Travelogue 913 – May 30
Spring Update

The grass is growing high. The dandelions are old and spent. Treetops are full of leaves, bright green with spring sap. The first red poppies have bloomed. The sun has been shining without much intermission for weeks.

The girls and I walk along the raised path that follows the abandoned train route. We monitor the wild growth along the sides of the path. We’ve watched the wildflowers cycle through their various seasons, the daffodils and daisies and the dandelions. In summer, the thorny bushes will bear their little blackberries. Little Ren runs and runs. Baby Jos is more cautious. She’s afraid of the big bees. She wants me to carry her past them.

If we go late enough in the day, the shadows are long and the horizontal sunlight strong. In the cooling shade of the wild brush, the insects swarm. We bring bites back on our exposed skin.

When the sun is highest, it shines on the stretch of concrete in front of our front door, freed from the impediments of one building or another. We fill the blue plastic pool with air and then with water. The girls lie in it; they splash each other; they pour cold water from one container to another, little pitcher to little cup, little cup to clear glass. Today they played with water balloons, carrying them around for long minutes as prized toys before tossing them into the air.

On my own walks, I see that football practice has begun again. I see the young boys running and kicking, doing drills, some in blue jerseys and some in black. I walk by the pitches under sun that’s getting hot and in shadow that is still cool. The spring weather has been ideal, sun and temperature balanced as ends of a beam on its lever. I stop in the sun to write on a little pas that fits in my back pocket.

The sheep are progressing now along the other side of that road to Schiedam, advancing patch by patch of unruly grass toward the west, and now they’re grazing on the strip of land separating the road from the train track, in the shadow of the elevated Metro track. They are migrating toward Schiedam, inching toward that train-and-Metro station with the zig-zagging roofline. When they have purged the area, will they board a train back to Limburg?

Travelogue 912 – May 29
Sad Days

My thoughts go out to the people of my old hometown, Minneapolis. There’s nothing I can say about the tragedy that hasn’t been said, and still, there are times you have to say something, nevertheless.

The political situation in America becomes more egregious every day, and, though it’s thousands of miles away, it weighs on me. I’m particularly downhearted today. It’s a depressing time to be American. Power has been seized at every level by the very worst the country has to offer. Of course there are honourable cops and even honourable politicians in America, but the agenda is being dominated by the most revolting and amoral of people.

Regarding the police crisis, my wife said it best, shocked as she was by the Floyd video, that a stray dog in the street would be handled with more human feeling than this poor man. What has happened to these policemen that they feel entitled to be monsters?

When Trump was elected, we might have been tempted to strike heroic poses; we will overcome, we said. Day after grinding day, year after year, we find ourselves more disgusted and demoralized, less heroic.

Trump, for his part, spends his time telling us in startlingly clear language that he will honour no election that doesn’t provide him four more years of power. He orders his Stepford Press Secretary, who has voted by mail-in ballot many times, to argue against mail-in ballots. He comments quite openly that Republicans would lose any election in which all the people have a vote.

Nobody wants violence. So provide people with options! How do you suppose people should respond to a system that kills them randomly and with impunity; that breaks the same laws they hold citizens to; and that openly tells citizens that any vote against them will be nullified?

Republicans, it’s clear you enjoy the game. It’s clear you enjoy winning. When it’s increasingly clear you can’t win without cheating, be careful. Most grifters don’t advertise they’re cheating and then gloat. Okay, that’s just your style. Best to think twice, though, before you back people into corners who have reason to fear for their lives.

Travelogue 911 – May 27
Catharto Auto Bio

I’ve been writing about story-telling again. It’s hard to say what I find so absorbing. I feel sometimes I’ve been working for a lifetime through that one reference in Aristotle to the catharsis of tragedy. Maybe it signifies nothing more than this: that the stories we entertain are the angels and the demons of our own stories. A superficial example might be my partiality to mystery novels, perhaps symptomatic of a vain belief that there are answers to be found for those who search. I also love sci-fi, which might just be a theatre for those who still believe in theology.

But what I do know is how complex our relationships can be with our own stories. We embroider our stories. We soil them. We iron them and fold them. We bleach them, and we dye them. What we can’t seem to do is hang them in sunlight and see them all of a piece with the sure eye of a critic. That’s what the gods and judges are for.

I spent years writing memoir, trying to fashion truth from autobiography, or from a wrenching chapter of it. I can tell you how valuable it is to try, and how foolhardy it is to expect to achieve truth.

One product of that effort was my book, “Careful So”. Five years ago, I published this memoir about my first two years in Ethiopia. My friend, artist Troy Zaushny, created the fantastic cover art for the book. He also created a beautiful companion piece, a print called ‘The Promised’. I never really promoted the book; I was too self-conscious. But I’ve been thinking about it again. Please, dear reader, take a look at Troy’s site. The book is also available for e-readers on Amazon, Lulu, Apple Books, and Nook. A link to the Lulu edition is helpfully provided to the left.

Travelogue 910 – May 25
Blade Runner and Game of Thrones

I don’t remember seeing Movie 5 from my Facebook movie series when it came to the theatres in 1982. I’m pretty sure I did; I just don’t remember it. The effect of this movie grows over time. I believe everyone feels that way about “Blade Runner”. It had a rather lacklustre opening, and now it’s recognized as one of the greats. Rules for the challenge: No specific image that had impact. No top ten list.

There is so much to cite critically, from Philip K. Dick’s story and influence; to Ridley Scott’s youth, vision, and script work; to Vangelis’s score; to the individual performances – Ford’s star power and Hauer’s elegance. The film gathered narrative and visual themes that would fuel sci-fi cinema for decades: the clones and AI; the aesthetics of dystopia; the noir stylings; the menace of runaway tech.

My engagement is with the beauty of this film. Critics lambasted its pace in 1982; I applaud it. Ridley found the riches inside the story. Most of what Hollywood does wrong is suggested by the early criticism of “Blade Runner”, capturing plot and surface personality and leaving all the powerful latencies in a narrative in a rush to print. This film is simply beautiful. The composition of one scene can still move me deeply, quite independently of the plot.

I think a lot about story-telling. In a different genre, the TV series “Game of Thrones” tutored me in similar techniques. The first three seasons were masterfully done, populating a relatively standard fantasy world with compelling characters and investing an arbitrary ‘game of thrones’ among unappealing contenders with some urgency and emotion. Martin deserves a lot of credit; I’m not thrilled by his books, but he drew the blueprint. I learn similar lessons to those I learned from “Blade Runner”, the care for atmosphere and detail, the generosity with time. The characters are incessantly on the road in the first three seasons, and we travel with them. Sure, Martin is a genius with the surprising plot twist, but more compelling was the time spent with characters. One very obvious difference between early and late seasons is how quick the travel becomes. John Snow sends a text message from beyond the wall, and the dragon is there in minutes.

I’ve spent almost two months writing short comic scripts for Zoom productions by my Hague-based theatre group. The premise is a satire of “Game of Thrones”. Even in these silly, throwaway scripts, I see the same principles at work. There’s precious little plot to speak of and the characters are two-dimensional caricatures, and still there’s engagement and involvement. Actors are enjoying the characters and the unfolding story, absolutely meaningless as it is. It’s a kind of divine quality in the human, I believe, to invest lifeless landscapes with movement and passion. To quote another movie classic: “Life will find a way”.

I don’t want to close this blog post leaving the impression that I put “Game of Thrones” on equal footing with “Blade Runner”. The difference lies in that transcendent beauty that the latter achieves. The Romantic poets might have called it the Sublime. Maybe it’s a sad state of affairs that we find the Sublime in sci-fi movies, but, then again … it was Mary Shelley who wrote “Frankenstein”.

Travelogue 909 – May 18
The Apartment

I was living in Minneapolis. I was working for the school district, and I was sharing an apartment with Scottie on Dupont and 28th Street. Domestic life was basic. I had no furniture. Our kitchen was bare. But we had a TV, the kind that was more console than screen. In my mind’s eye, I see a TV like an old station wagon, capacious and lined with fake wood panelling. That TV is where I first happened to see “The Apartment”, the 1960 Bill Wilder film starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.

“The Apartment” was Movie 3 for my Facebook challenge: “Ten images from movies over ten days that had an impact on me.” Rules: No specific image that had impact. No top ten list.

I was writing a lot of poetry at that time. What I saw in “The Apartment” was an artful and polished comedy, relying on witty dialogue and smart acting. The premise was provocative, but simple. The production and sets were beautifully done, but pointedly not epic, as the times favoured. (Ben Hur was the previous year’s big Oscar winner.) The success of the movie was primarily in the writing. Wilder’s work has been called a ‘cinema of words’. It was a theatrical movie in that sense, reading something like a play. And that movie, that evening, inspired me to write plays.

I had been working on a long poem dedicated to the memory of a friend who had died of AIDS. The poem had been through many revisions. The subject was painful, and it haunted me. The poem had evolved by that time into a kind of dialogue among grieving characters.

The day after watching “The Apartment”, I started changing the poem into a play, my first play. That play is still one of my favourites; I reprised it here in South Holland a few years ago, and I self-published it with a set of stories and short memoir a few years ago because it fit so well among my reflections of that earlier period of my life. The play is nothing like “The Apartment”. The inspiration lives solely in the choice of form.

I wouldn’t claim too many favourable points of comparison between Wilder’s writing and my own, beyond a fondness for the snappy comeback (and his are better). What inspired me were the efficiencies of his art. At the time, he was noted for his breaks with the conventions of the art form, but what I responded to, nearly forty years on, were the efficiencies within the form. I had stumbled upon a master, and one who achieved much of his effect through the power of words.

Travelogue 908 – May 14
A Space Odyssey

My friend Marcus nominated me on Facebook to post ten times about ten movies. I doubt I'll make it to ten.I see these Facebook challenges come and go, and I don’t think much about them. But because it was Marcus, and because it was film, I gave it some thought; I'll give it a try.

This is not supposed to be a Top Ten, or a collection of beautiful stills, but an inventory of movies that had an impact in my life. That makes it interesting. I’ll post some here in my blog, since not everyone is on Facebook. I can a little more substance. Facebook is not somewhere I can ramble on.

I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” in the theatre when it came out. I was just a kid, and it was the first ‘grown-up’ film I remember seeing. Imagine the Kubrick classic being your first impression. I still remember the experience. I remember the monkeys fighting, of course, because I was a young boy. I remember HAL’s voice. I remember the sense of wonder inspired by the scenes in space. We were a family that watched all the moon launches on TV. I remember the music and the stately pace of the film. I remember my father complaining about the film. It was too slow; it didn’t make sense. But it was a beautiful and a challenging film, and it stayed with me.

It’s odd to call up this memory, which floats relatively free from attachments. I don’t really recall the theatre, the trip to the theatre, the popcorn, the seats, anything else. Other movie memories are tied to more tactile impressions. My memory of “Oliver” comes with a few other clips, of the car ride, of my parents laughing at me as I tried to reproduce one of the songs in the parking lot outside. But “2001” stands starkly alone in my memory, just the power of the imagery and sound. And then my father’s complaint.

I imagine he expected more from the film; something more conventional. He was an engineer and a believer in science. He was an enthusiast of the space program. If he had lived long enough, we would have gone to see “Apollo 13” together, and he would have been completely content. ‘That’s what a movie is supposed to be,’ I can imagine him saying. And still, my memory paints him as surprisingly mild in his critique of “2001”. It would have been more in character to rail or dismiss. But my memory portrays him offering calm and rational criticisms. Not ones I would agree with, from my privileged vantage point, more than fifty years later, but reasonable ones. The film took a lot of risks, and certainly not all of them were going to pay off for the average movie-goer.

Travelogue 907 – May 10
Sheep on Grass; Sun on Sheep

For a month or so, someone has been rotating the sheep among the grass verges around our little neighbourhood. We lie in a kind of bowl between the Sparta football stadium and the Metro station. And all around are small strips of open grassy space. Apparently, the city and the shepherds have found some common ground among the unruly grasses of spring.

The sheep first show up on the grassy inclines that lead up to the level of the tram station, first on one side of the staircase and then a few days later on the other side. There look to be about fifty of them. There’s no one minding the sheep. They are confined within flimsy fencing of coloured twine. In a few days, those sheep trim everything green right down to the ground. It’s efficient.

It’s also refreshing. It breaks the hard divide between rural and urban. It eloquently expresses the Dutch commitment to pragmatism and middle ways. It also captures the sense of community so important to the Dutch. We all live together. The sheep show up every spring in this very urban neighbourhood. People pass and smile, or they register nothing.

I like seeing the sheep. They contribute a different element to daily life, a different colour. I stop and watch them. They live at a slower pace. Their job is eating grass. When they’re not chewing, they’re resting; they’re staring. There’s a timelessness to the sight of the sheep in their fields. I know we humans joke that we have lost track of what day it is, but in actuality we are keenly aware of the moment. History is very much present. It takes the form of an airborne virus. It prompts us to watch the headlines every day, count the days, count the casualties.

Every few days, the sheep are rotated to a new field. Eventually, they show up among the small grassy knolls beside the pitches that figure into my daily strolls. The short twine fence appears in my path to interrupt my routine. I stand and watch the complacent sheep munching on their grass.

I feel no resentment. Healthy communities are always in flux. There are tides in urban landscapes, and thhe tides bring noise and inconvenience. It’s best to give way. I take another path, following the dirt paths and then the bike paths. I cross over the busy boulevard that is one border to my small district. I stroll through an abandoned playground, follow the dirt paths around another construction zone, and then along the curving line a canal makes through this neighbouring city village. It’s different. It’s the same. The spring sun still shines on me.

Travelogue 906 – May 9
Guns in the Neighbourhood

We share the planet; we share the virus. Even so, we humans inhabit a variety of different worlds. One reminder came a few nights ago, in the middle of the night. We were woken at 2:20 in the morning by the sound of gunshots. Within minutes, there were police vans cordoning off a section of the street within view of our windows. A few of them were searching the surface of the street with flashlights, looking for bullets. The next morning, I saw the bullet holes in the window and doorway across the street.

We lead our lives in parallel planes. I’ll try a Zoom analogy: we’re all invited into the same Zoom call, but we make our way into different breakout rooms, with different codes of conduct. One room chooses rules of confrontation and strife; another chooses rules of peaceful co-existence and cooperation.

In the same neighbourhood, some people have been living by much more savage rules than the rest of us. And just because it bubbles up once in a public way, like a shooting in the middle of the night, doesn’t mean that their rules are less violent on many other, quieter occasions. This case just rose to the level of our attention.

World events can provide those glimpses into the deeper coding of other rooms. The COVID-19 crisis has offered a rather stark view into the code underlying American society, revealing it as peculiarly tribal and violent. Everything is a contest of wills. The vehemence of the reaction against public health controls was surprising. When it took on the language of war, we understood. Everything is strife, and the U.S. response is to suffer and fight. Life is a Rocky movie. We take our hits. We are knocked to the mat. Our glory is rising again, against all odds, taking a dozen more punches to the jaw, bleeding profusely, but somehow prevailing, if only by dint of our … what? Our size, our ugly charm? Preventive measures are for the weak. Pandemic response in America was never going to be clean or efficient.

There are people with guns in the neighbourhood, and the guns are just the code made manifest. If we had known their lives were so fraught with danger, we might have advised them that life could be easier. But they wouldn’t have listened.

“For who can hope to alter men’s convictions?” Aurelius counsels. He is rounding off his thought that humble goals are best. Aurelius consistently reminds himself, the reader, that all human aspiration is social. There’s a lot of wisdom in this.

Travelogue 905 – May 6
Notre Jardin

“…[D]o what nature is asking of you at this moment,” Aurelius write in Book Nine of his Meditations. Here we find a beautiful passage about humility. He continues, “ …and no glancing around to see if you are observed.” This part reminds me of Matthew 6, written about a hundred years earlier than the Meditations, and which includes this great scriptural line (in King James English): “Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men.”

Imagine there were no bragging. It’s easy if you try. Imagine no boasting, no selling, no posing. These days, nothing is real until it’s being sold. Imagine no proselytising, no pitching, no preaching, no convincing. Contentment is no virtue in our world. We must exult and shout. We must see our own enjoyment in others’ faces before it’s legit. Barring that, or even in preference to that, we must see judgement in others’ eyes. It galvanises us and informs us that we are on the right side, by virtue of opposition.

“…[D]o not expect Plato’s ideal commonwealth,” Aurelius advises. “[B]e satisfied if even a trifling endeavour comes off well, and count the result no mean success.” I’m doing my part with trifling endeavours. When the shutdown forced my theatre group to cancel a performance, I suggested a Zoom project. We’ve been doing this for about a month now, taping two-minute episodes in an ongoing satire of Game of Thrones and posting them. It’s embarrassing, but it’s been a show of life during a time of restraint, not in protest but in simple celebration of life despite the sombre threat. It’s fun; we spend precious time in a trifling project, and I’d say we derive a certain Aurelian pride from its silliness.

These are such great people. I’m amazed every time they schedule precious time for something as trivial as this. But they do it. And when they pop up in Zoom, I am so gratified. We laugh; we have fun. We produce something ephemeral, but the camaraderie is the reason. What does move us as humans, after all, and what proves most satisfying? Are we most content producing enduring work at great personal expense, or deeply enjoying the production of something fleeting, like the perfect spring garden?

Voltaire famously ended his “Candide” advising us each to cultivate our own garden – after having tracked the misadventures of the book’s naïve hero in a wide and cruel world. This seems the hardest thing for human nature to do, to accept small ambitions. I would hardly suggest I’m an exception to that rule. The mirror and the microphone are dangerous daily temptations - for us all. We crave approval; we want to be seen and heard. We act out, testing our voices in the wind. Who turns their head?

Lacking approval, some of us are happy to be reviled. We march with guns in front of state capitol buildings, and we bask in contempt. To be clear, protesting COVID shutdowns with a gun in hand is no Rosa Parks moment.

Travelogue 904 – May 2
The Biggest Ever!

It’s a different age. My anxiety dreams used to be set in my school or on stage. I would find myself rushing to class and realizing I had no lesson prepared. I would show up to rehearsal without a script. Nowadays, I dream that I can’t get Zoom to work.

Everything is channelled through eye of the internet needle these days. And so much of it is routed through only a few platforms, namely Zoom and Teams and Skype. It’s unnerving to have so much at stake when working in computer environments that are essentially akin to magic, at least for people like me. I used to worry about the power that the masters of local transit had over my life. This is another level.

This is not to suggest a conspiracy. Evil programmers don’t appear in my anxiety dreams. Bill Gates doesn’t dress like Thanos and snap his fingers. Why do I feel compelled to add this disclaimer to every complaint I make these days? An item is missing in the supermarket, I don’t blame Bill Gates. Am I naïve?

It’s another indicator of the age. Conspiracy theory is like ice cream or candy. We show no restraint.

I had some more warnings on Facebook. Trump was right all along about the fake media. Look at these videos of real doctors telling you the coronavirus is a hoax. Death figures are being fudged for profit.

I enjoy this kind of moxie. As though there weren’t enough personality or individuality among the thousands of people working in the media to fill a thimble, but among the few dozen contacts of the conspiracy theorist were all the great mavericks and free-thinkers. As though we couldn’t find a few cranks with geology degrees to say the world was flat. As though hospitals were corporate scams and Fox News were a charity. As though anyone could claim with a straight face that the hospitals have been the centres of excess and abuse during the corona era.

There is something endearing about conspiracy theorists. They dream big. You don’t hear many conspiracies about local elections, or about the goings-on in the neighbourhood. Or can we call gossip conspiracy theory? No, conspiracy always has to be big. It’s the richest men trying the ballsiest gambit to control the whole world, trying to gather all the money ever printed, exploit all the data ever generated, persecute the greatest president and run the greatest nation. And it never stops, either. Conspirators never tire. (And they never seem to win, either. Otherwise, why do they always have to start over?)

Of course all this reminds me of a quote from Aurelius …

Travelogue 903 – April 28
Our Pilots

Clearly, I’m reading the Guardian too much. This morning I saw a report that the Pentagon has released the official videos of UFO sightings that have been circulating illicitly for five years. The videos spooked me. On my daily trip to the grocery, I was checking the skies.

There was nothing to see. Coincidentally, it’s been the first rainy day in weeks. Riding my bike to the store, I gazed into the clouds, and I saw no strange lights or shadowy vessels. But the change in weather and the darkening of the skies only heightened the mystery. What lay beyond the low screen of rain clouds?

Maybe they’re monitoring our progress with COVID-19. I’m guessing that public health would be a major concern among interstellar organisations. If the germ we’re dealing with currently was able to jump from bat to human, then what sort of devastating bug could leap from us to them? We might wipe out the whole star system. They came a long way to be taken out by something like COVID.

Maybe they’re monitoring the American election. I can imagine this might explain their long silence. The first Pentagon video was recorded in 2004 – during an election year. They may simply have found every election more disturbing than the last. In 2012, they might have been tempted by humanity’s uncharacteristic show of reason. But then they waited one more cycle in the name of caution, and 2016 happened. If my theory is correct, we won’t hear from the emissaries of reasoning extra-terrestrials for quite a while.

We do one thing right as a species. Watch these videos and listen to the Navy pilots as they track down these mysterious objects. In a movie, these scenes would have been scripted as hushed or full of portent. That’s not reality. These boys are having fun. They’re laughing, and they’re shouting to each other in admiration of these little flying saucers.

I hope the banter of these pilots was the aliens’ first impression of us. It’s definitely the best they will have for a while.

Travelogue 902 – April 26
The Tory Emperor

I had to laugh when a Guardian writer attributed an interest in Marcus Aurelius to a type of privileged Tory who would downplay the threat of the coronavirus. Huh? Strange that I hadn’t seen myself as the privileged backbencher before. I don’t have the penetrating mind of a Guardian columnist, clearly. And so I still read the old man, even as I obey social distancing rules without complaint.

Perhaps Aurelius himself wasn’t aware how prejudiced he was, favouring economic productivity over precious human life. But, of course, we all recall his proclamation against quarantine when the Roman stock exchange took a tumble and unemployment figures were skyrocketing.

I can only reassure our esteemed columnist that life is fleeting, and all prejudices die. I read it often enough in the writings of the Tory emperor, Marcus Aurelius. “Celer buries Hadrian and is buried himself. These noble minds of old, those minds of prescience, those men of pride, where are they now?” Sage commentators from the Guardian can be sure that the fat Tories will follow soon, rolled into Aurelius’s intellectual limbo and forgotten.

The sort of frontal attack her article represents is so boring. Proving yourself smart and taking the liberty of being unkind, these are the hallmarks of most commentaries during the early Trump years. Aside from a few late-night talk show hosts, most opinion has been too earnest. It seemed to us as though indignation should work. It was justified. They were a dark couple of years, and opinion makers being right and snarky didn’t really help anyone.

I’ve been seeing some funny stuff online lately. It seems like people are getting funnier. It’s very possible that I’m only now discovering what was always out there. But it may be that things had to get worse. Or we needed time to mature into confident opposition. It’s a kind of ripening of opinion.

Oppressors are nearly always comical. Look at our autocrats from the past century, their strutting; their fantastical, clownish oratory; their peculiar grooming; and their fondness for costumes and parades. They and their followers are ridiculous. And they can’t stand being laughed at. It’s too bad they’re so feral, but that doesn’t eclipse the comedy. Why are we so drawn to the Tiger King story? It’s the autocrat written small. Repulsive and a little frightening, but delightfully funny.

I admit, there aren’t too many passages in Aurelius advising us, “Laugh. Have a good time.” But his writings were ruminations. They suggest he didn’t need a reminder to have fun. Maybe the comedy in his position came to him readily enough. Maybe he needed reminders of graver responsibilities. We clearly don’t need to be reminded how serious the situation is. The Trumpistas, on the other hand, have their eye on a different ball than we do. Their reminders should come in the form of laughter: “you are mortal; you are ridiculous.” Trump wilted after the disinfectant episode. He was playing a bad part without conviction, and the crowd jeered. Simple enough.

Travelogue 901 – April 22
Sin and Distancing

I’ve started into the ninth book of Aurelius’s Meditations, slowly working my way through the emperor’s thoughts verse by verse, fortifying my spirit with his spare language and sun-baked philosophy. A dose of Aurelius is like a dry sauna, cleansing by desiccation.

There are interesting variations, though. Sunday evening, I had an asthma attack that sent me to the doctor. I was utterly wiped out. But Aurelius’s words that night were about kindness. Predictably, his words were an exhortation to show the kindliness of the gods, but I was touched, as though a stern dad were putting his hand on my shoulder.

The emperor starts the ninth book in a way I would have thought uncharacteristic, speaking with some passion about ‘sin’. I’ve been meaning to look into other translations. Was the Greek translated correctly, or appropriately for his time? It’s hard for me to dissociate the word from its Christian usage. That’s probably unfair. I doubt the Christians came up with the concept.

I’ve been thinking of Christianity – again unfairly, I’m sure – as a kind of tonic to the philosophies of Aurelius’s time and class. I’ve come to think of his ideal virtues as those of the noble classes. From those assured power and renown, religion and philosophy asked an ongoing contemplation of death, the great leveller and the waster of reputation. Christianity was a religion that spread among the plebeians. From those who never had power nor fame, Christianity asked an ongoing contemplation of heaven, where everyone was redeemed in the eyes of a familiar God who knew where every sparrow fell.

But there’s something current about Aurelius’s Spartan ways, stressing internal strength and contentment, something apropos while the world suffers through a time of pandemic, exercising social distance and suffering silently. And least those with dignity are. There are those protesting, like school kids whose recess has been taken away. But the majority have a care for the other as much as for themselves, a virtue commonly recommended by both Aurelius and Jesus. When encountering on a narrow sidewalk a stranger who makes a circuit to maintain social distance, one person is offended and another sees a courtesy. Which are you? It’s really as simple as that.

In Holland, we’re well into our sixth week of shutdown. It’s a culture that prides itself on common sense and moderation, and it must be said that things are calm. Dutch moderation didn’t go for full lockdown. Perhaps as a consequence, the country has always been among the top ten in deaths from the coronavirus. But no one panics or protests. The streets aren’t deserted, but people are generally and genially careful. They maintain distance, but they do it with a wry smile.

Travelogue 900 – April 19
Choosing the Gulls

The sea gulls are loud. It’s all I hear as I wake up. I lie still and listen to them. I like bird song, even the plaintive cries of gulls. I can imagine them circling around each other, perhaps fighting over some scrap of food. I know some people hate gulls, but I’ve always liked the sound of their voice. They remind me of the sea.

It means a lot to me, living by the sea. But it would be hard to say what that means. Without the sensory experiences of the winds, the North Sea clouds, the occasional salty smell, and the cries of the gulls, how would I know the sea was there? I rarely visit it. The sea is more an idea than a fact, and the gulls the opposite. The mind likes ideas, but the emotions favour facts. I see the gulls every day. Did I choose the sea or the gulls?

The sun is out again, after only one day of light showers. It’ll be another beautiful spring day, and I can’t wait to take the girls out for a walk by the canal. The grass will be strewn with pink petals from the cherry blossom trees. They’ve been in full bloom for weeks and their flowers are beginning to drop. If we can get out in the morning, there will be a pleasant chill in the air.

It’s Sunday; ballet classes come first. Ballet class doesn’t mean leaving home. Nothing does anymore. It all happens by video call. Little Ren’s class is first. We set the computer on a chair in the kitchen so the girls can dance on the clear floor of the attached dining room. I help her slip on her pink ballet shoes. I join the meeting on Zoom, and we all say hello to the teacher. Other children show up in their windows.

It’s wonderful that the lessons continue despite the shutdown, but the rituals around a family activity can be as important as the activity itself. We used to arrive early and change, while the other families arrived. I would take Little Ren into class. We would sit together on the wooden floor while the other children entered. After both classes, we would go out to a café for treats.

Living the video conferencing life is convenient. It saves us a lot of time. But I’m sure the girls miss the excitement of seeing everyone, the immediacy of dancing for your teacher in the same room. Little Ren finds it hard to concentrate in this format. She gets distracted; she wanders. Seeing the world through her eyes is a reminder of how small the computer screen is, and how flat. If we could afford the thoughts, we might wonder at the arbitrary power we’ve invested in these little screens and their pictures.

Travelogue 899 – April 11
The Lonely God

Someone on Facebook has warned me to beware any vaccine they develop for the coronavirus. It’s part of a plot on the part of Bill Gates to wipe out a portion of humanity. It wasn’t clear what Gates’s reasons might be for that; and it didn’t seem to matter much. Guys like Gates have evil agendas. They eradicate people like weeds. They take guns away, like ice cream from babies, just to watch children cry.

I shouldn’t find it funny, but I do. Isn’t it wonderful that fans of the Avengers find adventures in the headlines, that they should see Thanos in the spindly figure of Bill Gates? The human imagination is dazzling.

Who are we to each other? I think the pandemic has offered opportunities to take stock, look at society and our fellow humans with a new eye. In general, has it made us appreciate each other a litte more? Does absence make the heart grow fonder? Or was alienation already a cancer in the body of post-modern societies? And has the pandemic only exacerbated the situation, making our fellow man even more sinister-looking beyond that metre and a half, behind their masks, behind their windows and doors?

Edgy people are getting edgier. Those not used to courtesies and self-sacrifice are finding an end to their patience. They stalk the streets and host vengeance-on-the-world parties. Ideologues have had time to dig their trenches. Behind their lines, they scribble pages of new twists on old paranoia.

“Men exist for each other,” Aurelius writes, in one of his blunter formulae. “Then either improve them or put up with them.” It’s a sentiment he returns to repeatedly, and you feel the depth of the challenge. We don’t know much about the emperor’s social life. He may well have been an amiable gent and a gregarious host. But the essential friction among people affects extroverts as much as introverts. Even the cheeriest garden party only allays our tensions for a minute.

That said, the landscapes that I glimpse through his prose are lonely ones, not unlike the recent photos on Facebook posted to illustrate the lonely feeling of social distancing. “It’s a lonely job,” the cliché tells us, being at the top. Holding all the power, in a position that comes with godhood, might isolate a person. He talked himself through his trials, drawing on the wisdom of his teachers from the past, the philosophers. These pep talks are his Meditations.

How many are writing their Meditations in these lonely times? What ratio would describe the Meditations being written compared to the treatises of raging propaganda?

Travelogue 898 – April 6
A Different Time

The girls are adapting easily. How would they know whether it’s a new world? Coming one year later, the pandemic might have been an event that really registered with Baby, an event that made a permanent mark in her memory. But she’s too young. She was going to school every day. Then, quite suddenly, she wasn’t. She didn’t ask questions. She plays with Little Ren, her little sister, and she does her lessons with Mom at the kitchen table. The rhythm of life is familiar enough.

For older kids, I imagine it will be a milestone of sorts. For young adults, it will be more, a turning point, perhaps like 9/11 was for a previous generation, perhaps like the fall of the Berlin Wall for another. For old-timers, it’s more like a quiet watershed, like a massive mudslide you watch from a distance, too far away to hear, an event that changes the landscape you’ve been admiring for years. Who knows? There are plenty of partisans out there ready to tell me that everything corona is hyperbole. Why did we ever shut down the taverns and the stadiums?

I’m happy if the girls are free from worry. They don’t need this particular dose of cold water to the face. The world is not safe, and they’ll find that out in due time. For now, adversity wears the mask of the sister. They make each other cry. They monopolize toys; they pinch; they steal more kisses from Mama than is fair to the other.

Leave it to us to shoulder the horror. Leave it to the ouders.

At night, I listen to my ghosts, and I turn to my solaces. I read a verse or two from Aurelius, the counsellor, the consoling voice to those with a plague of concerns. He’s a good counsellor because he’s an anxious man, confiding to his journal the needs of the soul for order and sense. An emperor, he felt powerless. Someone unique, he felt anonymous before time and fate. His meditations read like affirmations, like the comforts one breathes to oneself at the end of a tough day.

And then he reminds us he’s from another age. “You have perhaps seen a severed hand or foot, or a head lying by itself apart from its body,” he writes, reminding us he’s a ghost himself. My fears have no life anymore, he slyly says.

Travelogue 897 – April 2
Farther

There’s always some train passing. I see a tram, or I see the intercity trains. The interiors are empty. The sun shines through the windows unimpeded. If auto traffic doesn’t look to have slowed much, public transit looks hard hit.

In Week Three of the Shutdown, I’ve wandered a bit farther afield on my walks. When the sun has been shining, I’ve been drawn to walk into the sun. It’s the end of the day, and sometimes I find myself on the high road leading west to Schiedam. I say ‘high’ because it rises above the level of the neighbourhood, passing over a busy artery that leads north into the Spaanse Polder. That’s about where the elevated Metro curves in to run parallel to, and above, the road to Schiedam. Dead ahead, at this time of day, at this time of year, shines the sun. I can’t turn away from the warmth and light, and so I keep walking.

Without turning around, I enter Schiedam, following the road into the town centre, following the Metro line to the central train station. It isn’t far; I can see the zig-zagging roof of the station from where I start on the Schiedam road. My eye follows the elegant curve of the elevated Metro track as it turns to the right, gliding down the gentle hill toward the station.

The effect of the station itself is unsettling. It’s nearly empty. The people who are there seem lost or vaguely hostile. Everyone walks around each other without looking, except for the teenage boys horsing around and laughing too loudly. The quarantined world is one that bad boys seem to enjoy. I check the boards, curious to see what is still running. The train schedule seems normal, except for the abundance of red script identifying trains that have been cancelled.

The Metro ride back is also an eerie experience. There are four of us in the car. All of us are male. Three of us are young and shrouded in hoodies, - meaning, the other guys. All in all, public transit is a spooky experience. The Metro train takes no time to cover the distance I’ve fashioned a long walk from, taking that long turn in the sky over the football pitches in less than a minute, while I watch out the window from my seat, trying to count my steps.

Travelogue 896 – March 28
Under the Metro

It’s not the most colourful neighbourhood to be trapped in. We didn’t move to Spangen to contemplate the littered streets and drab, decaying architecture. We moved here five years ago to have a nice apartment on our budget, and to be within reach of the rest of the city.

Now it seems the rest of the city has faded away. I spot the high buildings once in a while, when cresting some small rise nearby, and I salute wistfully. Once I lived in a city. Now I live in a neighbourhood. There will be many lessons learned from the coronavirus, and one will be that a place is only as good as its half-kilometre radius.

Now it’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve seen any other part of the city. The furthest I go is the supermarket, which is on the other side of the Metro station. In the other direction, I take walks occasionally in the afternoon. Years ago, walks were my daily staple for sanity. It’s nice to have them back. But my past lives had prettier backdrops. It’s a struggle to squeeze any inspiration out of this one.

I find myself drawn to the pitches on the other side of the Metro line. Out here, the Metro line itself rises from the earth like a stalking giant, extending a high platform away from the city and toward the rail line’s next stop in the neighbouring town of Schiedam. Under that elevated track are the pitches I’m talking about, a complex of half a dozen or more community pitches.

Some young people and families flout the social distancing rules to come out and kick around a football, but, for the most part, the pitches are now quiet. It’s the peace that draws me. And it’s the sense of space. It’s nice to have one place nearby where you aren’t ushered down narrow alleys among city buildings, and where you can see some distance. The mind and body respond immediately, as though there is more oxygen and as though thoughts find more space.

I turn one corner and cross in front of a school that is dark and neglected. I turn another corner and walk the length of a parking lot facing the pitches. Half the cars parked there are occupied by someone busy with their mobile. I’m from another time; I can’t see that as anything but creepy. Down farther, I pass the broken façade of an abandoned fire station. Leaving the parking lot, I follow a path underneath the elevated tracks, skirting the edges of the far pitches. These fields are grass, and no one plays out here. It occurs to me that I would rather play on grass, but then I’m no football player. Gaming fields have their measures, and my walks are short.

We’ve turned a corner in the corona shutdown. We’ve entered long stretches of temporal space that we hope are the middle stages of the crisis, though it’s hard to escape an uneasy feeling we’re entering a vast open territory we would call the Future, or a new age, if we just knew.

Travelogue 895 – March 24
Week Two

I can still find my class schedule on the school website, like a report from a ghostly life beyond the reach of the coronavirus; like glimpses of people in a parallel Metro train, where they don’t have to keep 1.5 metres apart; like the world you think you wake up to before your memory corrects you.

In my ghostly class schedule, I see the rooms numbers where students would have been waiting for me on this very day; where I would have flung my jacket around the back of the chair and sat in the swivel chair to log in on the computer; where I would have stood at the window during the last minute before class started, staring out over the decommissioned harbour six storeys below.

But that is just our shadow world now. Each day’s events take us further away, as though those Metro trains were drifting steadily apart on divergent tracks. This world is the quiet one, in which everyone maintains an empty seat between themselves and their neighbours.

It’s funny how quickly it all happened, and how easily. It overtook us like a spring breeze, rippling grasses and bending slender branches among the trees, then raising goose bumps when it arrived. It was all the stranger in the way it arrived with spring, blue skies dawning on quarantine.

Our last day of normality was a rainy one. I dressed Little Ren up and put her on the bike. Wow, I’m already nostalgic for that kind of whimsy: to take my little girl out to the café, just because we felt like it; just because we craved a treat; just because we wanted a change of scenery. I worked on the laptop at our table; Little Ren played among the toys in the children’s corner.

As I paid our bill, I asked the barista what time they opened in the morning, and he told me with an awkward smile that the boss had just called to say that the government was shutting cafes and restaurants for three weeks. A chill ran down my spine. Life without the café? Now it’s been almost two weeks.

Those were grand days. People sat freely at tables, all in the same room, sharing the same air, touching tabletops that strangers touched only moments before. We lived dangerously.

Travelogue 894 – March 18
High Noon at Eight O’Clock

We have found our quiet routines for a quiet new era. It doesn’t take long. Animals are built for habit. We’re up early. Even with nowhere to go, sleeping in is not an option. Little Ren wakes up, and she makes her noisy way downstairs. She dresses herself. She insists it’s time to go.

When the corona shutdown began last week, it triggered a wave of hoarding. By Saturday, many shelves at the local Albert Heijn were empty. There was no meat, no greens, no fruit. There was no rice, no pasta, no bread. “Aha,” I said to myself, standing forlornly amid the desolation. Shopping could no longer be random.

That’s when we started shopping first thing in the morning, right when the supermarket opens. Little Ren took this mission to heart. After the first morning trip, she was committed. We were not going to miss a day. She dresses herself in the morning. She puts on her tights and shoes. He pulls on her own jacket, though she leaves the zipper to me. She finds the bicycle helmet, and she silently, but impatiently, waits for me to be ready.

The ride to the store is quick and agreeable. Little Ren chatters the whole way. She likes to tell me, “You’re going the wrong way, Pop.” I play along. “Oh, really? Well, let’s try this way.” There are enough turns along the way to make that game possible.

The weather has been fine. The moment the corona crisis broke, spring came to the Netherlands, as though nature had only been waiting for a sacrifice. The weather has been eerily pleasant; all the more eerie for how miserable the winter was, relentlessly wet and windy.

The cherry trees have blossomed. Tulips and daffodils are blooming, often in bright patches among grass strips dividing the roadways. The girls are at an age that they love flowers. These are the high points of cycling with them, when they shout out in delight at the sight of more buds opening.

The shelves are never as empty as they were last weekend, but there are always a few key lacunae. Some gaps rotate; some are constant. Fruit and vegetables, for example, come and go in quick succession, different colours for different days. Pasta and pasta sauce come and go. Meats each have their two- or three-day season. Even precious toilet paper appears suddenly in great bounty. The more fixed gaps are among the soap and medicine shelves. Sanitizer and paracetamol are simply gone.

When we arrive at the supermarket, Little Ren takes charge. She marches through the entrance and straight to the turnstile. There she pauses like a gunslinger at the doors of the saloon. This is it. Papa, grab that basket.