Brussels, part the fourth.

And, of course, in Brussels one can find some excellent examples of art nouveau. The home of the architect Victor Horta has been transformed into a museum, and is simply breathtaking. The photographs I have of the place were taken quickly and covertly, as photography was not actually permitted inside. What little I can show you is admittedly poorly executed, and some of the best rooms were, alas, the most closely watched by the guard. But I loved the place, really and truly. Every detail curved. It was done in fleshy pinks with lines of gold, or lurid greens. While in the upstairs bedroom I was overpowered by a scent, thick and musky, floral perhaps, but too rich to be natural. I thought it to be incense until I came upon a hidden hothouse, the heat and the close quarters forcing the garden to produce a perfume almost against nature.

The museum also provided a map to twelve of the other homes in the city built in that style, and I spent a pleasant afternoon wandering between them. They were decorated with owls, seasons, hours, the wrestling of dogs with white horses, improbable lines and glorious windows, and I never grew accustomed to it. Every one surprised me with just how much I loved it.

Brussels, part the third.

One of my hosts in Brussels was a family consisting of a Spanish mother, a German father, and a five year old boy and a seven year old girl. The children spoke both languages, and French, and boasted a modest vocabulary of a few essential phrases in Flemish and English. Upon my arrival they were asking their mother about me. "What languages does she speak?" "English," she explained. "Only English? But. Why?" Too true, children. Too true. Later, after they'd put on a delightful puppet show about witches and the devil and a wolf and a princess, the young boy sat down next to me and spoke. His mother laughed. She explained: he said, "you should learn French."

Brussels, part the second.

Brussels is also famous for waffles, chocolate, and beer. I can't believe a human exists that wouldn't like a city famous for waffles, chocolate, and beer. In the name of cultural enrichment, I sampled all three every day that I was in Belgium. Should you go there, you might want to know ahead of time that the excellent chocolate, unfortunately, is usually primarily a result of the country's continued relationship with its former colony, the war-torn Congo. The varieties of beer available, however, are so numerous and so diverse that not enjoying beer is not a reasonable excuse. While I had the opportunity I thought it best to experiment primarily with exciting and previously unheard of varieties of Lambic. Kriek, which is available at every bar in Belgium, is made from cherries, although that isn't immediately apparent in the flavour. I also quite liked the apple and Gueuze.

The city was home to the best flea markets I've yet found. Fascinating things spilled out onto the flagstones: keys, mannequins, chairs, suitcases full of matchbooks, and masks. I bought a mask there. She smiled shyly and slyly when I found her, but now she grins like a prophetess.

While in town I visited the gardens of an Art Deco home. There I found a hedge maze and a tree that I climbed. I explored the museum of musical instruments, too.

There was an art nouveau bar that I liked a great deal. I spent my afternoons there reading and sipping sweet beer. It was located on a pretty square lined with chocolate shops and antique stores. There was a formal garden and a church at its head.

Brussels, part the first.

I've been told by several people that most visitors are disappointed by Brussels. I suppose I might be able to see why. The city is, for one, filthy. On my first day in Dublin, I noticed something distressing: the pigeons were clean. They were so clean that I was actually embarrassed for Philadelphia's pigeons. I know that my town has a reputation for being, among other things, a bit slovenly, but having spent most of my life there I'm afraid that I'm less blind to it than I am actually perversely proud of our efforts. Encountering pigeons that looked as if they had better taste in cufflinks than I do, however, provided a new standard by which to judge. Pigeons across Europe are cleaner than Philadelphian pigeons. The only exception I've yet found to this rule is Brussels. The entire city is covered in a thick layer of grime. Following a blizzard, my city becomes coated in a slushy dust, black and thick, that has always reminded me of what one might have found coughed into the sleeve of an eight year old chimney sweep in London in 1842. Brussels was crusted with the stuff in the warm part of September. Due to my intense pride in my own dirty city, however, rather than judging Brussels for its scuffs and stains, I found that I was all the more endeared to it.

The other reason to dislike Brussels is that the city's mascot is a tiny statue of a urinating child. This is meant to express something about the city's rebellious spirit, but actually demonstrates what most of us already know: that most tourists are willing to stand in a crowd to take bad photographs of an ugly fountain.

My feelings about the place, however, can be explained thusly. As soon as I crawled out of the Central Train Station and onto the Metro, before I even had time to worry about whether or not I'd be able to find my host's house with my extremely limited vocabulary in either of the city's two official languages, I found this:

Might I present Orchestre International du Vetex.





Not only did I get surprise Balkan music, but the accordion player was wearing a hat that made him look like a bear. I dare you to name something that could please me more than accordions and bear hats. Furthermore, the adorably self-conscious shuffling dances were often made even better when during one member's solo the other musicians would surround him or her, fall to one knee, and reach to them with one hand while placing their other hand longingly on their hearts. I bought their CD immediately, and you should too.

Apparently this sort of thing is quite typical of Brussels: the city is famous for fantastic public events that were only ever halfway planned, were never advertised, and cannot really be sought out, but are delightful things to stumble upon.

For Science!

A brief train ride brought me to Haarlem, a small city, older than Amsterdam, and beautiful. It seemed at first to be all shops: bland, modern, expensive things. Their content may have bored me, but the buildings themselves certainly did not; even the McDonald's was ensconced in an architectural work of art, something from the early 1600s. I wondered for a moment if it were blasphemous, and decided that the degree to which I enjoyed the idea likely indicated that yes, it was.

I'd heard tell of an old science museum there. I enjoy such things a great deal, so I hoped that I might run into it. While wandering one of the canals I stopped to admire a truly grand building, and I took three pictures before I noticed the flag bearing the name of the museum for which I had vaguely been looking.

The outside was a suitable shell. The inside was spectacular. I entered into a room of marble, columns, and stately wood, flanked by classical statues and carvings of cherubs engaged in the sciences and the arts. (That ever there was a culture that could make a representation of such a thing not only appear to be serious, but even noble, is delightful. Score one for humanity.) It contained a ticket and information desk that looked as if it belonged there. Such a thing is no small feat for a museum. In fact, I doubt I'd ever seen it correctly executed before. It looked into a round chamber capped with a dome, warm, glowing, and golden. Next one comes upon the museum proper, beginning with the natural history section, then rooms devoted to antiquated scientific instruments, followed by two art galleries. It was another one of those private collections that eventually became a museum proper.



With every new space I entered I gasped, not only impressed, but actually moved. I've never seen a museum I loved so instantly, so intently. Not only the collection, but also the space itself, were everything I could have asked such a place to be: gentlemanly, tasteful, inspiring, and beautiful. I photographed everything. I wanted desperately to give you some sense of the place, so thrilled was I to find it. This place moved beyond simply archiving certain achievements of human culture, a high aim in itself. It became one of those achievements. It was a palace of art.

I found this place on the day on which the Large Hadron Collider was first activated.

I enjoy the LHC as a symbol as much as I appreciate its use as a tool. I'm pleased with the panic into which it seems to have thrown some people, and not simply because it is amusing. It is very human, I think, not only to fear the end of all things, but to expect to see it. Every generation has its apocalypse, it's ever-present threat of destruction. We anticipate some distant failure or attack; we wait to be important and frightened and final. I might be so bold as to suggest that our fear is a longing for a personal and internal spiritual destruction. We want to be confronted with something immense, alien, and devastating, to be laid bare by it, scraped to the bones. We want to fight it, or be taken or changed by it. Surviving the zombie invasion and being taken in the rapture mean the exact same thing. To expect it to be an external, collective thing, indeed, to expect it to be done to and for us, strikes me as slightly childish, but perhaps I oughtn't judge.

The fear surrounding the Large Hadron Collider is warranted, not because it might destroy the world, but because it might destroy the universe as we know it. This is the same fear felt when the earth lost its place at the centre of a created, clockwork dome, and when the sun became another small star. And I do propose that such fear is legitimate. I hesitate to describe science as truth. The frequency with which it is replaced and augmented and endlessly perfected and scrapped and perfected in some other way demonstrates that it isn't truth as much as it is a particular narrative, or the best we can do at the time. And that is precisely why it is so terrifying. Science means admitting that we are not searching for truth, that we cannot search for truth. It means peeling back the veil to learn the smallest of things. It means dedicating lives, obliterating ourselves again and again, to discover minutia that will certainly one day be replaced, and then be replaced again. I can think of few pursuits more worthwhile, and admirable.

And obviously, modern science having constructed a great circle with which to raise up energies that will help us to cross boundaries humans were not meant to cross, to peek into the inner workings of all things, to risk destruction in the name of knowledge, would appeal to me.

Still, I think something is lacking. My fascination with antiquated science relates once more to the spirit of these faded enterprises rather than their usefulness. These are artefacts from a time when brilliant men, dabblers, collectors, and scientists, sought not simply to probe, but to seduce a mysterious universe into revealing its hidden charms. Modernity disappoints me. I still cannot bring myself to silence my repeated complaint: given the systems and materials required to produce things with an ease never before known to the world, we've turned to ugliness, to functionality and nothing more. Science was beautiful once. It was carried out with the use of pretty devices. Specimens were gathered not simply to be labelled. They proclaimed that the complexity and variety of the natural world rivals our art, but that arranging them and displaying them and attempting to understand them could be an art in itself.

I returned to Amsterdam that evening in order to visit the absinthe bar where I intended to raise a glass or seven to science. It was a dark place, underground, and nearly empty when I arrived. It only meant that I quickly befriended the Surinamese barkeep and the other patron, a gentleman from Jakarta. As the place filled up I somehow managed to remain the closest thing to a lady present. So I spoke to nearly everyone there, and enjoyed it a great deal. The flame and sugar filled concoctions with which I toasted the Large Hadron Collider's first adventure were often bought for me, as a result. Of the several varieties available my favourite by far was a caramel flavoured absinthe, which sounds improbable, but was actually delicious.

Volendam.

I went to Volendam, a small fishing town. The name means "filled in dam". It's reputedly a horrifically touristy place, although when I was there the weather was bad enough that I didn't see much evidence of it. I'll take a bit of cold and rain to the wrong sort of Americans most days, so I was pleased enough. There were canals there, small and lined with grass and trees. There was a memorable bridge hugged by the roots and branches of a massive willow. The houses were shaped like those in the city, although in miniature. Amsterdam seemed so grand when I returned to it that evening! How quickly I grow used to things. I didn't stay long; only long enough to wander the charming and crooked streets, to watch the boats move in and out of the harbour, to watch the rain fall, and to see the birds fly in and out of the restaurant where I ate. There was a poster by Tadema on the wall there, and the place was all browns and golds and seemed to glow with its warmth. There were calla lilies, my favourite flower, on each table, deep red ones with golden spadices, like flames. I got a plate of excellent mussels served with onions in a brown broth. When I ordered a beer and my server asked what size I'd like, I requested a large as a a sort of sociological experiment. It was large enough that I'm not at all ashamed to report that I was nearly tipsy when I began my journey back to the city.