Living in the Netherlands you learn to see the world in “Still-Life-Vision.”
First, all the museums offer no end of paintings of flowers in vases, fruit in bowls, and people framed in space. They read a letter in their bedroom, pour milk in a kitchen, or play an instrument in the company of others.
Then, as you walk the streets, where one window comes with flowers, the next shows a local setting up for dinner and further down the block, a cafe window reveals someone working the saxophone you gather that Dutch life is worth depicting. You* see why the old masters** painted what they did.
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Here’s a tough still life from the Stripe ‘n Star diner in Florence.
An old, overweight, and exhausted couple sit across from one another in a booth. Even sitting, she’s bent over at half keel, eyeing the floor vacantly from table height. He’s playing cards on his phone.
For sure you have seen old and tired folks who have grown away from one another in other parts of the world. This snap-shot is hardly bound by geography.
Indeed, if you want to rescue these two from how they appear now, I am all ears.
Maybe they are 108 years old and just jogged in from Manhattan.
Perhaps this morning’s frolic with the great-grandkids squeezed so much love and light out of them all they can do is sit here and gather themselves. Could be that at seventy-five they got hooked on the ganja and what, with dispensaries now as common as Starbucks, this G-Ma and G-Pa spend every moment of their golden years stoned as can be.
Tell any story you like that recounts their lives as fertile and joyous and I’ll buy it.
Tell me that I am still wearing rose-colored glasses when it comes to Amsterdam and so struggle to see the good in America more readily, that my current lenses are tinged cynical by comparison. No doubt all that is true.
Still, no one who has grown up here or who knows the value of a bottomless cup of coffee would doubt, looking at the dusk and pallor of these two, their half-mast and disconnect, that America has happened to them too.
Capture life in the Netherlands; Watch what it does to you here.
**Despite months in town, it was not me who made the obvious connection between the museums and the windows. It was ‘The Girl Named Shakespeare.’
On her second night in town (shortly after swooning in front of Vermeer), she looked through a window and pointed to a young woman, facing us but sitting at right angle to a young man and the guitar he strummed. “All the world’s a still life,” the girl named Shakespeare said.
**Do you know the Auden poem that begins?
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;