Brussels

The last time I went there was in 1958, along with three friends my age,
to see the Brussels World Fair, the first of its kind after World War II.
Countries built their own pavilions, some memorable for their architecture.
Today, only the Atomium still stands. (Click to enlarge photo.)

I phoned the travel agent about the holiday we’ve booked next month in Brussels. I said it didn’t feel like fun any more, could we cancel? Certainly, she said, but we can’t give you any refund, as it’s less than three weeks away. So I said there’s no point in cancelling, we’ll just leave it open. We’ll see how we feel the day before, and either get on that Eurostar train from London, through the Channel Tunnel, all the way to the Belgian capital—or not. Whatever we do, the money is already spent. We can enjoy those four days, wherever we happen to be. The contemplation of this gives an unexpected sense of lightness and freedom.

At the moment home seems the pleasanter option, especially after this morning, when a plumber came to install a new kitchen tap, one that doesn’t squirt water upwards like a fountain, though we’ve only had it a few months, and it was guaranteed for fifteen years. While waiting weeks for its replacement, we’ve used bucketfuls of hot or cold from the bathroom. Up to then we always took water for granted, that it’s brought to you, you don’t have to go and fetch it. Now we give thanks for it all the time, and for never having had to go a mile or so to the nearest well, returning with full buckets balanced on our heads.

PS: we did go, & so missed the EDL march through our own town—
“Defend English freedom / our democracy / freedom of speech! no more mosques!”
and the counter-demonstration:
“Stand up to racism & fascism! No to islamophobia!!”
Brussels was quiet, with soldiers protecting the metro system
(Click to enlarge photo of Atomium, 58 years later.)

And when I saw videos of Brussels commuters the day after the bombs, with tales of how they managed to get to work despite the disruptions, and saw a kind of glow in their faces, the renewed sense of community, their own gratitude for being able to carry on, to still be able to get from A to B somehow, I wavered. These people, like us, will have learned a little of how to give thanks for the simplest things. Then I thought it might be a good thing to use our reservations after all and join the survivors in this new spirit of togetherness, thankfulness & touching of hearts. And yet we’re not thinking about it now—“shall we, shan’t we go?” When the time comes, we’ll simply follow the feeling. Who knows how the world will look on 8th April?

I feel a close kinship with Etty Hillesum, whose soul shines so brightly through her diary and letters written in Amsterdam in World War II. She and fellow-Jews were progressively deprived of privileges, then sent to Westerbork, a transit camp near the German border, waiting for the trains of cattle-trucks which took them on a one-way trip to Auschwitz. Is this old history now? No, we are reminded today by the sentencing of Radovan Karadzic for his part in the Bosnian genocide.

How was Etty able to stay above the hate, and help lift up others to the place where she was? Here’s an extract from a postcard she threw out of the train to Auschwitz, which was picked up later by a farmer and posted:

In the end, the departure came without warning—on sudden special orders from The Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa [Etty’s brother] too. We shall be travelling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care. . . . Goodbye for now from the four of us.—Etty

How did she stay above it to this extent? Here’s something from her diary, a year before, which may provide a clue:

Yes, we carry everything within us, God and Heaven and Hell and Earth and Life and Death and all of history. The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us. And we have to take everything that comes: the bad with the good which does not mean we cannot devote our life to curing the bad.

She had learned to be always able to find some good, and focus on that. For everything we need is within us.

While I can . . . because I can

Etty Hillesum

It’s the second day of March, with a bit of blue sky but a biting damp wind. I walk along the Ledborough Road to the bus station, destination and agenda undecided. Why? Because I can. Whatever I can now do, one day I won’t be able to. No one knows the day, or the hour. Thanks, whispering angel! You have given me an agenda. I shall see beyond appearances, at least I think I can. These people I pass, who don’t smile, I shall see beyond that and smile first, if I can. As if this were my last day. When I left the house, K was on the phone to her Mom. She never likes being interrupted on the phone, but when I mimed that I was going out, she mimed me to come and kiss her, while we both can. That’s understood. No one knows the day, or the hour.

I get off the bus with a vague notion of walking up Cock Lane to Tyler’s Green, but then the wind blows stronger and there’s a squally shower which defeats my umbrella and makes my face ache. I take refuge in a large electronics shop at The Marsh, wander round it merely to get warm again, then try walking on a familiar footpath, but it’s no fun in this cold. I don’t have to do this. I’ll take the bus back—because I can. I’ll dash off quick posts on my blog when the fancy takes, for the same reason.

When I get back home the postman delivers two books, one of them being Etty, its front cover as illustrated at the end of my last. There’s a fascinating complexity to her life, whose details she limpidly sets out in her diary. It is 1941, a year after the capitulation to German forces in Holland. She is reflecting how many people she knows are recently gone: dead or to concentration camps. Yesterday she was talking to her professor in the street. He seemed a broken man. Today she has just heard that he put a bullet through his head an hour later.

A world is in the process of collapse. But the world will go on and so for the present shall I, full of good heart and good will. Nevertheless, we who are left behind are just a little bit destitute, though inwardly I still feel so rich that the destitution is not fully brought home to me. However, one must keep in touch with the real world and know one’s place in it.

“Because I can” has become a mantra to pronounce from time to time, a lens for seeing the world and my place in it. It’s a kind of green light, as if I stood at a crossroads for a long time, and never noticed the lights had changed from red.

Etty’s involved with a man she calls S, he a psychotherapist, she a patient. She has some kind of depressive illness, part physical. The treatment, too, is part physical, and includes wrestling on the floor. They are erotically drawn to one another and yet she recoils from him physically. He is trying to stay professional, plus he has a girlfriend in London waiting till his divorce comes through. He is a German Jew and there’s a lot of hate in the air, caused by the occupation of Holland, the concentration camps . . .

All this helps put Etty in a turmoil. When S tells her that body and soul are one, it illuminates her understanding. She is trying to live a spiritual life. Everything is pushing her in this direction. The treatment offered by S has made Etty more alive.

Monday 4th August, 1941, 2:30pm. He said that love of mankind is greater than love of one man. For when you love one person you are merely loving yourself.

He is a mature 55-year-old and has reached the stage where he can love all mankind, having loved many individuals in the past. I am an ordinary 27-year-old girl and I, too, am filled with love for all mankind, but for all I know I shall always be in search of my one man.

Here’s a good piece on Etty Hillesum; which also points to the video alongside. Please especially note the quotes which appear in the form of subtitles, and which I’ve decided not to copy and paste here, but leave them to be discovered in the context of this short film which pays homage to her life.

Because I can . . . It was only the other day that I recalled the task I’d finished last autumn, during my “indefinite sabbatical”. It had taken months of effort and years before that, full of red herrings and false starts, to gather all these posts together into a single formatted document. Then it was finished; I merely filed it away and forgot it. And now, in just a couple of days, the processes to publish it on Kindle are completed, as simply and cheaply as possible; i.e. at no cost to the author, and for those who want to buy, at the lowest price that Amazon will allow. I have no thought of promoting it or trying to say “what it’s about”. Other such attempts over the years to publish and promote have failed because they were too complicated. They tried to shape the material into something it was not, all to make the project “a success” in competing against the other reading-matter being offered in the world. What I can is enough, and I’ve done it.

The present post isn’t included in the e-book just published, the “first edition March 2016”. There is no technical reason why I can’t go on fiddling with that edition: correcting the one known typo still outstanding and others yet to be discovered; adding new posts . . . but I won’t. Many are the things we can do, but don’t have to. I could supersede the first edition with later editions, but I won’t do that either. Any new and better editions can sit alongside. They can all stay on sale in tandem—because they can.

Finally, a little more from Etty. A diary is not the same thing as a blog, but her words could almost be mine, if I had her courage:

This writing is a sort of rough draft; I try things out, discard this and that and hope all the pieces will fit together in the end. But I mustn’t run away from myself, or from difficult problems, and I don’t really—what I do run away from is the difficulty of writing it all down. It all comes out so clumsily. But then you don’t put things down to produce masterpieces, but to gain some clarity. I am still ashamed of myself, afraid to let myself go, to let things pour out of me; I am dreadfully inhibited, and that is because I have not yet learned to accept myself as I am.

By the end, I believe she had not only learned to accept herself, but her entire world too, in some of that century’s direst moments.