The Netherparts: How low country can you go?

For Easter, I visited the Netherlands. As I get older I care less and less about manufacturing experiences out of travel, am less often alone when I travel, and am despite my deadened aesthetic sensitivities more confident with age that I am seeing a place on my terms while still somehow submitting to it. So it was with the Netherlands, and here are my notes.

The first thing I noticed about Amsterdam was that it is overrun with Brits, and perhaps the best way to illustrate the Dutch character is in comparison to its neighbors. If Brexit was an impulse for people who complain about too many Poles living in their midst, then perhaps Amsterdam needs a counter-gesture (Brittenuit?) to close its airports to the flights leaving every three minutes from England's airports. Or maybe they, the locals, simply don't give a Dam.

The British there travel in packs, either in groups of twenty twenty-somethings or as pleasant families; their is no other deployment visible of Brits in Amsterdam. You don't see tour buses full of retirees, or romantic couples, or thirty+ sports tourists, for example. You either get prams, or Instagram (strollers or rollers?). It is not as if the twenty-somethings you see are on their best behavior. The only favor they would appear to do the city, besides filling its coffers with cash and its canals with upchuck, is that in comparison they make the Dutch seem so poised. Placing a British twenty-something tourist in Amsterdam, all dolled up and blinged out, next to a Dutch twenty-something local is like putting a donkey next to a thoroughbred, except that the donkey speaks a language you mostly recognize, and the thoroughbred speaks ... well, more on what the Dutch speak later.

I did encounter one historical monument, however, from the grateful people of Amsterdam thanking the Royal Air Force for not having bombed it to smithereens when it was under Duitse occupation. That clemency itself was a gesture of gratitude from the British crown to the city of Amsterdam for hosting all of their subjects' stag and hen parties.

It's not only when compared to Brits that you notice the extraordinary poise of the Dutch: they are not the benevolent snobs that the Swedes can be, they are quite unlike the dandied Danish boors, and they have the Germans' parsimony and earthiness without their unutterable squareness. Abroad, they are chameleons. At home they are very much at home. Whence might this delightful assurance have come? I would presume it's the most visible legacy of their mercantile piety, their open, civic, sturdy traditions going back to their emergence from underneath the Spanish. You can take the Dutch out of the Calvinist church, but you can't take the Calvinist out of the Dutch; still today they are so effortlessly upright, so proudly relaxed. The unvarying dresscode of the middle class middle aged here is a lovely but not showy mix that leaves everyone looking like a part-time librarian, part-time real estate agent, part-time professor of naval law.

Ah yes, the Dutch language. It is as if German were placed in a soup pot and set on low heat for five hundred years, until most of the broth was gone and what remained were mostly bones and ligaments. Nevertheless, it's a glorious language. In addition to its impossible-not-to-choke-on sonorousness, the splendor of the Dutch language is also the result of so many pinnacles of poetic achievement, as seen in the following quintessential line of Dutch verse: "Hier ligt Poot, hij is dood." (Here lies Poot. He is dead).

I am delighted to have waited to go the Netherlands until having lived in Switzerland, for the Swiss are the only Europeans who can out-velar-fricative the Dutch. In a matter of a few years I should be ready for Hebrew, speakers of which are fricative champions. Similarly, I am glad to have learned a bit of Scandinavian languages before broaching Dutch, because in many respects the Netherlands is a Scandinavian society, and because in many respects Dutch is just Danish with more of the letters pronounced ... with a potato in your esophagus.

Alright, so maybe Dutch literature isn't in the same league as that country's tradition of jurisprudence, painting, naval might, hydraulic engineering, or brutal chattel slavery. Maybe it's just a fluke that the best selling Dutch-language author of all time was born German and was murdered at the age of fifteen. I will say that I've never been in a place where the modestly proud local language sits amid so many other, bigger languages so comfortably. Bookstores here don't even always organize by language -- a topical section like philosophy or history mixes tongues without ado. For us who suffer from the sad lingua franca of airport English, it is the best kind of multilingualism you'll ever see. Honegger liner notes in French-Dutch facing. Adorno in German next to Habermas in Dutch. Byron in English next to Pushkin in French. Only in Amsterdam.

Apropos potatoes: don't get me started. Dutch cuisine would appear to be the inimitable alloy of colonialism's finest spices and whatever is left of tubers after they have plummeted to the bottom of a vat of boiling oil. The Netherlands' prized fast food chain, FEBO (an acronym of "for everyone, by oil"), sells a dozen varieties of fried-potatoes-mixed-with-meat-and-cheese-before-being-ruthlessly-battered in their trademark lockers. The food of this nation appeals to simple palates, to people who want strong, rich, monochrome flavors. Terrific if you're intoxicated, murder if you're dieting. Lekker? I hardly know her!

It feels remarkably easy to size up the Dutch based on their buildings. If Parisian architecture may be summarized as "One Nation, above God", then the architecture of Amsterdam might fall under "No matter how rich we are, God still views us as dung." Now, that Luther quote about God's hating humans so much that he views them as dung is probably just one of the many apocryphal stories that Catholics are willing to tell when playing dirty against Protestants. But even the royal palaces here are studies in homely temperance: the Koninklijk Paleis van Amsterdam was originally built as a town hall, and later deemed sufficiently gray for monarchy. The finest counterpoint to the sobriety of the civic is the splendor of the mercantile. For a view of a city not overrun by shoals of tourists, try The Hague or Delft, for they are charming and stately, Church and State and Capital mixing gracefully. And for a true architectural epiphany, go to spacey Rotterdam: the city so nice they built it twice.

Historical fun fact regarding Delft: as a third person singular verb conjugation, it means "he digs", as in the English "to delve". See also: delven, "to excavate, to dig an entire country out of the swamp and call it The Netherlands."

I will admit that, of my many personality flaws, smugness is somewhere on the list, below gluttony but above jealousy, but in this respect I was well situated among the Dutch people. Nobody minded my smugness in the slightest when I asked for the check in intentionally bad Dutch by saying "We're ready to betalen" or walked away saying "Tak u well" or indeed greeted them with a "schönen guten Morgen Mijnheer Soundso!" The Dutch have a way of being curt and charming at the same time, of being smarmy but not unkind. Their notorious cheapness, however, is indeed all-apparent. A friendly bartender at Wynand Fockink (please refrain from practicing your pronunciation of this name in the presence of children) refused my too generous tip, implying it was offered in poor taste. Instead, he recommended I use it to buy a five-course meal at FEBO (order diagonally, he said). Still, that same bartender greeted me in perfect Spanish, after having just bid goodbye to some Spanish drinkers; when I told him I lived in Switzerland, he served me his best Chuchichäschtli. The coarse but panlingual Dutch must seem like curious little knowledge gnomes to the ubiquitous mono-langlo visitors.

But they're cheap bastards all the same. A woman at Easter Sunday brunch took a bowl of chocolates, thirty-strong, from her table and dumped its contents directly into her purse. She stared at me while doing so, with a face that was at once friendly and dismissive. "Yes, you little twerp?" she seemed to ask with a wink. Smarmy, but not unkind.

Arches, steel, decorative brick at the Centraal station.

I've always found the playfulness of lettering to be optimistic.

Du côté de chez Swann

The famous Austrian bridge, or Östeerreijkeensbroog

From the great arcade of booksellers. A jewel in the city's crown. 

A little known Rembrandt tronie (The Tourist, 2018, oil and vinegar) 

For modern tastes: pornography and beaux arts. Unpictured: Girl with a Pearl Necklace.

The great Spinoza

At the Concertgebouw on Easter Sunday

Mauritshuis in The Hague: again that poise.

Cranach's famous "This is my life now" Mary

The famous Five Dutch Senses paintings by Molenaer: Drinking, Drinking, Coughing, Spanking and Drinking.