Travelogue 1024 – December 30
The Sounds of Lockdown

We’re deep into holiday break (and lockdown) and the city is quiet. I enjoy getting on the bike during holiday breaks. The city seems calm and human. There are some exceptions, of course. There are the kids and forever pre-teens who are setting off bomb-like firecrackers from Poland in the dead of night. And there is the weather. Even when the people of Holland are still, the sky is not. There is a rushing wind under the grey sky that actually pushes me uphill on my bike when I’m crossing the Beukels Bridge. Pedalling up the other side on my way home is another matter. I’m pushing against the wind at a pace that I could beat by walking. But in a perverse twist on laziness, I don’t want to bother dismounting from the bike.

After doing some shopping, I stop by my favourite café. It’s owned by a young couple, half Brit and half Dutch. The Englishman is manning the front today. There’s only the front to man during the lockdown. They’ve had to let everyone go, and they run the place themselves. They’ve blocked off the whole space beyond the front counter. In the back, you see that he’s set up a tee and a chipping net so he can practice his golf game. It’s one of the few outdoor activities still open.

We talk about the pandemic, and we talk about the new year. He thinks the lockdown was a good idea. It’s nice to talk COVID in reasonable tones. 2021 has been a year of shrill voices. Maybe we get to be tired of wild-eyed ranting in 2022? That would be nice. He’s planning for a quiet New Year’s, as much as possible among the fireworks. He has a rooftop garden, where he and his wife will share some champagne and watch the adult fireworks shows.

Down below, the rest of us will be hiding behind locked doors with pillows over our heads, while the streets are surrendered to the communal lizard brain. The police have been clear that, though fireworks have been banned, chasing down incels with explosives will be low among their priorities. Fair enough. We wait to feel the hope of a new year dawning until the sun has risen and the smoke has cleared.

Travelogue 1023 – December 20
If We Had Been Saved
Part Three

It’s easier to imagine a world in which Hitler won the war than it is to imagine a world in which Hitler never was born. That’s fascinating. Why would that be so? I’m guessing the answer is a simple one. There are tangible measures for the first case. Hitler is a known quantity. The war is a familiar narrative.

If it’s ‘easier to imagine’, does that lend it some moral value? No, it’s clearly easy for our species to imagine dystopias and nightmares. It’s almost a specialisation of the human psyche. As much as historical speculation can be made to serve a moral purpose, it is neutral at its core. The what-if game can be quite a callous one. Concept exists in its own sphere, free of values. History is an objective study, in which the human experience is reduced to a series of formulae.

‘High concept’ is popular in fiction these days. Speculation, whether about history or future, has become a ubiquitous confection for readers and film audiences. Downey Jr as Sherlock Holmes fears the collapse of Western Civilization, but the hero prevails, and disaster is averted. Reality then becomes the counter narrative: August 1914 is an anomaly. Sherlock Holmes has already saved us from that. If every what-if makes of our reality its shadow, then by now we are living in the counter narrative removed many, many times from the intervention of the first what-if.

Speculation becomes a habit of the mind, leaping right over the obvious. If the world wars had been averted, the most salient effect would have been that some sixty million more people would have been alive in 1945. Our minds may run to the playground of big ideas, but the graveyard is still plainly in sight.

Is this the symptom of something deeper? One needn’t look too far to see other signs of our callousness toward human life. I think of the recent Rittenhouse trial. Whatever the reason, there is no dispute that this kid shot two people dead in the street. Who remembers the victims’ names? Who expresses remorse for the lives cut short? I’ve had to remind myself who they were, so seldom were they mentioned in the international press. Neither victim was armed. Both were concerned that a teenage boy was moving freely among protesters with an assault-style rifle. Every so often the term ‘death cult’ is applied to the Trumpistas. I wonder if it’s confined to them. Maybe they’re just the dumb kids who say it out loud, and, feeling dumb when we laugh, say it louder and louder.

Human life has never meant more to me than since I became a parent. It’s a miracle. We are blessed when we grasp this simplest principle. My girls teach me every day. We have so little of real value to cherish in this short existence. We manufacture silly placeholders when we feel empty, things like religious or nationalistic dogmas. We search for justification for the gift of life: a god’s design or success according to various yardsticks. But life is its own value. When we show ourselves careless with that treasure, we reveal something truly ugly in our nature. No pretty idea disguises it.

Travelogue 1022 – December 19
If We Had Been Saved
Part Two

We’re back in hard lockdown. I had no idea it was coming. My doctor friend didn’t see it coming, either, so I don’t feel too out of touch. Suddenly this morning we’re locked down until mid-January.

“Mensen worden moedeloos,” declares a local story. People are down. Yes. I have less reason than most to feel down. Lockdown has very little effect on my lifestyle, sad to say. We don’t go out. I don’t work in a market. The promulgation of a hard lockdown should be of little consequence to me. Instead, I find it depressing. As a public health measure, it’s an act of hope. As a government pronouncement, it’s like an admission of defeat.

It finally feels, two years in, like history. It feels like the Battle for Britain, a battle of endurance and attrition. It’s a dark time, months of deprivation sandwiched between Trump-Brexit and … God knows what. With the supply chain meltdowns we’ve seen, we may even see rationing to complete the World War II analogy.

Is this the collapse of civilization that Downey Jr as Holmes warned us about? Seems rather delayed if it’s a result of the world wars. But I’ve already been forced to admit that I have little notion what the difference between a saved world and an unsaved world might be. Professor Moriarty tried to plunge the world into total war in 1891. Holmes saved the world that time (according to Guy Ritchie,) but apparently was unable to in 1914. As it happens, Holmes himself did survive the war. As much as we like to think of him as a nineteenth-century character, he did appear in stories until 1927. Therefore, he and Watson entered with us into the fallen state, the dreamy historical miasma we optimistically called post-war.

My imagination failed me when I attempted to visualize a world that had been saved from Moriarty’s evil machinations and had avoided all world war. Would we have been free from climate change? Probably not. Would we have avoided the spectre of nuclear war? Probably not. Would we have been spared K-pop? Not likely.

Then I realized the premise was wrong. In the same way that Guy Ritchie’s movie (innocently) makes something of the Holmes canon that it was never meant to be – Arthur Canon Doyle had never dreamed of steam punk, – the brand of historical speculation that (not so innocently) forces nature into shapes it was never meant to hold (high-concept what-if propositions) has another purpose than accurate portrayal. It’s fun to entertain grandiose schemata of civilizational glory and decay, punctuated by once-in-a-millennium events, and suggesting Boschian scenes of disaster to the imagination, but, of course, few are privileged to live through tectonic civilizational shifts, and fewer realize it’s happening. Those who lived through the decline of Rome would have only dimly been aware of that decline. Those alive during the sacks of Rome in 410 and 455 A.D. were shocked, but they lived in a world in which Rome had already been lost in every sense but the final one, its safety behind ancient walls. Rome was no longer even capital of the Roman Empire in the fifth century.

Travelogue 1021 – December 12
If We Had Been Saved 

Part One

Now I use our Netflix accounts to watch cheesy old films, films like the old Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies. They’re like candy to look at, and the humour is just as sickly sweet. The dark sets are Gothic, and so are the villains. In the second Holmes movie, Professor Moriarty is planning to ignite the First World War a generation early, in 1891.

At one point, Robert Downey Jr is declaring that they need to stop Professor Moriarty and avert the collapse of Western civilization. It’s just a movie and just a throwaway line – these days, no villain worth their salt aims for anything less than the collapse of civilization. Why bother with a bank heist? We hear about the civilization’s demise every few hours on average. It’s somehow integral to every group fantasy of ours. But this spin on the old trope made me think.

World War I was destined to come, despite Sherlock’s genius. So … has Western civilization collapsed after all? It certainly would be a relief to know it was over and done with. Villains might be left without a sense of purpose, but the rest of us would be happy to get on with our humble, medieval existences, bowing to our half-witted leaders and watching the televised jousts from the UFC.

But what if the world wars had actually been averted and civilization saved? What would a saved Western civilization have looked like? Science and industry were already developing quickly. Population was ready to boom. Culture was overshadowed by Freud and Einstein, well before 1914. Would the post-colonial world have looked any different? Would it have been post-colonial at all? Would China have become any less of a juggernaut? Would Europe have retained more power, more dignity?

Russia might have retained its empire. Maybe there would still have been some Romanovs lingering on, celebrities with no power. A young Vladimir Putin might have died protecting a minor Romanov prince from anarchist bullets. Or perhaps perished in a skirmish with the Bolsheviks, who resurge every few generations in a wild run at the government in St Petersburg.

Assuming my mother still found my father attractive without his uniform, and assuming I still found my way into this tired old world, what would I have found? Being an American would have meant something different. No doubt, without being called upon to lead the “free world”, America would have been both lesser and greater, less noble and less corrupt, frivolous without needing to be self-righteous. Where would MAGA be without the narrative of a ‘great’ America? Sleazebags like Gaetz and Greene would have been free to be the offensive real estate agents they were born to be, chasing money instead of MAGA glory and bullying minority parents at PTA meetings.

This is a fun what-if game to play, but I’m surprised to find myself struggling to come up with tangible ideas about how it would have been different. It’s a game that seems easy to play until you try. I’m not even sure how to interpret the challenge it presents.

Travelogue 1020 – December 5

How Baroque

It’s hard to resist thinking back to our trip to Rome in October. It’s probably the last time we saw the sun. To say it’s been rainy here would be to insult Holland’s genius for gloom.

One sunny morning in Rome, we ventured across the Tiber to see the Vatican Museums. Though it’s been years since I visited, it was all so familiar, those astounding halls with all their wonders, and the peculiar exhaustion that creeps up on you and embraces you. That place demands a very specific sort of stamina.

COVID had made some changes. The biggest difference was our unregulated time in the Sistine Chapel. The last time I visited, we were marched in in groups and given fifteen minutes to enjoy. This time, the crowds were thinner, and we were allowed to freely enter and leave. In fact, we passed through the famous chapel twice, after I spaced out and led my family right past the Stanze di Raffaello. We had to circle back, seeing Michelangelo twice in order to see Rafael once. I would say that was a fair trade.

For me, Rome was the city of Michelangelo. Invariably, I visited Michelangelo when I visited Rome: the Pietà, the Sistine Chapel, the Campidoglio, the tomb of Julius II.

After some time, as though from the periphery, there entered another artist to contend for the soul of Rome. That was Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini came a century later, and he never cut the romantic figure that Michelangelo did, but his claim to the Eternal City is undeniable.

Bernini is everywhere. He’s at the Vatican. He’s scattered here and there across the centre, perhaps mostly famously at the Pizza Navona. He’s in museums, most prominently in the Galleria Borghese. Bernini was the son of a sculptor, and he was a prodigy whose talent was recognized early. He was the favourite of a string of popes, and he spent the majority of a long life contributing to the beauty of his city, in sculpture, paintings, architecture and monuments.

Unsurprisingly, as I’ve grown older, I’ve become drawn to the artists with long careers. I have a new regard for those survivors, the Berninis, the Rembrandts, and the Shakespeares, the artists who lived undramatic lives and who produced huge bodies of work. As much as Michelangelo is regarded as a brooding outsider – and to a good degree he was, – he was also, like Bernini, spotted early and favoured through much of his life by the popes of his time. He lived to be 88 years old.

Bernini’s art isn’t to everyone’s taste. He is father or midwife to the Baroque style, and to the extent that the centre of Rome stands as a monument to Baroque, we owe a tip of our hats to the overwhelming genius of Bernini. You may not like the drama and the grandiosity, the anguished faces and the gilded rays of Holy Spirit, but it was the art of its time, and Bernini was the master.

Travelogue 1019 – November 28
Santa Maria in Trastevere

The story of our food experience in Rome unravels quickly after its humble beginnings. We’re increasingly in the thrall of two overpowering forces, parenting fatigue and the charms of the city. These forces combine to make daily planning nearly impossible. By dinner time we are fine finding somewhere nearby for ease. We also want something more local and less touristic. Our solution is to cross the river and stroll around Trastevere. This is how we discover the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere.

This is a lively area of Rome. It wouldn’t be fair to say it was “Roman” in the sense we hoped for. There are just as many non-Italians here as in the Campo de’Fiori, but in Trastevere they are expats living or studying in Rome. In that sense only, we’ve graduated to something more local. We return there for dinner several nights in a row.

The piazza is old. The fountain in the centre dates back to the eighth century, though what you see is the work of Bramante. The basilica on the piazza was first founded in the third century. Much of the current building dates back to the twelfth century, notably those mosaics along the top of the façade. The church is long and squat, in the style of many basilicas in Italy, offering a somewhat blank face to the piazza, despite its embellishments, with a tall and square campanile in the back. The weight of so many centuries settles on this square with a sobering effect. Despite the piazza’s reputation for nightlife, the spacious square, laid with fanning cobblestone and lined in Renaissance colours, still feels a bit forlorn and quiet.

In the piazza, or along one of the nearby lanes, we tried pizza al forno and tried more pasta carbonara. We sat outside when we could, watching the night overtake our new little quartiere. We watched lovers sitting on the steps of the fountain. We watched the young lady chase a purse snatcher across the piazza. We watched the police van lazily pull into the piazza some ten minutes later. We placated our restless little girls, promising them gelato if they would sit still a few moments longer.

Travelogue 1018 – November 21
Rommel

I’m grading papers, digital piles of digital papers. Students are reporting their research findings, drawing conclusions, and making recommendations. I’m reading with an evaluator’s eyes, judging language, capturing errors, and tracing the arc of thoughts in flight, like the darting of starlings in mid-air. Perhaps it’s more like turkeys taking flight in some cases. But it’s quite a task, when you think about it, this construction of cases, this logic by numbers, this raising of towers with bar magnets and steel balls. It’s a kind of miracle. How do children manage this? I mean, developing to this sophistication of thought?

I turn away from essays for a moment to watch my girls. I wonder at the journey ahead of them. I imagine them consulting with me about argumentative essays and rhetoric.

Baby Jos was recently reciting to me a silly rhyme she learned from a friend, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly.” I laughed with her, enjoying her pride in having acquired this verbal toy. She repeated it all evening. Little Ren, meanwhile, was insisting that I call her “sensei”. She showed me how I should bow to her. Her big sister had helped her craft a black belt from paper. How long will I be able to share these small triumphs with them? How long will they include me?

Can it be possible that these thoughts experiments, my girls’ rhymes and their playacting and the three-letter words in their little books, will compound over time and evolve into essays for teachers like me?

Baby’s teacher recently posted a video of their classroom. Overnight, everything had been overturned and the room was a mess. The children entered with their mouths open in wonder. Clearly, the school had received a visit from Rommelpiet. Rommelpiet is one of the more entertaining of Dutch Christmas traditions. Sinterklaas comes to the country at this time of year. (Sinterklaas is NOT Santa Claus. Santa has a closer analogue in the ‘Kerstman’.) And when Sinterklaas travels, he does so with a retinue of ‘Piets’, who, unfortunately, are conventionally portrayed as black sambos. The Piets are tricksters, but none more than Rommelpiet, who likes to sneak into schools and turn everything upside down. ‘Rommel’ means mess in Dutch.

I wonder if Rommelpiet requires an ‘inside man’ at each school. I would like to volunteer. Imagine the hallways littered with essays. If only they were still on paper.

Travelogue 1017 – November 20
I Made This

Just a block away from the Caffe Sant’Eustachio is the one of my favourite sights in the centre of Rome. You come upon it quite suddenly, because this part of Rome is really the medieval city, where buildings crowd in and huddle against the cold centuries between ancient and modern. These are the streets north of the Palatine and Capitoline hills, where, during the Roman Republic, armies were called to duty and were trained. The fields there, collectively called the Campus Martius in those days, lay outside the city walls. Once the Western Mediterranean had been conquered, and Rome’s wars had become long campaigns fought far away, the armies were encamped and trained outside the city, often outside Latium. During the Civil Wars and Augustus’s reign, the Campus Martius became a place to build. Pompey built his theatre there. In an ironic stroke of fate, this would be where Pompey’s greatest adversary would be assassinated four years after he himself had been called to Hades. Years later, Augustus Caesar’s great general, friend, and son-in-law Agrippa would build the Pantheon in the old Campus Martius. No one is quite sure of the original function of the building, beyond it being a temple, hardly a novel purpose for structures in ancient Rome, where gods and goddesses abounded.

Walking from Sant’Eustachio, one approaches the Pantheon from behind, the first sight of the building offering hardly a clue to the significance of the place. One is positioned too close to recognize it. The wall could almost be the side of an old prison. There are a few small, irregular barred windows. Otherwise, it is blank, solid brick, old, eroded and reworked many times. One sees the remains of archways, filled in with brick. One sees the remains of mysterious walls and floors. One sees square peg holes where supporting beams must have been wedged. People are sitting on the low wall that surrounds the base of the building. The original level of ancient buildings is significantly lower than the streets today. Inside that boundary wall is a kind of dry moat surrounding the Pantheon. A narrow alley runs along the back wall, where tour groups shuffle along, blocking foot traffic, oblivious to anything but the voices in their ears. One eventually finds one’s way round to the imposing façade, where an ascending piazza allows for perspective. It’s a dramatic sight, high columns holding up the pediment of the temple’s portico, the pediment engraved with Agrippa’s name: in letters that can probably be seen at half a kilometre. “M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT,” it says. I made this thing.

As it happens, the Pantheon we see was probably not made by Agrippa. The original was likely wholly destroyed in a fire. It was restored by Domitian and then later by Hadrian. It’s even possible that the amazing dome that tops the Parthenon, still a model for architects more than a millennium later, was Hadrian’s innovation. It’s hard to say what the first temple looked like, aside from the awe-inspiring façade that proclaims that Agrippa lived and built.

Travelogue 1016 – November 13
Deer in the Headlights

I didn’t get far in recounting our food experiences in Rome. I started about our dinner in the Ghetto district, and then my mind was drawn back to the Tiber. But that’s how Rome is, city of distractions.

Let’s talk coffee. I was quick to ask Carolyn about coffee, and she recommended the Caffe Sant’Eustachio. That venerable establishment, open since 1938, is located in the Piazza Sant’Eustachio, just behind the Pantheon in the centre of the old town. The coffee is fantastic – they are famous for their secret blend, – and we enjoyed sitting lazily in the piazza. There’s nothing much to look at in the piazza, beyond the life of the piazza itself, and it wouldn’t be Italy without the beautiful chaos of the piazza. The place, the plein, the platz, the square, the piazza: warm images come to mind, whatever the culture. But the Italian piazza is a special one for me, informed by the taste of caffe and brioche and by the noise of a hundred conversations overheard.

A piazza like Sant’Eustachio would hardly seem a space worthy of the name. It’s more like the wide bend in a stream, where tiny rivulets converge. The space is irregular, uneven. Outdoor tables seem like awkward claims on space where the ‘stream’, as it were, eddies. There is no boundary between caffe space and the street among the fan-patterned cobblestone. And the caffe itself is as much a touristic sight as any ruin, a vestige of the mid-century Rome that showcased its unique cultural alloy of exquisite taste with the disarming disarray of the Italian street.

The one sight on the piazza, might be the church of Sant’Eustachio. There’s been a church on the site at least since the eighth century. In the back, off the piazza, stands its twelfth-century Romanesque bell tower. The façade on the piazza dates to about 1700, and includes a captivating deer’s head with a cross set between its antlers, high above the entrance. It’s a reference to the saint’s conversion, which involved spotting a radiant deer like this one while out on a hunt. Eustachio was an early martyr, a Roman noble who abandoned all to join the Christians.

Travelogue 1015 – November 10
Ghettoes

I want to report about our food experience in Rome, because our friend Carolyn was so generous with good advice about where to go. I’m afraid it will be a dubious homage to Carolyn’s good taste and her graciousness, though, because I am so underdeveloped as a foodie and because our schedule for fine dining was curtailed by the little girls holding our hands.

We made a good effort. We had dinner in the old Ghetto district, not far from our hotel, where we were able to taste some real Roman cuisine, including pasta Cacio e Pepe (cheese and pepper) and Carciofi alla Giudia (artichokes fried as ghetto residents apparently did). We ate outside, under umbrellas tilting on the cobblestones. The girls were more excited about the Fanta than about the Roman cuisine, I’m afraid, but we managed to keep them seated long enough to enjoy our own meals.

We had not arrived in the Ghetto district from our hotel, but from the direction of the river, just at the end of the Via del Portico d’Ottavia. We had toured the Forum Boarium and then walked along the river, beside the pretty Isola Tiberina. The Forum Boarium was a cattle market during the Republic, on a spot that would have been right next to the river. Located in the ancient market are two of the oldest standing temples in the city, dating to the two centuries before Christ. They are small but pretty. It’s a quiet spot, a pleasant opportunity to contemplate the ancient architecture.

Across the street, it’s not so quiet. There, tourists line up to take their pictures at the ‘Mouth of Truth’. No one is quite sure where this huge circular mask came from, though it probably served as something like the manhole cover it looks like, possibly originating in the floor of one of the temples across the street. Now it hangs outside the church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, parts of which date back to the 8th century. A superstition grew around this spooky mask that, if you uttered a lie while your hand was in the mask’s mouth, you would lose that hand. Standing together with all hands in the mask’s mouth is a popular family photo.

If you stop there, be sure to spend a few minutes inside the church. It’s lovely. You can spot decorative elements from a variety of eras, like delicate ancient columns, early medieval tile work and frescoes, and the Romanesque bell tower. There are suggestions of its Greek roots, as the church was founded while Rome was under Byzantine rule and set in what was then a Greek district of the city.

Travelogue 1014 – November 3
And We Protect Them

I’m looking at the disappointing results in Virginia this morning. The case against Trumpism has become so plain that making it begins to feel redundant and alarmist. It has become clear that this was never about principle. It was never about what was fair or what was right. It was never in question whether the Trump partisans in the public eye were anything but despicable. We were fools to argue it. All we communicated was that we were old school. That we were the real conservatives and the Trumpistas the (fascist) revolutionaries. I blush for people who still try to shame those operatives on Twitter. I blush a little even for the pundits who continue to deploy reason, though I admire their efforts to document the facts – fundamentally for future generations.

There was a moment, squandered by now, to suppress them. For decades, I’ve questioned America’s interpretation of free speech, as a protection for hate speech and sedition. We don’t feel shame for suppressing physical violence, but we do for suppressing the ideological kind. More people than we would like to admit respond to displays of raw power and disdain for the rule of law. By conceding legitimacy to the fascists, in the name of a false principle – that hate speech is protected speech – we have allowed them shows of power. People are excited by it, drawn to it. To people who think, it appears lemming-like, this crowding to the precipice of fascism. We reason that power for power’s sake benefits a very few people. Let’s be frank: the supporters of these fascists believe that the punishment will stop with immigrants and LGBTQ people and minorities. The police will beat on blacks. They will never beat on us. Those of us who reason things out realize that fascism has no boundaries.

I do believe in common sense. I do believe in reason. And some of us will continue to talk about these unfashionable tools of the human mind. It will be embarrassing in a world of flashy violence. But my optimism is long term. I think America will have to rediscover democracy, but I do believe it will. The question is only, how much suffering is required first? A depressing number of people need to be reminded that force and power for their own sake are thrilling only for a very short time. Power feeds on inequality. There have to be a lot of people under that thumb. ‘Minorities’ will not suffice. Power needs millions and millions of shoulders to bear its weight. It requires all their money, all their words, all their physical vitality. Ultimately, it needs all the last resources of a failing ecosystem, the system that provides food and water and air. All must be sacrificed for the pleasure of watching other people wield power with impunity.

Travelogue 1013 – November 1
The Campo

After our delays in Paris, we arrived in Rome late at night. We were exhausted, so we opted for a taxi ride into town. That was terrifying, a shot of adrenaline to wake us. It was a reminder of our many travels in Ethiopia, when our lives were in the hands of crazed taxi drivers, kilometre after kilometre on unlit highways at night, the headlights turned off to conserve the battery. But the trip into Rome was a short one, and we did in fact arrive, clasping our children to us in gratitude.

I was the first up in the morning. I went out for supplies. It was a sunny morning, and I was immediately struck by the casual grandeur of the place. We were staying a bit south of the Campo De’ Fiori, so I headed toward the famous piazza. It used to be one of my favourite spots in Rome. But it wasn’t as though I needed wait until the Campo to see the beauty of Rome. It was everywhere, the cobblestone alleys winding among palazzi and churches in every direction. This was exactly what I wanted to share with Menna, who hadn’t been to Italia yet. And I was rewarded a few hours later, once the girls were up and washed and we’d had a little snack. We stepped outside, and Menna was instantly enchanted. We needed no ambitious agenda of sights to see. The city of Rome was itself the sight, lane after lane, piazza by piazza. She hasn’t stopped talking about Italia since we returned home.

One theme for the trip was going to be coffee. Our first coffee was there in the Campo de’ Fiori, at an outdoor table where I could sit in the sun and the ladies could all sit in the shade. We have lots of specialty coffee in Holland, but there’s something special about coffee in Italia. I had been anticipating that first taste, and it didn’t disappoint. We sat for a while, watching the activity of the market in the square, regarding the lovely buildings surrounding us, some with rooftop gardens, and commiserating with poor Giordano Bruno, sixteenth-century philosopher who was burned at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori and whose statue stands at the centre of the square.

Travelogue 1012 – October 30 

Dunes

I’ve stumbled upon my one degree of separation! The authentic quest for a true American is for his or her closest brushes with fame. We Americans love the famous, and we envy them. Granted, we envy fame in a lazy way, happy to let the famous do all the work. But we have a God-given right to the chance encounter or connection that might shed some reflected light upon us. We acknowledge that fame is a burden best borne by the famous, but, by God, the famous are duty-bound to share their glory. And at last, I’ve found my one degree!

The new movie adaptation of “Dune” has brought Frank Herbert back into the spotlight. The book is now acknowledged as one of the, perhaps THE classic science fiction novel. When I read it, I was a teenager. The book had yet to find its place in the canon. Only a few of the sequels had been published, as I recall. Hollywood hadn’t discovered it yet. It had its impact on me. The character Atreides and the ambience of the spice planet were printed indelibly in my imagination.

I’ve been tempted to pick the novel up again. Curious about Herbert again, I did some reading and discovered that he had paid a visit to Florence, Oregon when he was working as a journalist in Seattle. Florence is a town on the Pacific coast, and it boasts a gorgeous stretch of beach, notable for its huge sand dunes. In Herbert’s day, the sand of the dunes was threatening to engulf the town, and engineers were looking for a solution. Herbert was fascinated by this stand-off between man and nature. Man won that particular battle, and the beach is paying the price. But Herbert had an idea while he was visiting Florence. Imagine a desert planet, he thought.

My claim to fame is the overlap in our destinies, Herbert’s and mine. It seems that only forty years after Herbert had walked that glorious beach, I was destined to walk its length myself. I was inspired by no brilliant thoughts while I was there, but that wasn’t my job, was it? I was placed there simply to step unconsciously in the sandy footprints of literary celebrity. It was a simple task, and I performed it well. It was my mother who did the lion’s share of the work, settling on Florence to be her home during her final years. All I had to do was to visit my mother.

The seaside in Florence is a powerful place. I’m not surprised that Herbert was inspired. The ocean rolls in with majesty and thunder. The rocks that rebuff the waves are magnificent. And the dunes that suggested a desert planet are still high and wild. It’s a moving scene, and I was fortunate to have been able to see it in several seasons. It’s a remarkable location, with or without celebrity. But now it bears the touch of Hollywood, and it boasts a glow of immortality.

Travelogue 1011 – October 28 

Lucky Even So

 

During our autumn break, we flew south to Rome, finally using the vouchers from a set of cancelled airline tickets originally bought for the 2020 Bath Half Marathon. That race was to have taken place in March of 2020. It shouldn’t sound like that was so long ago. It feels like a decade ago.

The spirit of COVID still forces itself on those who are audacious enough to fly. We had two flights to make on Monday, and we made neither. The first flight required us to leave home at five in the morning, so we had little humour for the first entanglement. The airline clerk checking us in told us flatly that she was rebooking us for a later flight, then dispassionately explained that we had no “Passenger Locator” form on file for the end destination. I thought I had done my homework, checking airline and government websites, and yet somehow it had escaped us that this form was required for arrival in Rome. The staff person’s complacency informed us that, though we were insipidly foolish, we were not the first. She smugly refused any questions and sent us to the airline service office, where I sat for quite a while fuming and filling out a lengthy online form on my mobile. Thanks to this laughable form, I have collected one more black mark on my record as a father, falling very far short as a model of grace under pressure.

Even flying several hours later, we had some time to kill in Paris. We were determined to have an espresso in Montmartre. That should have required only a train ride from Charles De Gaulle to the Gare du Nord. It’s an expensive ride, and I hesitated before the ticket machine when I saw the total price for four. I steeled my resolve, I made the purchase, and, in the next minute, a new announcement came braying across the vast hall. Our train would no longer depart from Terminal 2. I saw heads swivel around me, as dozens of others processed the distorted French as best they could. Then commenced the dash. We made our way up a level and to the shuttle connecting terminals. The train would depart from Terminal Three. We pushed our way through the growing crowd to enter the next shuttle.

I had done my research. I had identified our destination if we wanted the best coffee in Montmartre. It was a tony café below the basilique du Sacré-Cœur, where tables were set up in an enclosure in the narrow little lane leading up to the basilica, where the church’s gardens overgrew the wrought-iron fence beside the road, where the people were far more relaxed than we were after our stressful trip to their door. The servers looked at us with some alarm. And they told us the coffee machine wasn’t working.

We never did get our espresso in Paris. Nor did we find the lovely croissants we imagined in anticipation of the trip. But we did stand for the first time as a family at the top of that magical stairway, looking out over the City of Lights. And we felt pretty lucky.

Travelogue 1010 – October 25
Quickly Turning to the Tudors Again

 

In my final thought in the previous blog, I was reminded of the concluding chapters of Hilary Mantel’s latest book. In the end – spoiler alert – the protagonist dies. Anyone with the barest knowledge of Tudor-era history knows it’s coming, and indeed that knowledge fuels the momentum of the work. Mantel surely writes with the reader’s anticipation well in mind, tapping it as a source of suspense. The political tides turn finally, and turn shockingly, on Cromwell, and we follow him into imprisonment. He is to be executed. Mantel has her opportunity to indulge the writer’s perennial wish to follow the mind into oblivion. She does just that, narrating to the point at which – quite literally in Mantel’s account, – consciousness flickers like a light going out.

Mantel’s books do haunt one. They are beautifully written, and they assert a Cromwellian voice so durable it is hard to shake. I’ve analysed that voice at unforgivable length in earlier blogs, but I have to add just a few more words. Who could blame either author or reader for wanting, after thousands of pages with Cromwell, to see the story to its gruesome denouement? But it should be obvious, at the minimum, that the rounding off requires a change in tone. To say more, it’s a strain on the method. The book’s narrative voice has been an uneasy compromise between observations made inside-the-head and outside, a kind of hovering above the crown that has sounded like documentation, or, more exactly, the rehearsal of a document: perhaps Cromwell dictating by rote a journal of his extraordinary life as counsellor to the king. Suddenly, with imprisonment, the options for a locus for this voice narrow radically. There is no one to report, no one to report to, and no reason to report. There is only a solitary man with no opportunity to speak. We have entered a living soul’s black hole; data does not escape his isolation. What is the privilege of our viewpoint? When he enters through the doorway of death and the voice still carries on, like the twitching of a limb, the question is pressed even further. Where does this voice reside?

Mantel is a masterful writer, and the book works. We want it to, and it does. Ultimately, that’s what counts, and I don’t mean to diminish the achievement. I broach the question of voice just as an interesting problem raised by choices forced on the artist and her readers by their own cathartic need.

I believe Henry VIII himself still haunts us. He’s in my thoughts again because I picked up a book about Tudor times in Utrecht. The book is a biography about the young Earl of Surrey, Henry’s final victim before himself passing away in 1547. Surrey was a prodigy, a free spirit and a writer who inspired generations of writers. The book is about Surrey, but it’s this capricious figure of Henry VIII that catches our eye, like a glint of light in a mirror behind him.

I find myself wondering about this man. It surprises me how often. He’s a riddle. How does one justify this power over life and death? How does one understand Henry’s choices? Does he have rules to guide him when he considers executing friend, wife, nobleman or courtier? I don’t mean to imply that he had no reasoning or that he was a sadist. What is perhaps most frustrating about Henry is the sense that he was a feeling and thoughtful man, motivated by strange (unfamiliar, mysterious) impulses.

As quite a number of people court today’s fascists with flushed cheek and shining eye, it seems important to question, what occurs in the soul of a man like this, who holds fragile life in his palm with such aplomb, such nonchalance?

Travelogue 1009 – October 23
Who’s Listening?

A final word about old Utrecht, before my geographic focus shifts dramatically southward. The history of the Netherlands is basically a story of water, and every location has its roots in some watery negotiation. Utrecht is no exception. While most of Holland (only two western provinces of the Netherlands) was a still a marshland, Utrecht rose from the wilderness as a northern anchor on the Rhine. The Romans under Emperor Claudius had settled on the river as their northern frontier, and the site of Utrecht became one link in that chain. The course of the Rhine has shifted since then, and Utrecht currently sits on a vestigial spur of the great river, a branch they call the ‘Crooked Rhine’. After Rome abandoned it, the place went dark for four centuries. When it reappears in the historical record, it’s as a fortress town for the Franks. Now Utrecht becomes the centre of a new kind of offensive, the one on hearts and minds among the Frisians. St Willibrord enters as lead evangelist, and in 723 Utrecht is made the seat of one rare Dutch bishopric. That launches Utrecht’s long reign as the Netherland’s most important city. It will take the county of Holland centuries to dig itself out of the mud, and Amsterdam to rise to prominence on the back of its commerce. Even then, Utrecht is not eclipsed. It remains important enough to play a role in the establishment of the republic, and to become the site for the republic’s biggest university, founded during the Dutch Golden Age.

This is the town I overlook as I climb the glass mountain of the event centre, a town that has been a vital religious, political and intellectual hub for the country for centuries. It makes sense that I would come here - from the bigger city of Rotterdam – to feel some intellectual connection to the wider world.

English author Max Porter has written a poetic little book about the last days of the painter Francis Bacon. He was invited to the Utrecht literary festival, and he was interviewed in one of the highest little alcoves in that alpine glass monument. He was warm and thoughtful and witty. The event was thoroughly enjoyable.

The book is something both more and less than the author event, as well it should be. The book is about many things, as well it should be. For me, it poses an age-old question, a question particularly poignant to writers: who is listening to our final thoughts? The true writer wants every thought and experience to be recorded, is haunted by those that escape. He or she is most keenly tormented by the final thoughts, perhaps the greatest, that go unrecorded. Porter imagines, probably justly, that most final sensations are trivial and thoughts gibberish. But the question outweighs our conjectures. The exercise only draws attention to the emptiness at the centre of it.

Travelogue 1008 – October 16
But There Was More

During the Utrecht literary festival, I attended two live author presentations, and I watched the videos of two other author events that were online. Each was framed as a discussion between a local writer and the visiting author. That structure worked well. It was more natural and allowed the author to be challenged. But I could have wished for more talk about books.

Authors feel like they have something to say. That is why they write, of course. The two authors hosted live in Utrecht had a lot to say. They were eloquent and what they said was truly moving. Relatively little was said about the writing process. There was much more to be said about philosophy, grief, shame and politics. I was inspired and exhausted by the time I left. In neither case did I have the energy to stay for the book signing.

I’m hardly a writer, I thought as I rode home on the train. I would never have the stamina for an event like that. Even in casual conversation, I don’t know what to say about my writing. I figure I’ve said everything “on paper”. I went to great trouble to phrase it the way I wanted. Why then dive in impromptu? These authors did not have my reservations. They were even more compelling live than on the page. They were unfailingly articulate, humble, gracious and correct.

I was inspired by them, proud of them, and then embarrassed for them, as well. It seemed a lot to ask of authors, this display of courage and virtue. Fortunately, each of them had a wealth of ideas, fully formed and correct ideas that motivated their writing and overflowed the banks of any one of their works. Their literary projects were a means to speak about those bigger things.

The audience hung off their every word. The hall took on a church-like atmosphere. The topics became esoteric, and these men’s stories became like the lives of saints. The topics became like theology.

I’m allergic to theology. Theology has a didactic purpose, just as preaching does. Theology was invented for debate, preaching for conversion and enforcement of conformity. These aren’t evils in themselves, but devices to make one wary. When it comes to church, I prefer mute ritual and the shadow talk of stories.

Sadly, I’ve seen the impact of this virtue-mining on authors who are less gifted orators. They become so circumspect and cautious as to drain the interview of life. Interviewers prospect for philosophy and politics, and authors retreat behind carefully worded deflections.

Travelogue 1007 – October 15
He Wrote About His Childhood

I had a birthday a few weeks ago. It was a big one, and so I needed to dream up a suitably big way to celebrate it. After you’ve seen enough birthdays, though, you run out of big ideas. What I really wanted to do was get out of town. It had been too long.

Usually, I go out of town when I have some activity to motivate me. In previous years, I had organized fun trips around road races. For a previous ‘big’ birthday, I ran a full marathon in Rome. A few years of COVID cancellations have soured me on the road race strategy, and, along the way, have left me in regrettable condition.

No, this year, athletics weren’t going to cut it. Given that the body wasn’t ready, it would have to be a celebration of the mind. I wanted a literary angle. The town of Utrecht came to the rescue. Thanks to a fortuitously timed literary festival, I got to travel to Utrecht and listen to a few authors speak about their work.

It’s fun to observe how places evolve in our lives, in our perception and our experience. Utrecht during my first years in the Netherlands was an enchanting town, built round a famous cathedral and along the winding river beneath it, lined with cosy pubs. Once the honeymoon was over, Utrecht became an ugly train station in the middle of the country, perpetually under construction. For a moment, it became a bookstore hidden on a busy lane by the river, full of riches. Rotterdam is not a literary city, and book shopping had become stale.

The train station is finished now. It’s no prettier on the inside, but much more so on the outside. What an impact on the visitor when he can simply exit the train station and emerge into a wide public plaza with fresh air and can see the town laid out before him; rather than, say, being shepherded through dusty warrens made of plasterboard for hundreds of metres, only to emerge inside a rather shabby shopping mall. The latter was the only experience I had known of arrival in Utrecht. The finished station was an epiphany.

The event centre is not far from the central station. It stands like Everest before George Mallory, a city block of high rooms and precarious stairways. We walked in, brandishing our QR codes for the vaccinated, and we found ourselves lining up with people in tuxedoes and evening gowns. This didn’t seem like our crowd. Downstairs, we discovered, was reserved for Bach. With a vague gesture toward the sky, we were directed up … and up. Stairway after stairway, rising inside the high glass walls until we overlooked the city like aviators. Near the summit, we found our small hall, exile for the literary types, come to see a French author who wrote about his childhood.

Travelogue 1006 – October 1
The Power to Surprise

It happens we have some family time before the girls’ school opens in the morning. We sit on a bench together in the playground outside, a playground that is an odd oasis of fun in a tightly packed little neighbourhood. The playground is a like a stage set among brick buildings, a platform of concrete between two lanes that veer away from the school.

I’m the family’s schedule-keeper, and I’m compulsively early. It’s not the kind of quality that wins anyone’s affection. I’m the one to wake everyone up and urge them to get ready. When we’re early, it appears as though there was more time to sleep after all. Though we’re never more than five minutes early, it translates into hours of lost sleep in the imagination.

It doesn’t help that it’s the time of year when light comes later and later in the mornings. By now, we’re waking as first light only just discolours the night sky in the east. Soon enough I will truly seem a villain, waking them when the stars are still in the sky.

It’s light by the time we arrive at the school. The day’s light is a diffuse, autumnal light, grey with clouds, a glow rather than direct warmth from the sun’s rays. We watch the other kids play, climbing, swinging, kicking a ball. Sometimes Baby Jos joins in, while Little Ren hangs back.

The two girls’ natures begin to diverge a bit, even as they grow more alike in looks. Little Ren is nearly as tall as her big sister, and even her parents mistake the two occasionally, when the girls are seen at a distance.

Ren takes this opportunity to share a few thoughts. I won’t pass them along now, as they are still so special to me. I’ll say simply that she’d taken it into her head to tell me what her two superpowers were. She did so in a distracted way, as she often does, speaking as she watches all the action in the playground. Her remarks were so creative, I just laughed in surprised.

That’s the “superpower” of art, and of wisdom, to surprise and delight. Little Ren has that. Baby Jos is more forthcoming, but she’s like her papa, in that her thoughts are well-ordered. She can be brilliant, but her thoughts follow upon one another in plain sight. Ren prefers to avoid conversation, but then she’ll blurt out the most stunning things. Immediately, a children’s story blossomed in my mind, based on Ren’s utterances. I hope to have Menna illustrate it soon!

Travelogue 1005 – September 19
How to Enjoy September Sun

The sun has been indulgent. We are experiencing a gentle late summer in the land of moody skies. I couldn’t resist stopping by my favourite pub on my way home one workday. The days are long enough still to catch some lingering sunshine in the early evening. I sat outside, at a table overlooking the brick lane that runs alongside a canal. You don’t see the canal itself, but the masts of the boats anchored there, the houses across the canal, the big sky opened up by the passage of the water.

At the next table sat a family of Brits, two sisters and their parents. They had spent the day touring the city and seemed underwhelmed. As far as I could tell, being underwhelmed was their default state. They kept up an impressive stream of negative chatter while I sat there. Anything or anyone that came up in conversation was efficiently cut down, and the violence was carried off in such bright tones and casual delivery that they might have been trading observations about the weather. The gossip about friends and family was particularly biting. No one emerged unscathed. Even the dead were fair game. The mother proposed some words for a note of condolence, and the others laughed at her sentimentality. One daughter reeled off the proper formula. “No reason to gush,” she said. The daughter’s favourite adjective was “boring”. Everything in life perpetually teetered on the edge of suffocating boredom. This woman was no teenager. No matter how lustrous the long hair she persistently touched and waved about; no matter how often perfect the painted nails she held up for view; no matter how restless the bobbing sneaker at the end of one long leg crossed over the other, she was securely past thirty.

The bored daughter had one redeeming moment. It was a moment of reminiscence. She veered suddenly from the excoriation of a childhood friend, whose fond memories of their times together had to be proven false and undeserved. She veered suddenly into heart-warming reminiscences of her father. The old man clearly didn’t know what to do with this outburst. He mumbled a few unemotional observations, and let it go. She wasn’t bothered and went on at length about how special those occasions were, the weekends when Mother was off on business and Father indulged his girls in all sorts of special activities and meals. I found myself liking her, despite first impressions.

It didn’t last. A Dutch friend showed up, and the conversation returned to observations about how dreary the walk to the pub had been, how disappointing. The Dutchman played along. Complaining is a Dutch sport, and they’re very good at it.

It's not fair to judge people based on their behaviour on vacation. These jaded vacationers in their yachting clothes may be saving the world at their day jobs. But who doesn’t wonder occasionally whether wealth isn’t wasted on the wealthy, touring on the tourists, education on the educated? In a life so short on privileges, how are they assigned? Shouldn’t they be apportioned to those of us who have demonstrated a talent for graciousness?