I've been trying for a while now to figure out how I really feel about not living in Amsterdam anymore. I wish to know this for myself, and I wish to be able to tell you, the reader, whom as always I imagine as one or another of my Dutch (or at any rate Dutch-based) friends. I have no need to figure it out for those who ask me most frequently, namely my friends here in California. They ask, I say I don't miss it, and they seem satisfied with this answer even though it is, upon reflection, not likely to be true in any very deep sense.
Nor is it. I do miss Amsterdam, and yet--and this is the part that puzzles me--I don't miss it in the detailed, almost holographic way I would expect to miss it having lived and loved it these past several years. I don't miss it day by day, or often, or pointedly. I miss it in only a very vague way, as if I had never actually lived there and am really only missing a dream of something that has not yet happened and may never will. In short, I miss it exactly the way I have always missed it since my very first few visits there, as though I belong there but somehow can't stay. I keep forgetting my keys in my rear wheel lock, as though I haven't secured it a thousand times before.
I am busy now writing my annual celebratory blog in anticipation of Felix's birthday this Friday. By way of preparation I'm reviewing the last twelve months of photos, something like eight months of which were taken in or around Amsterdam. My sense as I view these photos is one of vague incredulity, as if I can't quite believe we ever lived in such a wonderful place and did such wonderful things with such wonderful people. It makes me feel like a banished angel. California is a heaven, too, but that doesn't really have much to do with it.
I can only repeat what I wrote in the last entry: won't some of you angels come see our new heaven?
Greetings from London. Another planet, where muscle memory has atrophied and sometimes only just succeeds in carrying me on journeys I thought were ingrained in my DNA. It is disconcerting, like a betrayal of a good friend, a betrayal of myself. I am not 'that person' any longer, my memory is not what hers was. Things that were automatic now require thought, and sometimes retrieval is elusive until some random prompt hooks the memory back into consciousness.
ReplyDeleteWe wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends—those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties—even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice—even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and in its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees—a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience…. [T]he fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.
ReplyDeleteJoseph Conrad, Lord Jim (London: Penguin, 2000; 1900), 206