Amsterdam's not much more than a couple of hours away by car and just three hours away on the meandering Inter-City we took from the Gare du Midi and yet it is so astonishingly different. It is so clearly a northern European city, more reminiscent of Copenhagen than of Brussels. The bicycles, the blondes, the brashness, the stylish discretion of the buildings, the wide northern sky, the autumn canals, the post-hippie aesthetic, the institutionalised bohemia,
the easy exchanges, the life-as-play, the unreflected naïvety, the up-front tolerance, the cool intelligence, the practical instinct, the astute business brain, the sense for money, the unstrained organisation, the literal-minded frankness, the right-on views, the straight-talking, the casual manner, the confidence in English, the belief in action, the secret conviction that they've got life cracked - all these things, so immediately apparent, cry out to be more thoroughly penetrated and more deeply understood. It surely has much to do with protestantism and capitalism - another book to write when I retire! Of course, one would have to have a fairly lengthy séjour d'étude, but a bijou apartment on a canal street with a bicycle to take me off to some hushed, but sensibly organised, university library... there are probably worse things in this world! Carol was enchanted by the atmosphere. Up on a trip for her birthday weekend, the poised, understated beauty of Amsterdam and the tasteful, safe unconventionality of the Amsterdamers appealed irresistibly to her Libran sensibility. Before ever coming to Brussels we had imagined a life in Copenhagen, with me doing literary research and Carol working in a hospital, the two of us living in a modest, but charmingly furnished appartment, surrounded by our unpretentiously creative and unfailingly devoted friends. Well, it wasn't to be, but Amsterdam somehow re-evoked that world of might-have-been, as Carol toyed with the idea of spending a couple of weeks' holiday there, with me following some course to improve my Dutch and her swanning around doing the shops and the museums! We'll see...
Our Copenhagen dream dates from 1973 and there's something of that era that has left its indelible stamp on Amsterdam. In some ways it's still dining out on its heyday as the European Capital of the Counterculture. Which was what, exactly? Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll? That certainly, and it's all still there in Amsterdam, but in a tired, seedy, clapped-out version in the form of sex-shops, koffie-shops and rock dives. In the end, it's difficult not to conclude that the whole counterculture thing was largely a demographic phenomenon whereby society was overtaken by the youthful extravagances of the baby-boom generation, a vast surge of testosterone-inspired energy as the swollen cohort of the generation born in the post-war years came into its own and demanded to be noticed and listened to and was prepared to stamp its feet until it was. Given that I was born in 1952, I suppose I'm a part of it all. What I can remember feeling most of all was an extraordinary sense of energy and of possibility - anything, everything was there to be experienced, life's potential seemingly inexhaustible. Whether that is youth or the Zeitgeist is difficult to say. I tend to the view that the accumulation of such sheer quantities of youth-energy was bound to impact hugely on the ambient socio-cultural environment; and nowhere does that influence linger more strongly than in Amsterdam. At its best it brings a creative questioning allied to a sense of moral justice, and a sort of stylish puritanism with a sense of humour. At its worst it is combination of mindless dissipation and right-on clichés heavily sauced with a sour and self-righteous indignation.

What did we do during our stay? Definitely a lot of walking. Our hotel was a little bit away from the centre and, although convenient for the big museums, meant a bit of a walk down to Dam square etc. In fact, walking around Amsterdam is the very opposite of a penance. Wandering along the brick-surfaced streets, past the elegant houses, by the gently moving water of the canals, under the turning trees, over the little railed bridges, avoiding the tinkling bicycles, you are gradually able to take the special atmosphere into yourself. Of course, we also took a boat trip round the canals - an absolute romantic "must". Enjoying the spectacular view of the patrician houses along the Herengracht, one gets an impression of the extraordinary confidence and wealth which Amsterdam must have enjoyed during the Golden Age of the 17th century - the age of Rembrandt, in fact, whose house in the Jodenbreestraat we went on to visit. Rembrandt bought the house at the height of his fame and seems to have spent a fortune on it and on a vast collection of paintings, sculptures, furnishings etc. most of which was seized when he went bankrupt in 1658. The house contains an impressive array of the master's etchings and, on the day we visited, we were given a practical demonstration of the various techniques of etching in copper plate, which further increased our respect for Rembrandt's achievements in that demanding medium. Although the house is of undoubted curiosity value and well worth the visit, the paintings are displayed to greatest advantage in the Rijksmuseum. The Rijksmuseum is currently undergoing renovation and viewing has been restricted to a limited area devoted to a sort of "best of" the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Apart from a certain crush, this was really a blessing in diguise, as, if truth be told, there are only so many paintings you can take in at any one go, and a limited exhibition puts a natural limit on one's cultural incontinence. Highlights for me were the Vermeers - The Kitchen Maid and Woman Reading a Letter - and, of course, the Rembrandts. The Vermeers do exude an uncanny stillness as of a moment in time captured for ever. It's been suggested that Vermeer used a lens and a camera obscura to achieve his apparently perfect representation of reality, but no mere photograph could capture that miraculous sense of eternity in the Now. Among the Rembrandts, the prime exhibit was "The Night Watch". However impressive and however obviously a tour de force, it fails to touch in the same way as "The Jewish Bride", which reveals Rembrandt's very special gift for what one can only call compassion. Clearly Rembrandt was a technically superb artist, but a painting like "The Jewish Bride" is more than just a technical achievement; it somehow manages to reveal a deep truth about the human condition through the medium of paint. The special nature of Rembrandt's gift was further revealed in a collection of his drawings and studies. Every single figure he depicts, however provisionally, however approximately, is invested with that same grace of poise, as if it was something which came out of him and directly into the drawing, independant of his conscious volition. He couldn't not do it if he tried. I was particularly struck by a very quick sketch of what must have been Judith driving a tent peg through the skull of Holofernes. Both perpetrator and victim were somehow elevated above the sordid brutality of assassination by the timeless presence expressed through the posture of the figures. Quite amazing.

Since reading Steven Levitt's "Freakonomics", I've been reflecting on the idea of an economy of human behaviour, a science of motivation, why it is that people do what they do. Self-observation reveals two consistent driving forces behind my own actions: the pursuit of physical pleasure/comfort and the craving for psychological gratification. Although these broad categories cover any number of permutations and contradictions, I can't think of any motivating factor which could not be categorised under one or the other heading. And at the same time, I can't help feeling there's something rather humiliating about this "Binsenweisheit". It's as though, despite my unceasing efforts at contriving to find myself "interesting", "clever", "creative", "original" etc., I am blindly driven by automatic desires in a manner not dissimilar to a clockwork mouse. And the worst of it is that, almost by definition, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". Gratification is, at best, momentary and straightway I am off in pursuit of the next "experience" that will make my life complete. Our lives are constantly projected into a notional ideal future, a state of affairs which effectively chains us to the treadmill of time. I am reminded of an old Captain Beefheart song, I forget the title and the album, but it goes more or less:

There ain't no time to stop in,
There ain't no time to stop in,
And there ain't no Santa Claus on the evening stage.

Buddhism urges us to free ourselves of desire - a seemingly impossible task; the driving force of desire is at the core of human existence. The only possible clue to unravelling this conundrum lies, it seems to me, in a new understanding of the nature of time. As Maurice Nicoll argues in his "Living Time" (see earlier postings), our usual, linear sense of time is only one dimension of time; in a higher dimension all time is reconciled in the eternal Now. It seems that it is given to man, in potentiality at least, to live in these two dimensions of time simultaneously; that this is, in fact, man's proper purpose, demanding a special effort to free his consciousness from the promptings of his automatic desires and his fantasy of himself. I leave you with a few lines from Eliot's "Burnt Norton":

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and present are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial extasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.