Who Else Is Having a Baby?

Dear Classmates,

Am I the only member of our class who is expecting a baby? I don’t know anyone my age who is about to become a father; but I do know that it’s very important for people our age to have a future, and to help shape and preserve that future. Our baby girl will grow up in a Dutch city speaking English with her father and Hungarian with her mother. The modern world!

Holland is a weird and fascinating country. It is uniquely overzichtelijk – an untranslatable Dutch word that means literally “overviewable,” lucid, suffused with mild grey light (like the paintings of Vermeer and Weissenbruch) and intensely perceptible. It is also amazingly well organized, with a long history of land and water management. Its population is smaller than that of New York City in an area about the size of Maryland – a third of it below sea level – yet Holland is the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products (after the USA). The population density here is comparable to Haiti or Israel, but one can look down from elevated waterways on broad vistas of green fields with cows and sheep grazing and windmills and church steeples marking the horizon. The water levels are so closely regulated that maps can be printed showing water depths and bridge clearances to within ten centimeters.

None of this was known to me when I arrived in Amsterdam thirty-five years ago. My post-Yale trajectory is probably typical enough: with no desire to find myself in Vietnam – recalling the fate of our classmate Donald Ferguson – or to go straight on to graduate school, I arrived in Europe in the summer of 1969 without much of a plan, and ended up washing dishes in a hospital kitchen in Berlin for a year and a half (during which I drew a lucky number in the draft lottery), followed by a second eighteen months in Paris studying Russian through French. After a further period of rootless cosmopolitanism, including a semester at the Yale Graduate School and a year teaching French in London, I ended up doing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (French and German) at the University of Texas in Austin. My first “real” job was teaching both languages for six years in the Foreign Languages Department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which I soon realized was an artificial way of trying to be in Europe without actually being here.

Why was Europe so attractive? I think it must have had something to do with the absence of any sense of history in the suburban California of my youth. Everything in that world was new: new schools, new houses and sidewalks and shopping centers, new saplings instead of trees one could climb. I remember thinking as a child that Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento (built by a Swiss immigrant in the 1840s) was the oldest thing in the world. My earliest doubts about the sustainability and sanity of mankind began when I beheld the monumental ruins of a thousand-year-old sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees State Park, the tallest tree in the grove, which had been cut down for no reason only one year after its “discovery.” Riding a tram into the center of the spider-web map of Amsterdam is a bit like tracing the concentric rings of that tree back through the centuries: from the 21st and 20th to the urban sprawl of the 19th, and then to the much-restored remnants of 18th- and 17th-century mansions and warehouses on the famous canals. It is somehow refreshing to see gable-stones with dates from the lifetimes of Shakespeare and Rembrandt.

As a resident of the Netherlands over the years, I have learned that whether in the cities or the countryside, the best way to appreciate Holland is from the water. Luckily this pleasure can be shared with my fellow classmates, since this spring Yale Educational Travel is offering a nine-day tour of the waterways of Holland and Belgium on a typical Dutch riverboat that has been converted into a luxurious mini-hotel and restaurant. May is a great month for tulips, and bike tours and museum visits are also on the agenda. Further information is available here: https://ivy.yale.edu/yet/programs/10452 .

I’ll be along as a lecturer and guide, and it would be great to meet up with some classmates after these many years. Unfortunately my dear wife and our baby daughter won’t be able to join us this time, but we’ll keep in close touch with the help of Skype.

Let me leave you with a quote by one of my favorite authors, Joseph Conrad, here spoken by Emilia Gould in Nostromo: “for life to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present.”

With best wishes in any case for the coming year and the years to come,

Gene