, through the ravages of jihadist emotion. They lead finally to eternity, like all worldly struggles do.

Fog soaks up the light, and it soaks up time. To say that the fog prompts thoughts of eternity is to be lazy. Eternity is not the same as timelessness. What fog erases does not constitute a positive space, a place where time frolics unbounded.

Even as I move, the fog robs me of the sense of movement. There is no measure as I throw step forward after step. Here shadows are cast by everything and nothing. There is barely light to call the day, nor shadow to call the night.

In days of fog, a part of me remains in sunlight. A couple weeks ago I was in Tunto, in the Kembata-Tembaro region of Ethiopia. My colleagues and I are crowding together in the busy cafe, our knees set round the circular table. The café door and window of the café open directly onto the expanse of dust that separates this set of ramshackle buildings from the road. This is the same road that has tortured us for several days already as we, with only good intentions, have returned to school sites that cleave to this tenuous ribbon of transport, the road that is barely a road. It is a road because the land is cleared along a long, meandering line threading villages and hills, because cars do travel it, but any definition beyond that must be tentative, must be forgiving. No surface prevails, no standard of smoothness. There’s a child standing at the peak of the bank above the road, staring. She is waiting for the cloud of chalky dust from our passage to overtake her. Then she disappears into the trees behind her.

A girl comes to pour us all coffee. She first brings the little cups. She shakes them like shallow porcelain bells, spraying the water in which they were soaked, setting them on the table. She offers sugar, broken clumps of it from a battered little aluminum can, collected in a small tin spoon. Next she brings the jebena, the traditional clay pot. Coffee slops onto the table. She makes a point of pouring to the brim for everyone.

The place is crowded. The crowds are staring. Gruff old men encircling the next table cast long, assessing glances our way. Boys stop by the window, lean into the frame and watch us, with a keen and unselfconscious interest. They inspect my face and my hair and my clothes at length. I’ve been coming to Ethiopia for years; it doesn’t bother me. I’m focusing on Yonas, an enterprising young local, who might serve as a guide for the moment among the capricious ways of Kembata-Tembaro, green hills harboring peoples, at densities high relative to other regions where we work, open grasslands, villages sparse. We would like to know about the schools in the district, from someone outside the system, someone raised and educated here, someone who cares.

We lapse into silence. It’s a comfortable one. We sip our coffee. The café crowds look, and I look back. There’s no challenge. I’m just a visitor. I don’t give; I don’t take. The measured chaos of the town carries on outside the walls, across the town square made of dust. The horse comes to rest, and the family climbs out of the two-wheeled cart. They pay the driver. The horse is sweating, shaking off the flies. It has so little flesh on its bones, and scabs from the work of the whip.

As we prepare to go, we realize Yonas has paid for the coffees without any of us knowing. We are guests.

Travelogue 596 – January 8
Feel the Noise

I don’t like noise. I’m one of those untouchable solitaries who haunt cafes and want no contact. I need people around, but not too close. We’re a miserable lot, who really should give up coffee.

That confession on record, I can say that I understand that noise is necessary. More, it’s desirable. It’s the sensory correlate to happy chance.

Is chance happy? Matter is a product of chance. So says the modern. From the chaotic clouds of rebounding particles and atoms to the accidents of evolution, the material world is a product of chance. Society mimics nature, and we all suffer and prosper by chance collision.

Are we happy for chance? There is that in human nature that abhors the noise of it. There is that that sets the mind to working out how to minimize or abolish it.

Of course I’m speaking about Paris. It seems as though some people can stand no dissonance. The world is their café, and the rest of us shall keep the chatter down. Or else.

As I’ve mentioned in this blog, I’ve been reading about the French Revolution. First it was Mantel. Now it’s Thomas Carlyle, oversized author, often annoying author, whose Voice must resound even above the clamour of one of History’s noisiest events. And yet, his style does fit, the Revolution as much a rhetorical achievement as a physical one, an accomplishment of writers every bit as sensationalist as Carlyle himself, (who was writing, it must be said, only twenty years after Waterloo). I speak of the pamphleteers, direct antecedents of the hard-working satirists at Charlie Hebdo.

‘Freedom of the press’ became a rallying cry back then. Practically overnight, there were hundreds of little bulletins and pamphlets being circulated, with vivid cartoons drawn of the fat king -- the ‘baker’ they liked to call him, -- and of his wife, accused of every sort of vice and crime. She’s portrayed kissing one of many lovers. She’s portrayed reaching for a giant male member rearing on horse’s legs. The people consume these publications. They rush to the streets to protect the authors, men like Marat and Desmoulins. They elect them to one or the other of the pinwheeling representative assemblies of the early days of the Revolution.

Days before I’ve heard of Charlie, I’m indulging in some of my own reading from favorite magazines. It’s Ethiopian Christmas. I have some down time. I can sit in the sun and read through the latest Harper’s. There’s an article there by Sam Frank about the occult musings among super-geniuses in Silicon Valley, the Bayesian extropists, extreme believers in the power of mind, to overcome psychology, corruption and poverty, ageing, and even the biological anomaly we call death. It’s an odd little lab for tyranny, somewhat reminiscent of the Jacobin club in the early days of the Revolution, where debate among the best and brightest of the patriots could only lead to finest solutions. Of course, everything is reminding me of the French Revolution right now.

There’s a vicious sort of self-selection at work among geniuses who would serve the world, whether it’s Allah’s geniuses or Rousseau’s or Stanford’s. How exhilarating it must be to discover that everyone in the room (those who have survived the mental shake-down at the door,) all have the same vocabulary and have stumbled upon the same solutions to the world’s ills! It must be providence! Shut out the noise. When we have the strength, we will issue forth from this room. We will eradicate the noise. Our solutions will prevail, and the thousand-year reign of paradise can begin.

Oh, well. I’m no genius. There’s little I can do to avert the next invasion of bright-eyed problem-solvers. (Has anyone studied the influence of coffee on the French Revolution? Coffee houses were all the rage among the political and culture classes of Europe in the eighteenth century. And I’ve seen firsthand the manic pace of caffeine consumption in the Middle East.)

As much as I complain about it, I will miss the noise. It’s distracting, but it is the language of celebration and exultation. It’s the true sound of pain and protest. It is song. It is the language of things spontaneous. Of course we will all be happy under the rule of the geniuses, every move planned by the smartest and the best. But I might just miss the whoop on a Saturday night from the mouths of dumb kids, the outburst of uncouth laughter, the whistle of the girl so happy she hasn’t noticed I’m reading.

Travelogue 595 – January 6
Bugs on Parade

Back in Addis, the Parade of the Bugs has begun. It’s the day before Ethiopian Christmas. Families are preparing for the feast. Bug means sheep in Amharic. Anywhere there’s a bit of open dirt roadside, the shepherds have set up shop. Families stroll among the meager herds, and they haggle. Young men follow their matriarchs home, each holding up one side, one holding horns, one holding hooves, while the big ram squirms against the ropes binding him.

We have made it back to Addis safe and sound, even if exhausted, even if a few of us are still coughing up the white powder of the roads of Kembata-Tembaro. (Driving through a moon-dust landscape, where the powder has coated everything near the road. Children standing at the top of the bank of the channel of the road, arms and cheeks white with dust, staring down at us as we pass, even as we raise clouds of the noxious powder.)

We hit the asphalt road early in the morning, heading north again. We have been bunking in Hosanna, nondescript capital of the Hadiya region. We take to the highway again, the highway being a slim and dilapidated ribbon of asphalt winding around its north-south meridian, connecting Addis to Ethiopia’s southern regions, only one of two main arteries doing so. When we stop in Butajira for lunch, Ijigu goes out to buy sugar cane and a pumpkin for his family.

The rest of us indulge in ‘fool’ for breakfast. That’s a treat. I remember when Leeza’s mom used to make it for us. It’s one of the few Ethiopian dishes with beans. In this case, beans and eggs. We sit outside at a small, bustling roadside café that the driver has recommended. We sit in the usual formation, me in the sun and everyone else, as many as can manage it, in the shade.

The weather has been getting heavier. When I first arrived in Ethiopia the skies were bright and clear. But a haze has been gathering day by day. Horizons fade into the murk of it. A few high clouds drift slowly along, far away. The afternoons are sweltering.

We’re home in Addis. We’ve returned to the office. It’s going to be a busy day. There will be two days off for Christmas, and then I only have Friday with staff before I fly home. I set up on the third floor, in the conference room, a room too cold in the morning and too hot in the afternoon, when the sun beats on the windows. There is a sliding glass door opening onto a narrow balcony. I stand there in idle moments, soaking up the sun, taking in the view over the neighborhood and beyond, to the hills around Arat Kilo.

On the bottom floor of the office compound is the Gebeta library for children. There are plenty of children there in the afternoon. Semhal, our in-house librarian, has arranged a Christmas party. She has set up a small Christmas tree, and underneath it are empty boxes, wrapped colorfully. The children are laughing uproariously. Jessica from Madison is leading them in a game. ‘Run, run, run, four!’ she chants, and the children have to grab each other in groups of four. Whoever is without a group is out. ‘Run, run, run, two!’

The day wheels by quickly in a succession of meetings. When it’s done, I head home to rest. I want nothing more than sleep. Opening the gate to our compound, I see the landlord family has secured its bug. It is tied up in the courtyard, and it bleats mournfully. The dogs in their guard post cages growl at him. It’s no way to spend one’s final hours, but there’s nothing I can do. I know its fate in the morning when the knives come out. Merry Christmas, little guy.

Travelogue 594 – January 4
Powder

We’re traveling in the south. It’s my fifth sunny day in a row, dazzling to someone who has been living in the Netherlands. We are driving west into Kambata. The road changes from asphalt to dirt to a substance in between, a rocky amalgam of earth and macadam. A road all the way to Jima is being cut into and across the hilly landscape. The road has been under construction as long as I have been traveling here. We rarely see road workers. We encounter lonely signs saying ‘Men Working,’ and we take pictures of them.

We go further and whole sections of the road are surrendered to dust. Passing buses raise it sky high. When we pass them, we drive blind into a cloud of it. My throat is burning. I hold a scarf over my nose, but still I’m blowing it so often there are spots of blood.

We pass through Mudula, a town built on hills, a town of mud roads and mud walls, set among country that is a southern Ethiopian shade of green, rich but not the heavy color of jungle, leavened by the yellows of the highlands. The blue skies are still bright and crisp with morning.

We have left the new road now, to travel downhill along a road just wider than our vehicle. We are looking for our teacher. His name is Ananu. He is a local we have hired to facilitate our rural literacy program hereabouts. We are stopping people along the road and asking, ‘Have you seen Ananu?’ ‘Have you seen a guy on a horse?’ The mobile network isn’t working here.

We ask an old man leading a donkey. A young man on his motorcycle stops. Some boys emerge from the trees lining the road, from among the hits and small plots of farmland we see through the leaves. There’s an old man with a naked infant on his hip. There are girls giggling at us. The boys peer into the car windows to stare at me. They whisper to each other, and they laugh.

Someone says Deresho. Look in Deresho. Where is that? It’s a village back up the road the way we came. The driver executes a laborious U-turn in the narrow road, and we’re driving again. We turn onto a smaller road, and we don’t go far before we arrive at the local schoolhouse, two mud and stick rooms alone in a small grassy field grass. We meet the teacher, young and shy, and we peek into the rooms, dark and empty. There is a warped blackboard on the wall, and a few long boards close to the ground for seats. They can accommodate only a fraction of the students. Fifty have to cram into each room.

Nearby is a clearing where the hundred or so young students have gathered to hear stories read by Mr. Ananu. Some elders have gathered, too, sitting in a row of chairs to one side. He has a book of children’s stories in Amharic. He has to translate as he reads into Tembarigna. The children are quiet, transfixed, by the story, by the occasion, by the strange-looking faranj.

I feel as though I’m being a distraction, so I take a walk. I find a small track through the trees, and I stroll slowly in the strong sunshine, by rough patches of ploughed earth, by huts. I am stopped by the decorations on one hut. It is the typical round hut with peaked thatched roof. Some of the huts around here are partially covered with smoothed mud and plaster, painted with designs and pictures. This one has two pictures outlined on either side of its doorway. One depicts a common theme, the roaring lion conquering the hyena, heavy paw on the creature’s head. It’s the other side that is surprising, dissonant: two men sitting in chairs, one with a guitar and the other with a keyboard. One wears little square glasses.

A little girl in rags comes up the path. She stands beside me and smiles. She whispers in reply to my greeting, in accented Amharic. When I pose a question, she answers the same way she did before. She just knows these few words in Amharic. We turn and walk together back toward the clearing.

Travelogue 593 – December 31
And Then, Santa Again, No Snow

And suddenly I’m awaking in Ethiopia. At the Romina Café in Arat Kilo, they are just putting up their Christmas decorations. Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas is the 7th of January. The decorations are strictly European or American in nature, Santa Claus and red felt. There’s a Christmas tree with lights.

I’m jealous of the bits of sunshine that grace this early morning, the first light of day. I’m sitting in the patio outdoors, despite the chill, despite the shadows throw by the trees surrounding the café. The sun is just rising high enough to project warmth, and I’m greedily soaking it in. There are a few spots of it playing in my shoulders.

The street is already roaring with life. Buses and taxis are idling in traffic, spitting out copious plumes of exhaust. People are forming long lines for taxi service, even as they watch the traffic inching forward at half the pace of the pedestrians. Just outside the café patio, the shoeshine boys and the newspaper boys and the parking attendants are goofing around, yelling at each other and dodging cars as the drivers try to maneuver around the narrow parking lot.

There are a few baristas who have been here years. It’s great to see their smile when they see me. ‘Tafah anta,’ they say. ‘you’ve disappeared.’ Yes, Europe has kidnapped me, (or maybe that’s the other way around,) and I haven’t seen much of Ethiopia in the year that’s now passing. I say the addis amat, the new year, will be different. The sun is getting warmer. My face and neck will be bright pink with exposure to the sun by the end of the day. I’m planning on it.

Yesterday, we sat on the tarmac for two hours. The snow was still coming down in Frankfurt. Temperatures were solidly below zero Celsius. We watched from the plane windows as they de-iced the wings. We watched the pink fluids flow down over the windows as they de-iced the roof. Then they seemed to start over. The short and cold and dim German day, the second to the last day of 2014, was spending itself outside, and we remained quiet in our tight little seats.

‘Oh, I forgot,’ says one of the baristas, one of the old-timers, ‘It’s your New Year!’ Yes, I say, it is. ‘Have a good time,’ she says. I will, I will, thank you. The heat is building across my shoulders. Thank you!

Travelogue 592 – December 27
White After Christmas

The day after Christmas is still Christmas in Holland. There’s a first day and there’s a second day. On the second day of Christmas, you might find some places open. Like the Coffee Company at Eendrachtsplein.

It’s one of those holidays within a holiday, half working, half holidaying. There is no Christmas this week in Ethiopia, so they are at their desks in the office. I’m calling on Christmas morning, conducting real work before the family duties of the holiday begin, which duties are supremely challenging: like, eating and accomplishing nothing. The time is made all the more rare and precious by our pregnancy and by the delicate pause between trips. I will be leaving for Ethiopia again in a few days, missing a few more weeks of the rarest of interludes, hidden baby coming, wife glowing, those sorts of things.

On the second day of Christmas, the barista at Eendrachtsplein is singing. He is dreaming of a white Christmas. I ask him and his colleague whether they are sad that there is no white to speak of, and there hasn’t been in a few years. It has been a common theme of conversation in winter in Holland: ‘There used to be snow and ice.’ They debate. It might be four years since there really was a white Christmas in Rotterdam.

It is cold enough for snow. Menna’s fingertips are burning. She’s not used to that sensation. We boldly chose to cycle into town today. It’s exercise; it’s getting out of the house. But there is a price to pay. I’m wearing my cycling gloves, which only go to the first knuckle. They’re the only gloves I have. Menna is suffering. She runs inside while I lock the bikes.

The baristas are dreaming of a white Christmas.

And then, just the next day, we wake up to snow falling. Menna screams. It’s her first snow. We dress as quickly as we can, and we dash outside. It’s a wet snow, clinging to roofs and tree branches and bicycle frames. It’s crunchy underfoot. We have to touch it. We have to make snowballs, and we have to make explode against each other’s jackets. We have to run to the river, and we have to take pictures.

I decide to cycle into town, having learned nothing from yesterday’s ride. I’m wearing the same gloves, and this time it’s worse. I’m really in pain. I’m riding slowly, sliding through the ridges of snow, splashing through the slop. I have no boots; my shoes are soaked after five minutes. Not only my shoes, but my pant legs a good six inches up.

I arrive, and my fingers are past burning. I have to get them back to burning again, holding thumb and finger tips against the espresso glass. They throb with dull pain. I’ve come here to work, but my fingers hurt too much to type for a while. The baristas are no longer singing about a white Christmas. I’m expecting them to be ecstatic about the snow, but they seem unsettled. Maybe they had to cycle in, too.

I watch the morning unfold, while my clothes dry out and my digits regain feeling. I watch the people rush in, smiling, buoyed by the change, exhilarated. They have found something that was missing. They are cold, and they are complete. I calculate the pain I will endure on the way home.

Travelogue 591 – December 6
Northern Solace
Part Four

Necropolis is just the right term for the Cimetière de Montmartre. It’s a city of the dead, wide paved lanes leading among the rows of sepulchers, small alleyways and paths linking one to another, creating little enclaves like quiet neighborhoods. The streets borrow their names from the more famous among the buried.

I pass some of the famous as I explore. I see the poet Heine, the composer Berlioz, the novelist Zola, and the novelist Stendhal. I find the final resting place of one Monsieur Sanson, professional executioner before and during the Revolution, the man who beheaded the king, the man who put over three thousand souls into their graves. His own grave is surprisingly humble and bourgeois. Citizen Sanson might be a shop-owner. Zola’s is marked by an extravagant bronze, imagining for us a leonine visage. It’s clearly a choice that was made well after Emile himself would have had any input.

Nearby, an oversized mask of Jesus sheds tears of stone. And I think of Saint Job again. Wouldn’t his tears be more appropriate? More convincing? I’m thinking that Jesus the Saviour doesn’t have much cause to shed a tear at the death of one Parisian. Shouldn’t he be the one Biblical hero with a smile of reassurance, with even a wink of conspiracy, symbol of all God’s best intentions?

I circle the grounds one more time. I take pictures. I see a few more tourists arriving to join us this morning. They are taking pictures. Everyone is quiet, especially the ones underneath the ground. No one bothers posing. It’s a weekend. Its morning. Most of us are dead. I am not, and I have a train to catch. I leave the new tourists to it, and I pass under the deep shadow of the Rue Caulaincourt on my way out.

I exercise the muscles of legs still oxygenated by a beating heart. I pass again the office of the complacent headstone salesman on the Avenue Rachel, into the cacophony of the city that has forgotten the terrors of Monsieur Sanson’s day. It’s a calm morning; I have no expectation of being beheaded.

We don’t draw pictures of Job. We tell stories about him, and make each other shudder with dread.

I’m reading Hilary Mantel again. The spirits housed in the cemetery, and under the cemetery, might thank her. Given a day to re-order their estates and memories, they might prefer a contract with Ms. Mantel over one with the man on the Avenue Rachel. Ms. Mantel restores something to them. She rescues historical fiction from the vampires and the purveyors of romance and porn.

And yet I wonder if the story doesn’t tell itself. The history is incredible in its nature. Imagining that people lived through it, even made it happen, challenges belief, even as the stories are durable as stone, made to be mythologized. One can imagine how, in a time before writing, these characters would become demi-gods and demons.

I might have wished for an account of my father, Job, wishing for him the voice of M. Danton, who speaks with the truth of tension, about startling events in startling times. (Is every age a wonder?)

The soldiers patrol the Rue de Cordeliers. They point out the house of M. Danton. They eye it with emotion, some with dread, some with admiration. Only two years have passed since the fall of the Bastille, and still it seems as though the fundament of heaven and earth – of Paris – have been disfigured. The time before is hard to recall. It was a dream. The future is dark. Some more of us must die.

The trains are running. The Gare du Nord is the lurid and shattered scene it usually is, people turning as though figures in a broken dance. They check the screens; they run. With the right ignition, they might just scream. They might topple columns and kings. They might loot the pastry stall.

But the crowds part, and I board my train. I cross the frontier without incident.

Travelogue 590 – December 5
Northern Solace
Part Three

The French have left their mark. The capital of Minnesota bears the lasting stamp of the Franks. City fathers were moved to name the outpost after their French solace. In Minnesota, land of desperate winters, solace can mean a lot. And who in the world could ever resist the kind of solace that the French prepare?

Perhaps with genuine gratitude, perhaps with a species of grim humor that months of snow will nurture, the first citizens of the capital wanted to name the city after the local purveyor of whiskey, one Pierre Parrant. The former fur trader had a popular tavern, and he had a bad reputation with local officials, and he did have a catchy nickname, ‘Pig’s Eye’.

One Father Lucien Galtier had other ideas. He provided another variety of French solace in the chapel of Saint Paul. Once the territory of Minnesota had an opportunity to join the Union, (just a few years before the Union was destined to be torn asunder,) and once the site of the capital had been settled upon the young riverside town – a matter decided according to the highest model of rational deliberation, meaning, the physical theft of the draft of a law to situate the capital in nearby Saint Peter, -- the city elders grudgingly acknowledged that the example of the good father might be more appropriate than that of the moonshiner. Saint Paul, it would be, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

So the French left their mark … and left, abandoning the city to the next generation of Catholics, the harder-working Irish. Poor old Pig’s Eye Parrant was forced out of the city, and no one is quite sure where he ended up after that. All possible trails point north. The old French fur trader turned back toward the snows, and lies now in some unmarked spot, perhaps to be discovered under a parking lot like poor King Richard was recently, squeezed into an ill-fitting box, his whiskey-soaked genetic material sampled in order to be strained through some high-science blender and identified as the reprobate founder of the city of Saint Paul.

The temperatures in Paris are more reasonable, the damp more familiar. I’m on my way home to Rotterdam, but stalled by a rail strike in neighboring Belgium. I am staying in a hotel of the Place de Clichy in northern Paris. Just a few short blocks away is the Cimetière de Montmartre.

I pay my respects in the morning, before I have to make my way to the Gare du Nord. The Belgian strike is carried out only one day per week, a show of order and deference that I plan to repay with a tip to the first conductor I see.

To visit the cemetery, one has to walk down the Avenue Rachel, resisting the temptation to follow the larger Rue Caulaincourt. The latter rue rises on steel girders to pass over the cemetery on its way to the butte Montmartre. From the Rue Caulaincourt, one surveys the vast cemetery from above, an opportunity for the harried commuter crossing from one arrondissement to another for healthy perspective, surveying the rows of sepulchres.

On the Avenue Rachel, one passes the storefront of the man who engraves headstones. You see the man already at his station, sitting at his desk with a complacent smile, a chubby man with small round eyeglasses, waiting for business, checking his smartphone.

Through the gate, one passes under the shadow of the bridge, and into the extremities of that strange contrast; seeing overhead the rush of daily life, those with hearts still pumping hastening with eyes set forward, issuing the hum and clamour of unrepentant life.

Inside the cemetery, there is repentance and there is introspection. One finds leisure to wonder about the lives of all who have ended up here, the thousands buried here since the foundation of the cemetery in the mid-nineteenth century, on the site of a gypsum quarry. It was a site already associated with the dead, being site to mass graves during the Revolution.

It is quiet. The family vaults crowd together among the paved lanes, seeming to jostle for position. Some rise high with grandeur and high-minded design. Some hold back in humility. Some names stand in vivid relief, some are already faded into obscurity. And still, among the strident cries for attention, all is terrifically still.

One strolls in reflection. And one thinks of the complacent man selling grave stones. How did he sell this one, the full-scale copy of the Thinker? How did he sell this statue, looking like an Indian scout with a hand up shading his eyes? The older monuments trade on traditional motifs, safely neo-classical or Gothic. But who sold the widow this garish face of Christ with tears in his eyes? These are some of the recent gravesites. With all the resources of the belated, we unfortunate have ample opportunity to make the worst choices. And which shall we repent more, bad behavior or bad taste? When memory of our lives fades, the memorial remains.

Or doesn’t. Once upon a time, there was a rude cross, branches hacked with a bowie knife and tied together with a stretch of leather thong. There was no need for a plaque. The woods being the only witness, there was no need to memorialize. The birds would know this as the resting place of one Pig’s Eye Parrant, French founder of the American state capital … and distiller of some fine whiskey.

Travelogue 589 – December 4
Northern Solace
Part Two

The weather has moderated somewhat. On the day that I disembarked from the aeroplane, temperatures in Minnesota were topping out at zero Fahrenheit, which I have discovered is equivalent to minus eighteen Centigrade. Minnesota temperatures don’t scare me anymore, but that does not mean I’m immune. They don’t serve to shock, but still they hurt. I’ve lost some tolerance. And, moreover, I’ve lost some of my heavy-duty winter gear during the years in milder climes.

I’m thinking again, the French came here for the margin on a few furs. Really? That is cold ambition. Advancing the line of a frontier into the extremes, chasing little animals for their carcasses. Did they wonder how far the temperatures could and would fall? In an uncharted world, wouldn’t there by reason be uncharted pain? I guess you can only freeze once. It hardly matters the exact value of the temperature that got you, unless rugged Catholic explorers might feel entitled to final bragging rights beyond the grave.

Me, I’ll defer that case of frostbite for another day. I dash into the bookstore. I have escaped the snow. I have escaped the distracting sting among the digits. But there’s still a draft to remind me to keep the coat on. I contemplate the brittle layers of masonry protecting us from the weather, the flimsy insulation, the box around our ears that represents the frightening, the decisive ratio, freezing space outside to sheltered space inside.

Winter anxiety. Perhaps it’s the mind that freezes first. Escaping the snow I find easier than escaping the thought of snow. It’s the mind that needs solace in winter. I’m in the right place, among rows of plentiful books. Protected, distracted, there is no threat from the wild atmosphere.

Would the French explorer sneer at our luxury? Would he stand in the bookstore and stamp his feet and shout? Would he challenge us from within his furs? Would distrust the warmth, thinking it would sap him of his best hopes for the afterlife? Or would he smile and shake off the snow, browse the French language shelves and look for an easy chair?

Would he tell stories? Would he recount the meeting with Ojibwa scouts at the river crossing? Would he detail the complex negotiations at the villages? Were there bandits? Was there combat? Could he paint the picture of the moonlit woods on the coldest night, or paint his terror of the wolves? Would he tell us about the long passage across the ocean? Will he go back some day? Is he buried here? Would the explorer have known the way to French heaven from the skies above the Mississippi?

What unsigned graves are there in the ample lands of the Upper Midwest? Might we be standing on one or two here in the Mager’s and Quinn? Am I browsing the grave sites even as I browse the shelves above earth?

Shall I browse the graves? Once back in Paris shall I browse the graves of the explorer’s compatriots, the safe ones, the ones who never left home and hearth, those who did nothing more adventurous than write essays or take up music, code high symphonies.

Travelogue 588 – December 3
Northern Solace
Part One

I was in Minneapolis last week. It was a short trip. I was there only for one week. It was a work trip, and so I was confined for most of my days to the neighborhood of the office, in Uptown. The office is located at the west end of Lake Street.

Lake Calhoun looks to be nearly frozen over. The sun is suspended inside its tight and very low arc over the southern shore of the lake. Snow has blown over the surface of the lake in uneven patches. It is a desolate bit of space, so appealing to me in its emptiness. I’m driving west, where Lake Street curves around the northern shore of the lake, where the street gets bottleneck busy with traffic heading out of Minneapolis and toward the suburbs,

When I leave the office and I want to walk, I walk toward Lake and Hennepin. That intersection is the heart of historic Uptown, a neighborhood so resilient and so stubborn in its identity. I have seen it through a number of phases in almost thirty years. It was renewing itself when I discovered it. It is renewing itself now. The place feels old to me, but must feel new to young residents. That’s a feature of identity the place will not relinquish, no matter how stale perpetual youth may become, no matter how rising property values dress the youth in brands ever more exclusive.

For me, the intersection has one enduring feature in Calhoun Square, the mall built on the busy corner just a few years before I first moved to Minneapolis. It’s rather bland and blandly ahistorical in its appearance, even though built around a few salvaged older buildings. The project was opposed in proposal phases and later while being built, as being an offensive incursion of suburban style into the aspiring urban neighborhood, an area known for its youth and arts cultures. But it did get built, and still it stands.

I’m surprised to see that now Calhoun Square hosts H&M, a chain I’ve become accustomed to in the Netherlands. In Rotterdam, one may just be lucky enough to find multiple H&M outlets on a single block. Now here it is in high-rent Uptown, across from the Apple store. I stand and regard its familiar branding, standing on Hennepin Avenue while a light snow falls. Certainly the old mall has experienced its share of tenant turnover, as it has of facelifts, but somehow I’d become accustomed to thinking that nothing European ever came this way. I take a stroll through the store, and I find racks of familiar styles. They haven’t bothered to Americanize anything, if there is really such a process anymore.

I’m more interested, ultimately, in crossing the street and walking a few storefronts down to the old Mager’s and Quinn, a shop that opened on Hennepin across form the mall some years after I made my own first appearance in the city, and which became a regular hangout. I can certainly recommend this as a stop for any book lovers visiting the Twin Cities, a kind of chapel to an old cult of the independent sellers.

Travelogue 587 – November 30
One Stick

It’s a funny little bend in the road. The road winds down the hill like a lazy stream, arranging meetings with its cobblestone tributaries at small plateaus like this one, where the ways conjoin at a curve, washing around a sharp point of pavement, on which stands a narrow building that houses a restaurant That narrow promontory surrounded by cobblestones plays host to a small patio under an awning and sided by plastic sheeting. Tables with ashtrays stand protected by the awning and plastic. Outside, on the last bit of kerb, a few more tables stand exposed to the elements. Crossing the small street there, one crosses into a small plaza occupying the curving space near the gate into the hillside park. This plaza is sided by three other restaurants.

She sits at one table with two friends. Everything she wears, except her tall boots, is purple. She has one cigarette, and she has one mobile, both held high, She wraps up one conversation, singing, ‘Merci, merci, ciao bella, au revoir.’ After that she has one hand free, which she returns to her fruit tart. Her attention she returns to her friends. The man with the long and well-tended beard is talking now. He is leaning forward, shoulders bunched. He has one cigarette, which he holds low, as though holding the collar of his dog. He is laughing without laughing, and that could be what he is doing all day.

Along the left side of the restaurant, the road drops quickly down to busier avenues. I have climbed up that same hill, and I needed a pause. My body is aching. Last night, I felt the advance of some infection, and today, a day of travel, my muscles are sore. I have to slow it all down. I have to rest.

I won’t enter into the park until I’ve taken my rest among the ashtrays, no matter how much I want to make of the last light of the short day. The sun casts intriguing, dappling shadows, its light becoming entangled in the leaves of the trees in the park.

I’ve been reading Foucault, preparing for post-graduate research, and I feel both smug and embarrassed opening to the words of the great French philosopher while sitting on the train to Paris. I’m flying out of Charles de Gaulle tomorrow, flying toward Minnesota. But I get my few hours to enjoy French genius on French soil. In one hand, he holds an argument like one ball of yarn that unravels under the influence of gravity and, falling, tells a spiraling story about power.

I get one evening to stroll around Montmartre. The gate into the park leads to another steep incline, a paved walking path that switches back up the parks’ hill, and on this last spur deposits the pedestrian at the foot of the steps below the white-domed church on the hilltop, the hilltop where cannons were seized by the hungry and rebellious mob. That was half a century before Foucault was born.

The boy in sweats hangs by one hand by the struts of a street lamp. With his one free hand, he holds aloft a spinning basketball. The ball doesn’t spin on a finger, but on one small stick that he holds straight while turning his body around line of torque defined by his hold on the pole. He has the muscle to swing his legs around, in a slow break dance in the sky, while he keeps the ball aloft. The sun is setting now, but there are many people passing. There are still people to hold their phones up in tribute.

Travelogue 586 – November 15
Sint Job
Part Three

I’ve been running this route for a long time. I remember discovering this little pier that opens onto the River Maas. I remember the appeal of the open water. It offers some space, some forgetfulness. Again I reflect on the perpetually renewing nature of free water. Does free thought, free spirit, renew just so? Doesn’t the cage drown the song?

I have chosen this place. As my father chose L.A., choosing to live on with the choice, years afterward, with the suffocation of his job, with the suffocation of the polluted airs of the L.A. Basin, as his blood continued to pulse even as he drove down the grey highway day after day, highways built to defeat aesthetics, as though aesthetics were the enemy of productivity, despite the assault of doubt on happiness, he stood by his choice; in this way I must show the courage of my volition, even as the mists gather, the mists that somehow absorb the ghostly impressions of all reflection, condensation of soul and psyche, even as they sow in their very grey damps the seeds of melancholia, reaping the harvests as well, bearing them on as grafts onto water made light enough to drift above the sand. I live with my choices.

The promenade along this side of the pier is paved with small, square flagstones, about four inches per side, made of grey composite. I enjoy my two minutes on this straightaway, a couple hundred peaceful meters from end to end. It’s an opportunity to surrender to steadiness, steady footfalls, steady breathing. I monitor the matrix of waves in the water to my left. I watch the tiles under my feet. They were uniformly manufactured, but the place has marked them with identity, weathered and stained them, so that they tell stories. Something has soaked them, maybe water, maybe oil, so that dark areas trail across the surface in rivers and islands. Some areas are dry and bleached. The same stones, laid some time not long ago, each changed, diverging since the first day they were set in mortar.

In exercise there is a sense of power. It is suitably limited, a reminder of one’s limits. One enjoys the articulation of muscle, feeling every step with a refreshing sense of being the motive agent, even while knowing that companion to power is fatigue and hunger, knowing that, among the tomorrows, one has the privilege of witnessing the deterioration of muscle tissue. Nothing is more repetitive than exercise, and yet each step, copy of the last, is still a minor liberation, a paper ship set out upon the river.

The stars are out. The damp air is cool. It’s fresh. I couldn’t do without this taste of Creation. The Creator gets nostalgic for beginnings, too. ‘When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,’ He says to Sint Job. Have we decided we don’t need to shout anymore? The stars have been coming up for so many years. The many clouds have made me appreciate the stars when I see them, and I love seeing them. I don’t shout, but I love them.

‘Where wast thou?’ He asks, and it’s a challenge. I barely know where I am now, Lord Creator. Where I was yesterday. Where I was in spring. Where I was one summer, then another summer. How I’ve gathered so many. My skin is like the crust of these flagstones, grey but tarred by time. Sint Job has moved on, and there is only me here on the bike path at 5am, heading home. I love the stars, but I don’t shout. Maybe once I’m gone, it will all be a little bit quieter. Maybe it doesn’t matter how many people there are, the loss of each adds to a great silencing.

And if Job had lived in the time of the existentialists? Would his family have survived? Would the Accuser have tormented him with thought? It might have been enough. It’s a different age. Foucault says we live in the time of confessions. When nothing stings like the open sore of identity. Many people died on the cross. But one of them cried, Eli, Eli lama sabachthani.

Naked came I out of my mother's womb, says Sint Job. I’ve provided the day’s sweat, like the oils for the sacrifice. There’s a moment’s regret I have to stop, when I pause in front of the apartment door, in the gathered silence of the old, old city. But then I turn to enter, I return to the shower, to wash the sweat. I return to the mirror, to the curse of ever-lastingness. It’s uncanny how identity persists. The city is the city and the sky the sky. The mirror bears its marks, the signs that time has made its passing, the chips, the residues of washing, and still it utters the same name every morning. Uncanny machine that stretches the one line upon the earth with such a steady hand.

Travelogue 585 – November 14
Sint Job
Part Two

It’s five in the morning, and I’m running alongside a small harbour built early in the twentieth century and named for Saint Job.

And I’m wondering how the name for the harbour came about. Among the complex economies of the human mind, it is rare that a name comes from nowhere. There is always a thread linking stories and names. It could be that the location had long had some association with the old, old man. It might have been some vaporous linkage in the mind of an engineer, a fragile connection that has evaporated in time. The human imagination is so rarely capable of the true random, the free thought.

‘Can you loosen Orion’s belt?’ the mad god shouts.

And I wonder how young my Dad was when he discovered his fascination for the stars. Was he just a boy in Colorado? I don’t think it would have come from his own daddy, who was by all accounts a shell-shocked WWI vet, and a drunk. But who knows? A drunk and a dreamer, perhaps, who stared into the skies as evening turned to night over the plains, watching the stars emerge and showing them to his boy. ‘One day, …’ he might say, the alcohol fueling a fleeting sense of hope for the race of humanity. And the boy may wonder, the boy who would live to see rocket ships travel to the moon.

I imagine that he was young when he discovered he could not loosen Orion’s belt. His was a youth made of labor, caring for the family abandoned by his trauma-crippled father. His time was a time of labors, a span stretching across the middle of a tumultuous century, a life fostered in poverty and spent reaching for a place among men that commanded respect. He was a grandson of immigrants. He would be the first to earn a college degree. All that would come after the war.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? cries the god in rage.

Before there was an earth, I must have been in space. But the fact is, I don’t know. I don’t even know enough to say I was nowhere.

I’ve moved to live in a place where the stars are obscured. My father, in contrast, kept moving south and west, until he landed the family in southern California. It could be that in the back of his mind, there was a devotion to starry skies driving him to the driest climes. He wanted unimpeded views.

How close a match are those L.A. skies to the ones once rotating over Sumer or ancient Arabia, where Job lived a life renowned for sanctity and for God’s favor? He may have spent evenings sitting on the porch and watching the stars emerge, and giving them names for the benefit of his sons. Look, there’s the great shepherd. He follows his flocks across the whole sky. See how dedicated he is? He never strays.

For the Greeks, he was the Hunter. Could the name Orion have once attached to a living man, someone so known for his feats as a hunter that he survived in stories? Names are so rarely made up. They are required to bring significance even to the identification of a hero or a monster or a god.

They say Job was likely to have been a man once, before he was a memory for the race, a memory of riches and devotion to God, ‘perfect and upright’. Many years later, a poet borrowed the semi-mythologized figure of Job for a story. The poet wanted to formulate a philosophical query into a story, the query behind a world of theory called theodicy. He invented a scene on Olympus, in which the Accuser is offered a seat at the banquet. And the Accuser offers the obvious challenge. Well, yes, he says, successes and devotion to the Creator are a salubrious mix. In borrowing the character of Job, the poet employs a sort of shorthand. The name was already associated with the archetypal good man. Is it no accident that Job is rich and he’s pious?

And who hath stretched the line upon the face of this earth? God challenges.

I would be born in the place of clear skies, and eventually reverse the direction my dad took, describing an arc in my travels that would end at just about the place where his youth exploded in a shell burst, sacrificed to the war. His new home in America would be an army hospital. In heading east, I undertook my journey in some spirit not too alien from his, I would imagine, not too alien to that of a majority of people. I look for something that fits, and makes sense. Skies that explain something, even in their obscurity.

We try. But we must fail, and we did when we endeavored to stretch the line into space. We stood upon the moon … and we retreated. Such frightening hubris. Now we tell ourselves it may have been a conspiracy, a bit of theatre in a NASA studio.

It’s hard to say whether this, the slow decay of the space program, would have been one my dad’s greatest disappointments, with more immediate regrets to face in his final years, but it must have struck a plangent note. It must have seemed a clear failure of hope

At river’s edge, as I round the end of the pier, the wind is at its strongest. It usually blows in from the direction of the sea, which puts it in my face. The surface here along the river is laid with uneven cobble stone. The combined effect is one of a sudden loss of momentum. The river opens its grey space, now to the stars, in a few hours to the new light. The sun will be rising behind me, the wind in its face.

Travelogue 584 – November 13
Sint Job
Part One

I don’t get to see the stars too often in Rotterdam. The city lights wash out the weaker specimens, and the clouds wipe out the rest. Most nights I don’t even think about them anymore.

In Ethiopia, the stars were like family. I saw them almost every day. I got to know their names. I made time for conversation.

I’ve been sleeping well until last night. At four, I was up suddenly. The brain was going to be put to anxious work. I didn’t fight it. I opened the computer, and got to work on a nagging project.

I worked for an hour. The gesture made, the conscience appeased, my anxious energy could be directed into proper, more enjoyable channels. I put on the running gear. It was cold enough to wear gloves. I emerged into November’s long night. It’s now the season that Menna dreads: the sun turns away from us. The temperatures are dropping at a taunting rate. Morning light and morning warmth come ever later.

I see Orion! Setting my warm-up pace alongside the Schie, and glancing over the waters that are surprisingly still, I see stars. I see familiar patterns among the stars. I am reminded how fragile is knowledge, and how fragile are relationships. My stars are distant. They have withdrawn into space.

I grew up watching Apollo shots, my dad watching with the anticipation of World Cup fans, breathing and sweating hope, drinking his Manhattan as though it were the future itself. The launches were a luxury of boredom for me. There was little of my dad’s amazement, though now I appreciate his solicitous need to impart enthusiasm and perspective. I grew up with an almost genetic appreciation for our achievements in space.

No generation has had such an awareness of ‘space’. I grew up looking at the sky differently than any boy could have in any previous generation. I had read stories about distant galaxies, other planets, alternative dimensions. I’d seen the stories in television episodes. I had watched as the rockets launched. When I looked into the night, I looked into ‘space’, into dimension, into open territory that had now been given dimension by human beings. I was gazing straight out into frontiers and aspiration. We traveled into ‘space’, and then, I vaguely became aware, we stopped.

Orion, rising in the early morning hours at the beginning of winter, himself stands for other, older types of aspirations. The constellation was myth and god. He heralded winter. For some he stood for regeneration. For the Hebrews, he was hope of winter rains. Further: thirty thousand years ago, a member of race carved what is considered Orion’s first portrait into ivory of mammoth. It may be he was associated with the miracle of childbirth because his term in the sky synchronized fairly closely with the period of pregnancy, even to the term of a best-case pregnancy that ended in summer.

For the Babylonians, he was a shepherd. To medieval Muslim scholars he was known as the Giant. To the less imaginative Chinese he was the ‘Three’, named for the stars in his belt. For the Greeks, Orion was the hunter.

Before the Schie empties into the Maas, it flows through a lock, over which two street bridges cross. Beside the second bridge there is a police station. On one side there is a fenced lot for their cars. On the river side, there is a mooring for their boats. Some of the officers are already stirring. They watch me go by. I turn the corner by their station and down the pier that forms one side of the harbour. It’s a favorite straightaway of mine, heading out into the Maas, and into the winds.

The stars are bright here. One catches a taste of their freedom over the sea. Not far from Orion -- it looks as though he hunts in the territory of the Crab, -- the moon is suspended, more full than not, waxing or waning I can’t tell. She’s strong with light.

On the other side, the pier bounds the haven of Sint Job. I’m running by condos on this side. On the land side of the small harbour is a landing for water taxis that travel as far as Dordrecht. On the other side is a maritime school for youngsters. Sometimes I see the students bobbing in rowboats on the Schie, learning some obscure trick of the waters. They shout joked to one another. A teacher with a bullhorn struggles for their attention.

Travelogue 583 – October 15
The Moderns

At night we’re still watching the ‘Game of Thrones’. Troy brought these strange people to us inside his little computer, inside his little bag. And now they haunt us with their grim and wretched lives, their sordid pleasures and their desperate intrigues. They share with us the repellent visions of their vicious gods. The stories and settings warp over time, the narratives leaning more and more heavily upon the straining crutches of the supernatural. There are zombies to the north. And to the south are dragons.

I enjoy the show; I won’t deny it. But I’m left to wonder as I watch it at the ways we humans talk to ourselves. ‘The night is dark and full of terrors,’ the characters say. We viewers nod. We mutter in horror at our own mysterious selves, renewing our amazement at our survival. Among all the hazards and the hatred, we survive.

We wonder at our history. It’s my theory that TV shows and films like this are release valves for the world psyche. They can only become more ubiquitous, as the fascination grows for a vanished past. We entertain ourselves with horror stories in which a simple moral is uttered by some dumbfounded everyman, ‘At stake is our entire way of life.’ But what we’re really saying to ourselves is, ‘Gone! An entire way of life!’ Thousands of years of it, washed away quite cleanly. We don’t know how amazed we are, or how anxious.

The first stage was gentle nostalgia, the period pieces, the Jane Austen films, in which we indulged in costume and the carriages. The past was quaint. There were westerns for excitement, or medieval larks, vehicles for Shakespeare and Dickens and the like, studies in passion dressed in robes or top hats. Everyone rode on horses then!

Gradually, the streets in those medieval towns became more alien and more revolting, ankle-deep in mud and the contents of everyone’s chamber pots, the scene of constant brawls and crime. The shadows of those medieval towns became alive with mysteries and secret societies.

There were scares like the Millennial Bug, when we thought we might just be thrown back into the primitive days before computers. The terror inspired was profound. Planes would fall from the skies. The dinosaurs would walk again. But the deeper terror was simply contemplating whether we could live the way we did only thirty years before.

Now we seem to regard the past with unmitigated horror. There weren’t really dragons back then, were there, Daddy? No, of course not. I don’t think so. But who knows, Dad finally says uneasily. There weren’t wizards, were there? Did people really worship fire? Those were dark days, son. Who knows? Maybe they even raised the dead back then. The family shudders to think.

I’ve always had great regard for the moderns, those pioneers of thought and art in the early and mid-twentieth century. These were intellectuals who reveled in the changes. Now I see that they could well afford to celebrate, when the new was new, and when their several generations straddled the gap between the past and the modern. It’s easy to delight in the new, when one still has the comforts of the traditional.

We visit the memorial of one such modern, an unlikely hero of the modern era, a sickly Dutch boy with a penchant for drawing. This is one of Troy’s boyhood heroes, and it happens there is a museum dedicated to him in Den Haag.

M.C. Escher studied in Haarlem, failed in architecture and switched to decorative arts. After school he traveled, and finally moved, to Italy. Here his vision was inspired by what he saw, and his artistic career was launched, producing landscapes and nature drawings. During his youthful travels, he also visited the Alhambra in Spain, and was deeply affected by the geometrical designs of the Moors.

A trip in 1936 through the Mediterranean on ship seems to have sparked that latent fire in Escher’s imagination. He launched upon the phase of his career for which he is famous, the experiments with mathematical art and impossible realities. It’s interesting that this phase corresponds with his permanent break with Italy. Disgusted by Fascism, he moved to Switzerland in 1935, and then back to Holland.

He draws the hands that draw each other. He draws the cityscape among a still life. He draws the stairways that lead up to the bottom and the waterfall that feeds itself upstream. He draws planes of figures that interlock and trade between two and three dimensions.

It’s fun to see the Escher classics on the walls of the museum, and fun are the little thought experiments in mathematics, illusion and impossible realities. But for me the most interesting, as it always is with me, is to see the tools of the artist. We see the lithography stone. I learn about mezzo tints. I can’t imagine the patience in this kind of work.

Seeing Escher on the walls reminds me of my youth. I was fond of drawing as a child, and I was fascinated by his visions. Seeing it again now, his work makes me think of my father. My father was an engineer and a modern in his way, an optimist and a man fascinated by numbers and machines. He was a man of his generation in that way. The future was bright then, and the past was nothing special, nothing so full of shadow.

Sometimes I’ll stop on my bicycle rides through town, stop at a construction site or by the side of a canal where a big ship is dropping anchor or unloading. I will watch the big machinery with something of Dad’s fascination. But more often, I’ll be watching the old man who is spending an hour of his long afternoon watching the machinery.

Travelogue 582 – October 13
Watermolen

I feel like I’m seeing these fields for the second time, though I’ve never been here before. Is it because he has been here? I don’t even know whether Vincent did landscapes of the fields during this period, but nevertheless I see the fields framed and described in brushstrokes, hues dimmed with the passage of time.

The colors seem right, the stripes of rapeseed among somber greens, and the soft grey of the skies. The humility and stillness are familiar. Am I seeing with my eyes, or with sight inherited from the painter?

We’re outside the town of Neunen, which itself is a satellite town of Endhoven. We’re on rented bicycles, following the traces of a new Van Gogh trail, first pedaling down long avenues in Eindhoven, following the train tracks until we are leaving the city, jogging north, discovering the dedicated bike path. We follow a spur of the path that is no more than dirt. There are tractors and earth movers left inert by the side of the trail. Troy has heard that a section of this trail was to be lit by innovative glow-in-the-dark paints. While a light rain begins to fall, we search the dirt for signs of an experiment, turning over bits of clay and pavement and blue plastic. Nothing glows. We return to the existing trail.

We discover the Collse Watermolen, almost passing it unawares. It lies off a bland rural road, to the right as one crosses the bridge over the millstream. We backtrack, and we find a little dirt drive up behind the water mill. All is quiet. We read on a sign that the wooden mill is still functional. Volunteers work here occasionally, still producing flour and oil. We read that there’s been a mill here since the fourteenth century. But what persists is this vision from 1884.

Van Gogh is still discovering himself as a painter. He has come to Neunen, where his father is minister, to regroup after a fairly disastrous stay in Den Haag. He has started using oils in Den Haag. He is experimenting in Neunen with landscapes and character studies of local peasants. His father dies in March of 1885. Some time during the same spring, he finishes his first major work, ‘The Potato Eaters’.

I’ve come to Eindhoven for very different reasons to Vincent. I have a race to run. The city is now the third largest in the Netherlands, and it touts itself as the world’s smartest city. It’s a tech center, and a design center. It sponsors one of the country’s winningest football teams. I am ready to add one more superlative: it sponsors one of nicest half marathons I’ve run. The Den Haag half in September was refreshingly small, and the course was pretty. It’s Eindhoven’s spirit that makes the race memorable. There are bands all along the course. There are people cheering. The course volunteers don’t just offer cups of water. They have fruit, and they have sponges soaked in water. (It’s an unusually warm day.) For nearly the last two miles of the run, through downtown, the roads are packed with cheering crowds. (The downside is a disorienting sense that the finish line is just around the corner. This false impression is not helped by the multiple balloon arches over the road, advertising one sponsor or another, looking each one like the finish. I see runners repeatedly fooled into a strong finish, only to find it’s not the finish. I’ve never seen so many runners stopping within the last kilometer, having spent their reserves. Fortunately, I have monitored my watch. I know my pace, and know very well I haven’t reached the end yet.)

We have also come here to find traces of the young artist. Later and later is the sun rising now, autumn full upon us in its dark glory. I am groggy and sore from the race, but I am still up before anyone else. I make sure Troy is awake. I have to convince him once more time that it’s a good idea, even though the sun hasn’t risen yet. His idea. We must get to the train station and rent our bikes. A half hour later, the sun is risen, and we are pedaling east along streets unusually quiet. It’s already worth the pain of awakening.

Smart as Eindhoven has become, the countryside looks the same as I imagine it ever did, populated sparsely by regular farmers of average intelligence. I look out over their fields with my own average thoughts, conditioned by the smart people who have preceded me. It’s as though I’ve carried a heavy frame with me on the bicycle, only to hold it up in front of me once I’ve reached Vincent’s scenes. Could I see them without the frame? What would I see?

I think again of Bloom’s anxiety of influence. We are born so late. But perhaps it’s not all bad. Everywhere there is significance because of their stories. These are our songlines, making our landscapes sacred.

Travelogue 581 – October 3
The Boys Are All Right

Jan is riding ahead of me. He’s riding a typical Dutch bike, on which one sits comically erect. We’re heading down the south side of the long Erasmus Bridge, high above the river. The bridge is the biggest hill for miles around. You lose all hill conditioning in Holland, and then huff and puff up the steep bridge. On the other side, you coast at an exhilarating speed. The wind whips Jan’s baggy white pants. It makes his sporty jacket flutter like little pennants at his sides.

Jan cycles with a controlled abandon that is natural to him as a Dutchman. He knows exactly how far to push it. It’s hard to gauge for a foreigner, especially among crowds. And the closer we get to the Feyenoord stadium, the more crowd there is.

We’ve come to watch local heroes Feyenoord play their Europa League match with Standard Liege from Belgium. Jan had found a deal on seats, called me at the last minute. We are arriving just in time. Inside the stadium, fans are roaring. We lock our bikes to a pole behind the trailer selling hamburgers, and we walk around to the back of the stadium for our entrance.

Life in the stands is something very different than life outside. I’ve seen the finesse with which Jan weaves bike among bikes, missing, pressing, never actually touching. The complexity among all the insect-like machines is fascinating. Among the football stands, the complexity dissolves, and finesse is abandoned. There is little effort to preserve space. People are jostling one another as they move, as they stand, as they sit. It’s not an event in which people eventually settle down into their seats. In our section, the seats are for standing on and walking on. The Dutch are a large people. They bring some weight to their jostling.

Football seems to appeal to the rowdier sort. These are not the clientele of the Hopper café. These are people I’m more likely to see working in the port or populating the local ‘brown’ bars, as they’re called, small pubs in in which a squinting crowd of old-timers and brawny young men with booming voices sing into the night.

They’re singing tonight, ‘Feyenoord, Feyenoord,’ and trains of words that even Jan can’t make out. One section waves at another and then they serenade each other. They hold up one finger to the incredibly boisterous section of Belgian fans, who are jumping and roaring all through the game, waving huge flags, and sounding a terrible, echoing beat on the metal side s of the balcony and rattling the fences around their section. Security people in neon are lining up on all sides.

When Feyenoord scores, all remaining space collapses. People are jumping and shouting. One fat man rushes down the aisle, and I manage to preserve only half my plastic cup of beer. The rest is soaking through my shirt. ‘Waar is het feestje? Hier is het feestje!’ the boys are shouting. The guy in front of me feels an urgent need for the Belgians to hear this message. He is becoming hoarse, though the maniacal glint in his eye does not flag. ‘Where is the party? Here is the party!’

After the game the dangerous web of bicycles among bicycles is even more intense than it was before the game. Fans launch their bikes into the street without a care, and the drunken pelotons weave fantastic patterns among the cars and trams all the way back to the bridge, among shouts and songs. Jan is chatting all the way, swerving, braking and charging forward without a thought. I’m struggling. I pull up beside him and breathe, ‘Yes, yes,’ until I need to brake and swerve again, suddenly. Jan keeps talking. ‘Yes, yes.’

Safely home, I sigh. All in all, it might be less work being on the pitch than in the stands.

Travelogue 580 – October 2
Irretrievable

It’s morning. The sun is not shining. Sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough sleep in the world to make up for what I need. Even if I could nip a little from everyone I see on the bike paths, five minutes of the sleep belonging to each person at the café.

It wouldn’t be fair. There are plenty of people at the Hopper café. It could that none would miss five minutes of sleep. They are many and they are diverse, suits and beards, dreads and pigtails. This bakery and café is located near Beurs in the city center, and near Witte de Withstraat. Beurs is a central business and shopping district, and Witte de Withstraat is a street lined with galleries and clubs, two different aesthetics only blocks apart. If you head south past Witte de Withstraat, you pass the big eye hospital, and you pass a spacious playground full of children from the schools and pre-schools that encircle the square.

Yesterday I saw Babise here at Hopper, meeting with a dozen other moms whose children attend the schools down the street. Babise is my landlord’s wife. She is a lawyer, and she marches toward my café table like a lawyer.

It wouldn’t be fair. Children need their sleep. Mothers need their sleep. I can suffer for their sake.

It has taken so long to get going this morning. I could not move. When I could move, it has been only to turn over. I might have simply slept again, but my mind has awakened more quickly than my body. It might have been the physical sense of helplessness; it might have been the gloomy weather and the lack of light, but I found my thoughts becoming anxious. Not about useful items, not about my agenda once the blood is coursing, but anxious about the nights ahead.

Troy has brought us ‘Game of Thrones’ from America, a series about struggles for power in a fantasy world, in which dragons and zombies are only mild distractions from human conniving. We joke about the lack of light. Is there any happiness in this fantasy world? Who will be slaughtered in this episode? I don’t need much encouragement to expect the worst.

I have another race coming up. I’ve scheduled two half marathons only weeks apart this fall. I’ve already run in Den Haag, a race along the beach and through wooded parks. The day was perfect. Troy and Menna met me at the finish. We ate breakfast at an outdoor café with a view on the course.

Next week’s race will be one year after the 2013 race in Köln. The temperatures were near freezing then. This year, mild summer lingers on. The sun comes and goes, but a gentle warmth remains to color another day. Forecasts have slipped into calm eddies of repetition.

My morning thoughts, while I’m lying helpless in my bed, have leapt, unaccountably, to thoughts of Twain and Tom Sawyer. The Mississippi spreads its wide waters across my imagination. I see Midwestern hills carpeted with summer trees. I’m seized by a longing for the dust and the brush of quiet countryside.

Twain had captured something of the essence of childhood. I’m swimming for a moment in the expansiveness of it. When the summer sun is shining, the nights are so far away. It’s coming to me very palpably, how irretrievable is every day. I have to get out of bed.

Travelogue 579 – September 12
Panizzi in London

More than two hundred years after Ashurnasirpal, his empire was still pre-eminent in the region. The capital of the empire was now in Nineveh. His throne had been inherited by one Ashurbanipal. Ashurbanipal was not his father’s first son, and so he was not raised as heir to the throne. He had been raised as gentleman and courtier. He was taught to read. When he succeeded to the throne, ahead of even a surviving elder brother, he became the first – according to legend – Assyrian king who was able to read. Being literate at that time meant reading the cuneiform scripts of Akkadian and Sumerian. It so happened the young scholar was also a leader of some skill, popular with his people and effective as a military man, and extraordinarily cruel with enemies, it seems. He ruled for almost fifty years, and was the last great king of the Assyrians, perhaps being all too effective and too cruel as a conqueror, reducing his enemies to a state in which they had little left for tribute or tax. Within a generation of the great king’s death, the empire teetered and fell, over-extended, broke, and victim of an alliance among the many harshly-treated subject races, close to home, including Babylonians and Medes and Chaldeans. Is this the consequence of knowledge from books? Perhaps it’s the hubris of the third brother, smarter than the rest, given the world?

More lasting than empire was perhaps the great library founded by Ashurbanipal, who was proud of his scholarship as he was of his conquests. It was the first systematically collected royal library in history, the great king having devoted himself to owning all great tracts of history and legend and science. The library might have survived for centuries. Alexander is rumored to have seen it and been inspired. He had a vision of an Alexandrian library. The vision was taken up by one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, who would become king of a revived Egypt, centered in the new city of Alexandria. The library of Ashurbanipal was re-discovered in 1849 by young Henry Layard. About thirty thousand texts were dug from the ruins.

The Reading Room at the British Museum is closed for repair and inspection when I visit. That’s a great disappointment. My first visits to the great library remain vividly in my memory, like visits to a holy place, and I want to see it again. There is something magnificent about the great libraries of the world, a sense of arrival when one walks in. Even when one allows how much has been written and catalogued that might have been better forgotten, the prospect of encountering all surviving recorded thought in one place is awe-inspiring. And the circular space was been designed with suitable reverence by the architect Sydney Smirke and the librarian Antonio Panizzi, opening in 1857, its walls lined with books under a dome painted sky blue, sober brown reading desks radiating like spokes around the room’s center. The room served for 150 years, serving such luminaries as Marx and Gandhi, Woolf and Wilde.

Panizzi was librarian for the British Museum from 1831-1866. He was a controversial figure, vain and strong-willed, but extraordinarily committed to the task of administering the library. He is thought by some to have been the greatest in this occupation in history. He wrote a set of ninety-one rules for cataloguing that have formed the basis for all subsequent systems.

Panizzi had started as a lawyer in northern Italy, and as a supporter of Italian unification and democracy. His politics won him few friends among the powerful, and eventually he had been forced to flee. Arriving at last in London, he survived as a language teacher until he won the friendship of the future Lord Chancellor, Henry Brougham. Brougham was able to find placement for Panizzi at the University of London and then the British Museum.

The British Museum itself began life as a collection, a collection without a home, a collection that included more than forty thousand texts. This was the collection of one Dr, Hans Sloane, physician and happy eccentric, who willed his collection to King George II. The king okayed the creation of the British Museum, and Sloane’s library was joined with several other venerable collections, including, in 1757, the Royal Library. The Museum was settled in the Montagu House by Russell Square, bought by the government for twenty thousand pounds, and opened to the public in 1759.

One of the rights granted to the Royal Library, and transferred to the British Library, was the right of legal deposit. Newly published books were to be deposited into the national collection. Panizzi revived this principle during his tenure, and pursued the library’s right to books relentlessly, building the collection to become the world’s largest, at more than half a million volumes.

The website of the British Museum tells us, rather starkly, that ‘the Museum is now consulting widely about the future use of the Reading Room.’ Obviously the library survives, having been transferred to its new site at St. Pancras. And the world’s knowledge seems more secure than ever, stored in dozens of great libraries around the world that would make Ashurbanipal’s jaw drop, stored electronically, deeply among the circuits and cables strung across the surface of the planet, and backed up in drive after drive. So secure that we are led to question the purpose of the Reading Room.