Travelogue 1154 – 29 November
Piets On the Map

Despite temperatures being close to zero, parents and their children were milling about in front of the school this morning. Juf Franca, Little Ren’s teacher, told us we were waiting for the Piets. She showed my girls a map on her phone, pinpointing just where the Piets were, across the river. They were running late.

The Piets are Sinter Klaas’s helpers. Sinter Klaas and the Piets have been in the Netherlands for several weeks already. They arrived from Spain in mid-November. That has meant gifts and candies at home (left by the Piets) for two weeks. But it has also meant lots of public appearances from our high-profile visitors, all leading up to Pakjesavond on December 5th, when big gifts will be delivered, and the whole merry crew will bid us adieu. “Hasta la vista!”

Now the Piets are on their way for a visit to our girls’ school. This is something I like about the Sinter Klaas tradition. It’s very concrete, and very Dutch. By contrast, though Santa Claus appears in movies and shopping malls, he is still something of a cross between mythical figure and celebrity, everywhere and nowhere. Sinter Klaas exists on the map. He lives in Spain. He arrives in the Netherlands every year in a very public way. You can go watch him chug into town on an old barge. You can follow his daily itinerary. The Piets are busy scampering around the towns, delivering gifts and engaging in mischief.

The story is absurd. Children scratch their heads at the many faces and shapes of the Piets and Sinter Klaas. They wonder at the timing, at the resemblances to Santa Claus. But they are very ready to roll with it. Why not? It’s less glamorous than nesting at the North Pole and soaring round the world behind rows of reindeer, but the rituals have a charm that excites a loyalty that I don’t think Santa ever achieves. We love the Santa story, but do we love Santa? He's venerable more than loveable, sparks a wistful affection more than a playful one, engages the fancy more than the mundane sense of fun. Sinter Klaas is a man of the people.

Travelogue 1153 – 20 November
Hailstones

The gentle showers of one day turned into hail the next. I had to travel to an appointment in The Hague, and the schedule was tight. The girls had a half day at school. Between dropping the girls off and picking them up, I had only a few hours. Everything – apart from the train between Rotterdam Centraal and The Hague Centraal - I did on bicycle. In Rotterdam, I rode my own bike, of course. In The Hague, I rented a bike. All in all, I spent over an hour pedalling in the weather.

The stinging impact of stones came and went. Sometimes the ice was traded for rain. I splashed through puddles, steering with one hand into the wind as I held the hood of my rain jacket, as I made slow progress toward the dentist’s office, amazed that I would go to this effort to sit quietly in a chair for the man who would tap at my broken tooth and prod my tender gums with a metal instrument manufactured for no other purpose than to jab at people’s gums. Pain upon pain, I meditated each. This is the life we lead.

Even so, I’m also enjoying myself. There’s a spark inside, a centre that I observe, and from which I observe. There’s some peace there. When my systems aren’t flooded by anxiety, there’s some peace. I’ve become such a practiced dentist’s patient that my anxiety is quieted. The hail picks up again. There’s nothing to be done but to keep pedalling, keeping the wheel straight in the wind.

Travelogue 1152 – 19 November
Complicated Skies

Before six, a gentle rain is tapping at the window. It will be cold out. The season has turned. Yesterday was a day of complex skies. The clouds were everywhere. The sun never quite found its patch of blue because it sails so low now, but it shone through the vaporous masses and lit them with pretty pastels, linking sunrise to sunset in a way only winter can do.

Sinter Klaas is in Holland, and I’m happy to report that the girls still believe. Baby Jos complains that many of her classmates don’t. She chooses to, and I’m pleased. It’s such a sweet tradition, and I’m grateful to have one more run. Already the girls giggle at the silly romances of cartoon characters, and I cringe at the relentless approach of the great introversion called adolescence. I have enjoyed their childhood at least as much as they have.

The teenage years orient us toward humanity, toward each other, toward society. It becomes a mania that defies recovery. Most of us have marks from those years, as though we survived a pox. I have an impulse to protect my girls, a wish to protect the magical realism of kids’ days. Of course it’s futile. And I can’t say there is no beauty among the clouds. There fly there ideals and passions, insubstantial things that fuel hope and renewal among people. Those are desperately needed.

Travelogue 1151 – 16 November
Wonders

Groggy, I’m up before six. On a Saturday. I’m up hours before light on a weekend for a sport that I had never heard of before moving to Holland. Or if I had, it had made the kind of impression that my dreams made last night, leaving a kind of echo of something, a reverberation to be picked up later in another form.

It’s not enough that I’m up before light, I have to get gear ready and pack fruit for the whole team. I have to be sure the girls are dressed for their games. I have to travel with Baby Jos to the far reaches of the metropolitan area on a long tram line. We will ride all the way to the last stop. Beyond the club’s fields are only parklands and farmers’ fields.

There will be a clubhouse next to the hockey fields. I will mill around with parents, hoping for coffee, while our daughters warm up in the cold outside. Afterwards, we parents will stand in the wind together, shivering in our coats, while our teams of young girls clash on the field. Baby Jos has reached the age where games occupy the full field and one full hour. That’s a long time. There are no benches; we stand beside the field.

The clubhouse there is comfortable enough. It’s newer than our clubhouse in the city. But we have more fields. And just a week ago, the dome went up. Every winter, the clubs all play ‘zaal’ (hall) hockey indoors. The bigger clubs, like ours, erect temporary halls for the purpose, arching, white, balloon-like structures with a rectangular base fitting snugly onto one of the regular playing fields. Inside are half a dozen smaller fields with smooth flooring to make the indoor game fast.

That a building like that goes up in a few days still amazes me. Maybe it’s because I am reading a lot of medieval history lately. In a modern setting, sure, why not? There’s construction everywhere. But I can’t help imagining the wonder this place would excite among Charlemagne’s masons. That hockey zaal would instantly be the biggest single room in the county, aside, perhaps, from a few basilicas in the most important towns. The age of the cathedrals was still centuries away. They would marvel at the ceilings held high without pillars. The biggest shock would be that the room was for children’s games.

Travelogue 1150 – 6 November

Elections

I was home ill on America’s election day. It seemed only fitting. Much of the campaign season sounded like the rantings of a man with a life-threatening fever.

Somehow everyone managed to stay healthy through our trip to Venice. We wore no masks. We ate whatever we liked. I made a list of everything we tasted the first night in Venice, sitting outside at a table by a quiet canal: octopus and squid, shrimp, sardine, mussels, clams, sea bass, polenta, lasagna, and mascarpone cream. We were offered five courses, and we never hesitated. Sure, we were slow moving in the morning, but we soldiered on, stepping right out for caffè and brioches filled with marmellata to fortify our aching bellies. Then we started our tour with the Ca d’Oro and a traghetto ride across the Grand Canal to the Rialto Market.

The next day, we had an appointment in a church in Mestre, where we would attend the battesimo of a sweet little girl growing up in the Netherlands, far from the beautiful land where her father grew up.

My original home is faraway, too, in many ways. It’s become a matter of language. “He speaks my language,” Trumpistas will say. “He says what I want to say.” If so, this is a code that I find indecipherable. On the surface, it’s a hotch-potch of insults and nonsense, belligerence and incoherent parables. But underneath, there must be a powerful code. So powerful it outweighs the speaker’s character, which the most debauched Roman emperor would have described as “filthy”. If it was a smell, it would be a penny lost in Vance’s sofa. If it were a clue in Pictionary, it would be a sketch of a soiled toilet brush.

I have read that this will be the criteria of our age, not credentials but authenticity. It’s a damning indictment of traditional politicians if the huckster rings to the ear as more authentic.

We have developed – maybe through film texts – a mythos that the criminal is, at the very least, sincere. According to this strange frame of reference, being openly evil spares the individual any need for artifice. Extending that logic, being good requires artifice. That’s how the average American feels. Civility is suspicious. Better to be evil than to be false. It’s a degrading ethos to live by – made more degrading by forcing others to live under the reign of criminals.

Travelogue 1149 – 1 November
Dark Edges

The darkness over the water is eloquent. It is not silent. The water laps there; the boats’ engines roar. The darkness does not speak, but it is expressive. In the distance, the city lights are chattering. The waters are watchful, and they keep their counsel.

The evening falls quickly over the lagoon. It is autumn, and the season’s night comes on early. We have travelled across the water to the island of Murano. We sat for snacks and drinks in a square there as the day drew to a close, the sky above the piazza changing colour, becoming violet and losing its light.

Afterward, we rode the water bus back to Venice in night. The lagoon was rung round with the yellow lights of towns and roads, but the blackness ate up all the space between. Lights were reflected upon the waves, then the darkness ate them again. Ahead, Venice was sparsely underlit, as though asleep already, brick towers over the jumble of rooftops, their white stone highlights, their history, obscured by the night.

There was life in the streets. It was early. But the crowds had dwindled. The people walking had purpose, as though, night drawing on, they must get home. Crossing bridges, we came upon darkness again. Canals that featured no access, where buildings walls dropped into the water, had no lighting. Shadows fell precipitously off the bridges. Above, there were ancient buildings we passed that had no lights in any windows. Many seemed abandoned above the ground-floor shops.

La Serenissima emerges from the shadows, the ancient city still there underneath the noise of the jaundiced lights of the modern.

Travelogue 1148 – 17 October
The Dark Ages

This is the season that I forget bike lights. Spring lights have been lost. The new ones I purchase, I forget at home because the routine is still new. I don’t attach lights to my bike because the frequent rains short them out. So I find myself out without lights in the dark. Everybody else has lights. I have to watch for police, who stop cyclists and fine them.

It’s more complicated because I have bikes in two locations. My life is west; my life is east. Home and work are on opposite sides of town. I stow a bike in a free garage at Kralingse Zoom Metro Station, dry and safe. My daily bike is sturdy and rusting and carries a heavy child seat on the back. Neither have a light.

The autumn dark creeps in, and, even home and dry and safe, the night seems to become deeper. The fall brought me a long series of nightmares a few nights ago. I had eaten late, and whatever was for dinner hadn’t agreed with me. The dreams were of the sort that repeated in sickening detail, branching endlessly. At some point, my dreaming mind began to believe in hell, the visions were so convincing and so persistent. I’m sure there was never another moment in my life I took the idea seriously. The idea of hell.

In one moment of isolation in dark semi-consciousness, I could be convinced that hell was as real as, say, Mar-a-Lago, and every bit as grotesque. It’s odd to think that such a bizarre concept could find an opportunity to become real. And, yes, I am speaking here about Mar-a-Lago.

It’s astonishing that one could be so easily convinced, even in a vulnerable moment of darkness and distress, that one could be damned. Not to claim that I’m no sinner, but, really, damned forever? Suffering pain forever? As it is, twenty minutes in a dentist’s chair is enough to push me to the edge of apathy or of swooning. What is eternity?

People believed in hell for centuries. When was the first time the concept of eternal punishment appeared in a human mind? One can just about imagine it. There was no moon to make shadows. There were no clouds to obscure the vastness of the night sky, the oppressing nullity enforced upon us by the Milky Way; no psychological safety nets in place: no science, no icons of the Virgin Mary, no karaoke. Add to that intestinal distress. I should think there were many opportunities for that in prehistory. The agonies would have been as relentless as the nights. The dreams engendered would have been tortuous. The notion of hell could have risen there as organically as salmonella.

Critically, the pain somehow became wed to an idea: “I deserve this.”

In this sense, night contrasts nicely with hell. It is impersonal, and it descends without an eye for the state of my soul. The very colour of the sky changes, and we are spectators, the sinful and the pure. The blue vibrancy of the day congeals and darkens, is shot through with red, while shadows creep forward. It is quite a show. One sees it better without bike lights.

Travelogue 1147 – 7 October
The Donation of Pepin

Until 751 CE, Rome had more or less always been Roman. Rome had belonged to Rome. For a thousand years after its founding, it had been autonomous and the centre of the early Roman Kingdom, then the Roman Republic, and then the Empire. Since the late days of the Roman Empire and then under the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, Rome had still been “Roman”. Suddenly, Rome being Roman was in question. The Lombards were at the gates; the Byzantines had been ejected from Italy.

In 754, the pope was in residence with the Frankish king. Pepin the Short was sending embassies to the stubborn king of the Lombards, who had conquered the Byzantine lands in Italy and was threatening Rome. Pepin was cajoling his own lords, convincing them that the pope’s interests were their own.

Finally, the Franks invaded in 755. They invaded again in 756. Apparently, one sound defeat each year was enough to convince Aistulf of the Lombards that the Franks were going to dictate their own terms. A treaty was signed in 756 that would become one of the foundational documents of the Middle Ages. It came to be known as the Donation of Pepin – a document that didn’t survive physically. The treaty awarded to the papacy the lands that were formally Byzantine in northern and central Italy. This was the beginning of the independent Papal States. Rome would be Roman again, this time until the nineteenth century.

Fascinating to me is the power of the Franks to make all this happen. There was no Caesar writing about the army’s crossing of the Alps. But we know that that was no mean feat; we learn that from classical authors before Pepin. The Frankish era is relatively silent; there are no epic poems or memoirs or verbose monuments. But clearly Francia was a martial power, restless and aggressive. Clearly, they had a reputation. They were intimidating. Aistulf did not need much convincing. And in another generation, Charles would simply put an end to the independent Lombard kingdom (taking the crown for himself). The Byzantines wanted to claim back the land that Pepin had rewon, but had no power to do it. They offered Pepin a fortune to return their lands, and he refused. That was that. The Franks were the new power in the West. And they would be the protector of the papacy.

Travelogue 1146 – 24 September
The House Guest

The story of the Bishops of Rome - the papacy - and the story of Northern Italy in general after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is bound up with the story of the Byzantine Empire and the Exarchate of Ravenna. For two centuries the exarchate stood against the Goths, first the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards. As long as the choice was between Byzantine and Gothic rule, many places were happy to be counted among the Byzantine camp, even as they effectively rebelled against Byzantine control, as the Bishops of Rome did. The petty infighting only weakened the Exarchate. In 751, the post-Roman order finally collapsed, as the Lombard king Aistulf overcame the Byzantines and ejected them from Italy. As Aistulf turned his eye on the Duchy of Rome, the new pope, Stephen II, chosen in 752, looked outside Italy for a balancing power. It’s worth noting that Stephen II was an Orsini. The Orsini were an aristocratic Roman family that would dominate Roman politics for a millennium. It seems no accident that, when Rome was being threatened, the Roman nobility stepped forward. Stephen II appealed to Pepin, the king of the Franks. It had only been a year since Stephen’s predecessor, Zachary, had approved Pepin’s appropriation of the Frankish throne.

What follows is fascinating. Stephen II asks Pepin for safe conduct into Francia. He becomes the first pope to ever cross the Alps. And for at least two years, he is a guest of the royal family while Pepin negotiates with Aistulf. He shows the Pope great honour and respect. When the Pope arrives, he receives him as a supplicant, and he leads his horse to the palace. The Pope returns the favour with many honours. He formally anoints Pepin king of the Franks, and he similarly anoints his two sons. He names all three “patricians of Rome”. These honorifics would become important in the future, when Charles became king, and when he and his descendants became emperors. Charles would have been just a boy when the pope was a house guest. Imagine the effect on him.

Travelogue 1145 – 18 September
The Stage Was Set

Time erodes the features of the man, as though he were statuary left in the rain. Revision paints him up as it thinks he should have looked, paints the stage as it would have liked the stage to appear. The erosion has swept away his friends and his colleagues and his family, and he seems a solitary figure. We are enchanted by solitaries. We imagine them heroic.

Charlemagne stands in isolation in the imagination of popular history, emerging like a mythical figure from the mists of the “Dark Ages”. I’m guessing he wouldn’t recognise himself in any of the popular portraiture. He was hardly a solitary, and he hardly saw his times as chaotic or primitive. The kingdom he ruled had stood strong for three hundred years, always expanding. He lived in a world of precedent and tradition. He was his father’s boy.

Great-Man stories are always leaky. They are exciting and engaging, and I think they can be useful in the narration of history, but they don’t capture the sweeping showers of truth very efficiently. The irony of celebrating Charlemagne the way we do is that we are, in the main, celebrating his father, Pepin the Short. Charles accomplished a lot; he was a great leader. But the creative elements, the moulds that were set for the Middle Ages, were largely set by his father.

It was Pepin who took the throne for the “Carolingians”, as his line came to be called, named after his son, Charles. Pepin made manifest what had been fact for generations, that his family had ruled the Merovingian kingdom. He deposed the last Merovingian king, Childeric III, and he did it with the quiet blessing of the Greek pope, Zacharias. Pepin united the north and south of Francia, subduing Aquitaine and seizing Septimania from the Muslims. He was responsible for installing Tassilo III as a vassal on the ducal throne in Bavaria. Charles’s dispute with Tassilo would eventually lead to the incorporation of Bavaria directly into the empire. Pepin was fond of reforming the Frankish church, and he supported the church’s evangelism in Saxony. Pepin forged an alliance with the papacy, perhaps the most enduring of his achievements in the romantic imagination of the Middle Ages.

Travelogue 1144 – 8 September
Baptising Saxons

Charlemagne picked up the family business with gusto. He pursued war strategies upon every frontier, expanding into Spain, Italy and Germany. In Germany, this translated into a long series of conflicts and negotiations with the Bavarians and with the Saxons. He ruled for almost fifty years, and the subjugation of those peoples was a project for almost his entire reign.

What might often be forgotten is that Charles was fighting pagans on both eastern and western fronts. We know the Spanish ‘Saracens’ were Muslim, but it might have been overlooked in high school history that neither the Saxons nor the Avars were Christian.

Context is always important in understanding history. When we recall Charlemagne as the first “Holy Roman Emperor” (and the title can be argued,) it’s easy to imagine him as a heroic leader taking the helm of a homogenous and unified Christendom. We imagine it because it was a convenient simplification and prejudice for later histories. The further distant the period, the less we care for detail.

But in fact (and here I indulge in my own cheap simplifications,) Europe was wilder and more heterogeneous than we are comfortable in admitting. Charles was far more focussed on tidying up affairs on his borders than on the big themes of history that we like to associate with him. He was more an agent in the expansion of Christianity in Europe than a glorious symbol of the already-consolidated Christian continent. It’s almost comical how many times he returned, not only to pacify the Saxons, but to force conversion and baptisms. But this mission would bear only a passing resemblance to the mission of later Europeans colonizers. The two eras would have seen their converts, their own religion, and the relation of church to state all very differently.

There’s enough evidence to believe in Charles’s sincere religious faith, but it is equally clear that he understood the political capital invested in the church. The bishops were internal allies. The pope was an external ally. A Christianized Saxony would have Saxon bishops he could summon. Charles was very fond of ecumenical councils and doctrinal capitularies.

Travelogue 1143 – 2 September
Just Another Rival

Charlemagne’s grandfather was Charles Martel. “Martel” was a sort of cognomen given him later, signifying “The Hammer”. His life story is an account of ceaseless aggression, making it a kind of history of the Franks written small. The Franks seldom rested from war, from the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West until the kingdom’s territorial peak under Charlemagne, a period of more than three hundred years. The expansion started under the mysterious, long-haired Merovingians and continued through the leadership of their majordomos, who eventually became the Carolingians. Martel himself moved from war to war, battle to battle, with every year of his life devoted to some campaign. We know about him because he was so successful at it.

His father’s wife tried to sideline him early on, pushing Pepin of Herstal to pass Charles over in favour of Pepin’s grandson, Theudoald. The poor boy didn’t last long. He was eight years old when he became majordomo. The Neustrians rebelled, and the Austrasians broke Martel out of his prison and gave him command. Etcetera.

Martel’s claim to fame these many centuries later – in large part thanks to the eighteenth-century historian, Edward Gibbon, – is the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers), in which he defeated a Muslim army under Abd Al-Rahman. This battle stopped Muslim expansion into Aquitaine, if only because Abd Al-Rahman, who was killed in battle, had proven to be irreplaceable.

This victory earned Martel a reputation as “Saviour of Europe” … but only centuries later, when the concept of Christian Europe had developed well beyond anything Martel himself would have recognised. Martel was deep into his own territorial strategies and ambitions, and he cast his own hungry eye on Aquitaine. The Muslims were not the existential threat that later Christian nationalists perceived, but just one more rival, much like the others.

Travelogue 1142 – 29 August
Long Time Ago

Charlemagne, or “Charles the Great”, was only the second king in his line. His father had had himself declared King of the Franks a few years after Charles was born. But his family had been running at least one of the Frankish kingdoms for more than three generations already, acting as majordomo to the Merovingian kings who had ruled for two and a half centuries.

It’s helpful to remind myself of the spans of time occupied by the early Middle Ages. They easily telescope from our vantage because there is so little surviving detail. Two and a half centuries is the amount of time the American Republic has survived so far.

It doesn’t seem possible to say when the Merovingian line was established. They were the kings of one small contingent of Franks, the Salian Franks, living some happy place like Brabant when Roman rule collapsed. It’s likely that Merovech, the source of the name ‘Merovingian’ allied himself with the last Roman general trying to maintain order. He wouldn’t even have been the first of his line, just the first with a profile in history.

It was Clovis, probably the grandson of Merovech, who created what would become France, taking advantage of the vacuum left by the Romans, fighting his way to the top of the Frankish heap, uniting all Franks into one kingdom that begins to be recognizable to moderns familiar with the map of Europe. He converted to Christianity and converted the kingdom. His name, Clovis, was an early form of Louis. So many patterns for French history were set so early, almost three hundred years before Charlemagne became Emperor. Again, that’s a chunk of time that would swallow up U.S. history whole, Washington to Biden. Fun fact: it's likely the language Clovis spoke was much closer to modern Dutch than to modern French.

Travelogue 1141 – 19 August
Lubber

The waves were high during our last visit to the beach. The girls waded in intrepidly. They needed no warm-up time; they were immediately splashing and diving and soaked with sea water. Joy was completely at the helm on their beach day. Their father, on the other hand, required a long time to enter the water. Past the knees, every centimetre was hard-won. Cold water translated into pain. There was no mediating sensation, like “refreshing” or “bracing”. No, it just hurt. All the way up the back and shoulders. But the water was relatively warm, and it was too windy to hang out on the beach, anyway. The blowing sands stung my legs.

Eventually, I was all the way in, out past where the girls could go, in the roar-and-silence of deeper waters. This is a nice meditative moment I get to experience a few times a year, bobbing among the waves in summer, just long enough that the family doesn’t miss me.

Strangely, it’s the troubled seas that draw me out. I am pulled by the bobbing motion, overcoming my fear of the sharp cold. I drift out beyond the feel of sand underneath my feet, and I watch the waves and the ships on the horizon. I look up at the clouds. I glance at the shore, and at the long pier half a kilometre off my shoulder. It’s comforting.

In the lobby of the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, a video loops on a big screen, films recorded on ships in the high seas during storms. We watch the waves crashing on the decks. The camera’s perspective drifts away from the ship, and out into the raw motion of the waves, huge, threatening, violent. The waves rise, they loom, white ribs of foam forming in the rushing wall of water. There is no stable POV, as the camera tilts with the motion of the sea. It is dizzying and frightening.

I live by the North Sea. I swim in the North Sea. But it’s a stranger. It has a reputation as a stormy sea, temperamental and dangerous. But I haven’t fathomed it. Finally, I’m just a landlubber, try as I have to always live by the sea. As fascinated as I am, I have never had the opportunity to see through the eyes of a seafarer. All those generations the Dutch plied the seas, thousands of people living out much of the lives on water, and the rest of us have so little idea what it felt like.

Travelogue 1140 – 13 August
The Philosophy of Binnenste Buiten

Last night we took the girls to see “Inside Out 2”. We all know the story: the emotions are made into personalities who man the control panel behind the eyes. The idea sounds miserable, but it is masterfully executed. It’s touching and funny. The girls loved it.

Little Ren had been begging to see it. I’m not sure how it got lodged into her mind, but she would not let it go. We happened to find ourselves standing outside a theatre after a visit to the beach. Mama and I checked with each other, and we shrugged, why not? Once I had understood the themes being developed in the film, that puberty had entered the control room in the sequel, I worried that we had made a bad call. I watched Baby Jos in particular, the older girl of the two. But she seemed to simply have fun with the story.

I myself was challenged by the film. It doesn’t take much to excite my imagination. I’m on old sentimentalist. The film created a bigger stage set than the control room of the mind. It painted an internal landscape for the emotions. In the story, the childhood emotions were exiled, and they had to fight their way back to HQ through a terrain bubbling with ideas and memories and moods. The mental earth trembled with the violent changes of adolescence. All that was amusing, but it made me reflect again on the complexity of the human organism.

Being someone on the other side of the lifetime equation, closer to the end than the beginning, I wonder at human complexity in a different way than a child or young adult might. I remember the inspiration I felt when I was young, discovering the vast terrain both inside and outside myself. When I was young, I was confident I could solve all the mysteries out there. Now the scale of things raises questions; like, what was all that about? Such a grand project is the human being, it must mean something more than what I happened to notice along the way. Now, the mysteries have moved from the ethers into my house. They’re arranged on my desk. They tease like ink blots that mean something different every day.

Travelogue 1139 – 12 August
The Olympics

It is hard to believe we watched the entire women’s marathon from start to finish. The coverage was that good, and Paris was that enjoyable a background. We did lose the girls in spells, lost them to their games. The games they played were often spinoffs on the sport motif of the past few weeks. But they always came back, rooting for the Ethiopians and rooting for the Dutch.

The Dutch woman won, edging out the last Ethiopian competitor. Literally. She elbowed Assefa out of the way with one or two hundred metres to the finish line. It was an exciting race.

We had watched Sifan win her bronze in the five-thousand. We had watched her win her bronze in the ten-thousand. She has been amazingly strong.

We have watched a lot of the Olympics, mostly gymnastics and track and field. And we did have to watch the women’s final in hockey. The Netherlands won, and we cheered.

It is just the right moment. The girls are old enough to be involved in sports now; they are innocent enough to simply enjoy the show. I have found all of it very enjoyable. I know how cynically some people approach the spectacle and the hype. Their visceral reaction to it looks like fear. I can understand: if everyone is a type of athlete, I am a marathoner. I am an introvert. The noise can be overwhelming.

When Sifan runs the marathon, she finds her own space. She has a faraway look. She talks to herself after she crosses the finish line. She looks to stifle a yawn during an awards ceremony. She pointedly says, “I don’t care” when a commentator asked her how she feels when a co-medallist is threatened with disqualification.

There is something wonderful about sport, wonderfully human. No matter how people try to politicize it, monetize it, psychoanalyse it, or make philosophy of it, something essential slips away. It defies both the impulse to glorify and the impulse to dismiss it.

Travelogue 1138 – 14 July
Flying Ant Day

Last week we experienced Flying Ant Day. The temperatures had finally risen enough to feel like summer. The air was dense with humidity. And then they appeared, the double-sized ants, crawling like stumbling drunks across the pavements of the city. They had wings, but they never used them, submitting themselves to the perils of land exploration. Behaving quite unlike our everyday ants, they spent the day in uncoordinated riot, released upon the world without direction, and scattering every which way. By mid-afternoon, most had perished under heel and tire.

Baby Jos had a hard time with all the carnage. She stepped very carefully, slowing us considerably in our errands. She cried to see the massacre, and protested when we were not mindful of the ants underfoot.

In response, as solace, as philosophy, Little Ren issued her summary and conclusion, and quite a nice aphorism, after all: “Life is nice, and sometimes you can squish life.”

I’ve been reading a lot of history. It’s an indulgence, now that I have recovered my mind from the rigours of teaching and correcting, to sit and read. I read like I have centuries of history to catch up on. The result is a sensation something like Flying Ant Day, surveying the succession of wars and the waves of slaughter. Generations divide and turn on their neighbours, needing only the slightest pretext, squishing life with all the hesitation and mindfulness of rushing pedestrians traversing a field of struggling ants.

Of course, Americans seem hellbent on joining time’s grim pageant. This morning, the news reached Europe of an assassination attempt on Trump. It’s a sad thing to wake to. Are we really such helpless little creatures? Is squishing all we’re good for?

Travelogue 1137 – 7 July
Drama

“I’ll never have fun again,” said Baby Jos with tears in her eyes. Somehow we had missed another notice from school. The next day, water guns would be allowed at school.

The days had been hot and sunny for a string of miraculous days. The school year running out, the days left running short, the teachers had decided some play outside was well-earned. But we are rubbish at checking the myriad messages from school, and Baby Jos is terrible at calendars.

We had thrown last summer’s water guns out long ago as messy clutter. Baby Jos spent a frenzied twenty minutes digging for the lost guns. Forced to give up, she declared in tears that fun had become impossible.

Of course, it was easily solved. We stopped by a supermarket in the morning, and the world was put right again. Fun had been readmitted into the world.

I hope I do not sound like a sadist if I say I am enjoying the girls’ dramas. They are such pure products of childhood. And, happily, they are often quickly remedied.

Baby Jos brought home her first friendship drama recently. Two friends had quarrelled, and one friend had declared that she was renouncing the whole group of girls. Baby Jos was the bridge between the pariah and the rest, and she was anxious to resolve the dispute. Fortunately, Baby Jos was more puzzled than hurt by the episode. By the next day, it was resolved. It made for good family discussions.

We are into real childhood now. Little Ren is younger, and her dramas are simpler. The girls recently discovered a deck of playing cards at a café, and we taught the girls a simple card game, something I used to play in my childhood, something Menna and I used to play in Ethiopia to while away the time. The girls really took to this game, and particularly Little Ren, who had a lucky streak. It wasn’t lucky enough for her: she dissolved into tears any time she did not win a hand.

I grew up the youngest in my family, and I recognised these tears. I shushed Baby Jos when she tried to shame her little sister. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a child learning how to lose.

Imagine how much more pleasant all of our lives would be if a certain orange plutocrat had learned how learned how to lose when he was a child.

If there were gods, one or many, would they find similar nostalgic pleasure in the trials of humankind? I doubt that they could if they had never been children themselves. It is the tragic flaw in our experimentation with AI, I think. We program computers to accumulate data; we even try to program them to play. (Without a sense of the frivolous, how does one define play?)

The processing in AI remains cold and merciless. Human learning is accidental, even if it follows similar patterns. Every time a kid does something we recognise, it is original. And their interaction with others colours the learning. The child’s mind absorbs it all. Critically the child’s mind absorbs it with the nuance and shading that create character.

Travelogue 1136 – 27 June
The Price of Vocation

Rome was a city of summonses. Rome was God’s city, and this God was a micro-manager. In Caravaggio’s day, in Michelangelo’s day, in Fra Angelico’s day, popes were summoned by God, and artists were summoned by popes. One could call it a game of thrones. Maybe a game of mitres and laurels.

Seeing all the monuments in Rome, all the silent stone, a tourist may form the impression that the Eternal City was never born and never suffered an awkward adolescence. Watching the measured irrelevance of the modern papacy, one may be forgiven for imagining papal history as a long chain of murmuring gravitas, academic theology, and the medieval version of photo opps. It’s easy to forget that, as the Renaissance budded in Florence, Rome was in shambles. It was in its worst state since the barbarian invasions a thousand years before.

In 1309, Pope Clement V had moved the papal court to Avignon, and the court had stayed away for nearly seventy years. Even after it returned, the papacy wandered for several generations, seeming only to intermittently settle in Rome. This was a period of schism – during which rival popes conspired in Avignon – and of warfare – during which Italian city states skirmished over territory and the popes endeavoured to reassert their own dominance over Rome itself and then over adjacent lands in Central Italy.

History being what it often is, the kindly pope who first determined to move the papacy back to Rome died soon after accomplishing it, and he was succeeded by two rather brutish men who helped plunged the church and the city into new rounds of chaos. One was grouchy, one was greedy, and for both Rome was often too dangerous – threatened both by the mobs and by the patrician families that had run the city while the popes were absent.

In their defence, Grouchy and Greedy each pursued a Rome-first policy, setting the foundations for a revived city and papacy, even at the expense of its integrity. Papal income had dwindled: schismatic popes drew funding away, and proceeds had diminished from diminished papal lands and from Rome itself. Meanwhile, expenses increased: wars and urban renewal are not cheap. These renewal popes were not shy about “monetizing” their spiritual powers, selling off positions in the church, selling the same positions as futures, selling indulgences, announcing jubilee years in which pilgrims could dump their sins and their cash in Rome. These were tricks that both rebuilt the Renaissance church and sowed the seeds of Luther’s rebellion a hundred years later.

Travelogue 1135 – 17 June
La Nostra Vocazione

The spotty rains continue. If you are outside as much as I am on an average day, you witness all the phases of our weather, the gathering clouds, the showers, the clearing and the sun between the waves of clouds, like rings above us, the vestiges of a god stirring his finger in the atmosphere. It means I never leave the house without rain gear, for myself and for the girls. Everyone shakes their head now when you mention the weather. Where is summer? Every day we wake to temperatures like 11 or 12˚C.

It is easy to forget how prone we are still to the tricks of a god’s idle finger, our colds and our hots, our wet hair, and the joints in our knees still subject to the finest variations among Nature’s complex moods. Every day, in very mundane ways, we are like Matthew Levi, caught counting his coins. We look up from our tabletop, one thumb still pressed against the greasy surface of a silver florin, and we see one of our lords beckoning. Me?

When we are young, the concept of summons is grandiose. Why would one be summoned at all, if not to greatness? But Nature’s tide will wash that away. That will feel like a death of sorts, but when one’s eyes adapt to the darkness of ignominy, one sees the many small ways people are called and every day. To inconsequential things. If we are not called by Gandalf or by Christ, we are called by Nature itself; and if we are not called to bear the one true ring, we are called to step in a new puddle on Marconiplein, one formed in the tram tracks by the last rain shower.

Little Ren has received her summons of the season. She has been enjoying lessons in gymnastics every Thursday evening for a year and a half. Last month, the coach of “A-Team” came to watch the little girls at practice, and a week or so later, we heard that Little Ren had been chosen. Now she attends practices on Mondays in the big high school gym at Wolfert Tweetalig by the zoo. The mood is quite different. The head coach is tall and fit man, cheerful and encouraging, but also very serious. He directs the girls in setting up the considerable amount of equipment involved in gymnastics. They do this every week, and it is undertaken with sober self-discipline. Once the mats (and bars and trampolines, etc) are out, the teens are tumbling straightaway, executing long sets of harrowing flips and turns. One teen takes charge of Ren and begins drilling her.

Here I have the answer to a question I have entertained for years now: how do serious athletes and artists and scholars emerge from the system that I had experienced as the parent of small children? Young hockey girls are trained by teens; ballet lessons are determinedly focused on fun over craft; music teachers keep things light; school teachers don’t drill or assign homework. Now I understand. The change in tone is dramatic.

For the rest of the summer session, we will attend both levels of gymnastics. The teens running the B-Team congratulate shy Ren and show her some new attention. The parents of the old group now eye us with something that looks like suspicion. They animate Caravaggio’s “Vocation” scene for us, acting out the moment after the summons, when the other men at the table have realised what happened.