Digression: Part of what I like and dislike about Cambridge is its effeteness, both intellectual and multilingual. There is no need to suddenly switch one's conversation with the J. Press salesman over to French once this commonality is discovered when English is the first language of both parties. The eagerness to engage one's mind and others in deep conversation about absolutely anything reminds me of the naive excitement I sense amongst some ---- undergrads, although here it is sometimes executed in depth and can lead somewhere important. I love its presence but dislike its open display. I'm one to talk, aren't I?
Schiphol is much the same besides the healthy smoothies stand's transformation into a 'DONER KEBAB' haven, but luggage delivery time is seriously inefficient. I end up on a Brussels-bound train with two finance professors from the Fordham Business School (a secular arm of The Jesuit University of New York), Frank Werner (who introduces himself as Frank 'Warner') and one whose name needs no conscious memory effort, Jim Stoner. They are flush with passionate ideas for a new joint book on sustainable finance and explain them wholeheartedly, even stopping to shed light on some of the terminology. Frank has an interesting answer to my question of why the environment has come to the forefront of public consciousness; both Al Gore's deliberate efforts and Bush's unintended botches have drawn more people to a side that Gore shows as sensible and that Bush shows as an alternative for conservatives to his rapidly support-losing brand of conservatism. I am interested in their enthusiasm for change as large-scale as they are suggesting; I had thought of finance scholars as practical-minded analysts, but here are men on a grand thought experiment determined to bring their results to the world. After all, Stoner lists "Ontological Inquiry, Excellence, and Personal and Organizational Transformation" in his university profile. The masses have not heard their voices clearly before but are more likely to listen now; I wonder if they have always approached finance this way or whether they are developing ahead of the game. Here is an obvious display of scholarship and yet I enjoy it more than much I overheard in Cambrdge; they seem hapless to hold their excitement back rather than eager to make more of it than it is. It is already enough.
I pick up a stoptrein at Roosendaal, still in wonder at how expensive Dutch train tickets are relative to Belgian ones. At Middelburg, I wend my way rather indirectly to the Bagijnhof. I don't yet feel the euphoria of return (that will happen when I finally set foot in Antwerpen again, the city truly woven into my spirit), but I feel a strange mixture of ease and discomfort. Walking down the charmed cobblestone streets, knowing that any destination is within an easy stroll, I have my yearned-for freedom back--freedom to go where I please without being prisoner to the motor vehicle. But Middelburg is a small town, and the inhabitants stare openly at me, and the fashionable women are still dressed in the awful frilly look I came to despise and truly hoped would have changed by now. I have come to expect them, but still I am irritated.
two belfries
Gerda is waiting for me and has already arranged for dinner with one of my new housemates as well as a hybrid(!) bike loan from her family. We chat and I give her the ironically selected Ivy League gift I've borne across the ocean -- a handsome crimson Harvard academic planner, from which I hastily peel the price tag.
Bagijnhof 4 is an inefficient maze of heavy purple doors and crazily steep, narrow, creaky (creaks of the vocal, lip-smacking kind) orange staircases (all but the latter quite typical of stairways in old Dutch buildings). My third-floor room belongs to a certain Iliana, who has a penchant for clipping South Park cartoons and Absolut ads. She has not offered to loan her bedding (not atypical in this country), so I trek out to HEMA and pick out all the cheapest sheets while still coordinating them in bright blue. For a bath towel, I pick out a striped bright blue beach towel that will also serve as a blanket on cool nights. The bed and Iliana's orange IKEA folding chair become the proud the highlights of the room. They are trumped only by the tripartite window that overlooks the Stoppelaartuin (now a parking lot) and the little backyards of the surrounding houses, one of which contains a mural of a hand either holding moss or overgrown by real moss. Iliana is taller than me; I cannot see into the mirror she has set in front of the little sink.
A bell begins to toll, sending up a flock of maybe fifty birds who fly high over the slanting mossy rooftops westward.
Only later do I realize that the ceilings are pitched symmetrically, starting at the hip. I cannot decide whether they remind me of the interior of a Quaker meeting house, a Swiss mountain home, or a witch's abode. But I have finally indulged in the Burt's Bees travel set from Jeannene and for a while the room feels rather like a North Carolina spa.
21st-century Middelburg
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