Utrecht

Flora goes to school an hour or so away by train, in Utrecht. There was only one day out of the several I spent with her on which she had to attend classes, and I asked if she wouldn't mind if I followed her, exploring the city while she studied English and Italian Renaissance literature. She was delighted by the idea. We took an early train, and she drew me a map.

Utrecht is a medieval town, also built around canals. The city is so old, however, that new street was built upon old street, new house built atop ruin, so often that the canals now lay at the bottom of long sets of stairs descending along stone walls, a full floor of a house at least below street level. Sometimes the basements of the homes and businesses have windows or doors or courtyards opening up onto the water.

There is a great Christian Viking stone in Utrecht, and the church was once blown in two by a great wind. A storm arose long ago, and one wing of the cathedral was destroyed by it completely and never rebuilt. As a result, the church proper and the tower, called the Dom Tower, short for Christendom, are separated by a courtyard. The flagstones under which people were buried in the church are still there, part of the pavement out of doors.

It is a university town, and all of the school buildings are public spaces. Flora encouraged me to explore them, and I found some lovely things, including a stained glass ceiling. There is also an Art Deco post office and more than one apothecary's garden.

Castricum, the Netherlands

Some of my last days in the Netherlands I spent not in Amsterdam, but in a nearby town among the dunes called Castricum. I'd gone there to stay with a friend of various wonderful people I'd met in that city. I knew that her name was Flora, that she worked with herbs to great practical effect, and that she was a midwife, and that was all I needed in order to want to seek her out. I met her at the Noordermarkt on Saturday, which is one of the two weekly organic markets in the city. Amongst stalls of mushrooms and fresh juices, pleasingly piled fruits and tempting antiques I found her, standing near the sheep skins: a small creature, tanned, with a chip on her front tooth. She smiled and laughed kindly when I stumbled, not having known until that moment that the Dutch kiss one another on the cheeks three times, not two. The market was closing down, so Flora and I and many of the people who worked the stalls at the market went out to an organic vegetarian restaurant on a canal, the name of which meant "The Bowler Hat" in Dutch. We sipped soup and coffee verkeert, and, as very few of us there had grown up speaking the same language as anyone else, we all spoke to one another in English. One of them was leaving within the week to return to a monastery in India. The British expatriate was rude and loud and completely fantastic; we sat next to one another and conspired together, laughing at all the same jokes. There was a pair of beautiful Russian twins whom I admired from across the table; Flora whispered to me, "We call them our Russian princesses." And when the sun had gone down and the lights had come on I followed Flora home, to a beautiful place with purple walls in some places, Victorian wallpaper in others, and wallpaper made of sheet music in some of the smaller places. There were dented brass instruments hanging on the walls, puppets on the shelves, Moroccan carpets everywhere. The space glowed.

She took me for walks in the forest, to the beach, on the dunes. We cooked locally grown vegetarian food together and had picnics. She showed me the plants and told me their names and what they were good for. We ate seabuckthorn berries, apples borrowed from the trees of farmers, wild raspberries, and young hawthorn berries. We climbed trees. We drank fresh mint tea. We climbed the wall built by the Germans during the war in fear of an attempt by the British to claim the Netherlands as a land base and port. It was a good deal easier to scale than the barbed wire fence I clambered through a bit later. We saw horses and birds.

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.