Dutch Love Quotes

Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.

We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.

One of the others shouted a translation: "The beautiful couple is beautiful.

We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.

Cooking is an art and patience a virtue... Careful shopping, fresh ingredients and an unhurried approach are nearly all you need. There is one more thing - love. Love for food and love for those you invite to your table. With a combination of these things you can be an artist - not perhaps in the representational style of a Dutch master, but rather more like Gauguin, the naïve, or Van Gogh, the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love.

Because I was fifteen and generally an idiot, I thought that the feeling of home I was experiencing had to do with the car and where it was parked, instead of attributing it wholly and gratefully to my sister.

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time. This is a moment:

She took it all in, and as the stories of the past unfolded she had nothing but sympathy for me. Celeste wasn’t wondering why I had taken so long to tell her about my life, she took the fact that I was telling her now as proof of my love.

You remind me of a Dutch painting," she said, staring into my eyes. "You have a strange face. Uncommon. Plain, but fascinating. It has a beautiful turbulence hidden in it. I love it. I bet you have brilliant dreams. I bet you dream of other worlds.

It’s the other things he does, the things that crush me on the inside, that make me want to die. I would have if not for Dutch’s light. I would be dead. I know it. I wish it were real. I wish she were real. She’s getting older and more beautiful with each passing day, and even though she’s a figment of my fucked-up imagination, I love her. To the very depths of my soul.

I’M LOSING FAITH IN MY FAVORITE COUNTRY Throughout my life, the United States has been my favorite country, save and except for Canada, where I was born, raised, educated, and still live for six months each year. As a child growing up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I aggressively bought and saved baseball cards of American and National League players, spent hours watching snowy images of American baseball and football games on black and white television and longed for the day when I could travel to that great country. Every Saturday afternoon, me and the boys would pay twelve cents to go the show and watch U.S. made movies, and particularly, the Superman serial. Then I got my chance. My father, who worked for B.F. Goodrich, took my brother and me to watch the Cleveland Indians play baseball in the Mistake on the Lake in Cleveland. At last I had made it to the big time. I thought it was an amazing stadium and it was certainly not a mistake. Amazingly, the Americans thought we were Americans. I loved the United States, and everything about the country: its people, its movies, its comic books, its sports, and a great deal more. The country was alive and growing. No, exploding. It was the golden age of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream was alive and well, but demanded hard work, honesty, and frugality. Everyone understood that. Even the politicians. Then everything changed. Partly because of its proximity to the United States and a shared heritage, Canadians also aspired to what was commonly referred to as the American dream. I fall neatly into that category. For as long as I can remember I wanted a better life, but because I was born with a cardboard spoon in my mouth, and wasn’t a member of the golden gene club, I knew I would have to make it the old fashioned way: work hard and save. After university graduation I spent the first half of my career working for the two largest oil companies in the world: Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. The second half was spent with one of the smallest oil companies in the world: my own. Then I sold my company and retired into obscurity. In my case obscurity was spending summers in our cottage on Lake Rosseau in Muskoka, Ontario, and winters in our home in Port St. Lucie, Florida. My wife, Ann, and I, (and our three sons when they can find the time), have been enjoying that “obscurity” for a long time. During that long time we have been fortunate to meet and befriend a large number of Americans, many from Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” One was a military policeman in Tokyo in 1945. After a very successful business carer in the U.S. he’s retired and living the dream. Another American friend, also a member of the “Greatest Generation”, survived The Battle of the Bulge and lived to drink Hitler’s booze at Berchtesgaden in 1945. He too is happily retired and living the dream. Both of these individuals got to where they are by working hard, saving, and living within their means. Both also remember when their Federal Government did the same thing. One of my younger American friends recently sent me a You Tube video, featuring an impassioned speech by Marco Rubio, Republican senator from Florida. In the speech, Rubio blasts the spending habits of his Federal Government and deeply laments his country’s future. He is outraged that the U.S. Government spends three hundred billion dollars, each and every month. He is even more outraged that one hundred and twenty billion of that three hundred billion dollars is borrowed. In other words, Rubio states that for every dollar the U.S. Government spends, forty cents is borrowed. I don’t blame him for being upset. If I had run my business using that arithmetic, I would be in the soup kitchens. If individual American families had applied that arithmetic to their finances, none of them would be in a position to pay a thin dime of taxes.

And love was always a beautiful thing, even when it wasn't returned.

There's another part, an obstinate part, that wants more. That wants Dutch live and in the flesh. That wants her hand. Her mouth. Her hips under mine. It wants all of her. Every last ounce. Body and soul.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving, Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss), In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold -- anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

Dear Mr. Peter Van Houten (c/o Lidewij Vliegenthart), My name is Hazel Grace Lancaster. My friend Augustus Waters, who read An Imperial Affliction at my recommendationtion, just received an email from you at this address. I hope you will not mind that Augustus shared that email with me. Mr. Van Houten, I understand from your email to Augustus that you are not planning to publish any more books. In a way, I am disappointed, but I'm also relieved: I never have to worry whether your next book will live up to the magnificent perfection of the original. As a three-year survivor of Stage IV cancer, I can tell you that you got everything right in An Imperial Affliction. Or at least you got me right. Your book has a way of telling me what I'm feeling before I even feel it, and I've reread it dozens of times. I wonder, though, if you would mind answering a couple questions I have about what happens after the end of the novel. I understand the book ends because Anna dies or becomes too ill to continue writing it, but I would really like to mom-wether she married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether she ever has another child, and whether she stays at 917 W. Temple etc. Also, is the Dutch Tulip Man a fraud or does he really love them? What happens to Anna's friends-particularly Claire and Jake? Do they stay that this is the kind of deep and thoughtful question you always hoped your readers would ask-what becomes of Sisyphus the Hamster? These questions have haunted me for years-and I don't know long I have left to get answers to them. I know these are not important literary questions and that your book is full of important literally questions, but I would just really like to know. And of course, if you ever do decide to write anything else, even if you don't want to publish it. I'd love to read it. Frankly, I'd read your grocery lists. Yours with great admiration, Hazel Grace Lancaster (age 16)

This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was a Dutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack, attackers to play in mid-field; it was football’s version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it.

Men!” Maeve said, nearly shouting. “Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it. Our mother left and she came back and we’re fine. We didn’t like it but we survived it. I don’t care if you don’t love her or if you don’t like her, but you have to be decent to her, if for no other reason than I want you to. You owe me that.

I had been to Amsterdam a couple of times with Eric; we loved the museums and the Concertgebouw (it was here that I first heard Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, in Dutch). We loved the canals lined with tall, stepped houses; the old Hortus Botanicus and the beautiful seventeenth-century Portuguese synagogue; the Rembrandtplein with its open-air cafés; the fresh herrings sold in the streets and eaten on the spot; and the general atmosphere of cordiality and openness which seemed peculiar to the city.

The true meaning of life is to become the true meaning of someone else's

When I love, I love with everything within me.” Seeing him with his child, this was obvious. Did he mean…yes, he meant exactly what he said, and it was like he wanted her to know it went much deeper than only with his child. That whatever he loved, he loved with everything inside of him. “I sense that about you, Tristan. Your actions and words are heartfelt.

And yes—scholars might care about the innovative brushwork and use of light, the historical influence and the unique significance in Dutch art. But not me. As my mother said all those years ago, my mother who loved the painting only from seeing it in a book she borrowed from the Comanche County Library as a child: the significance doesn’t matter. The historical significance deadens it. Across those unbridgeable distances—between bird and painter, painting and viewer—I hear only too well what’s being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it’s really very personal and specific. It’s there in the light-rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are—hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible—and then, at a distance, the miracle, or the joke as Horst called it, although really it’s both, the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone. It’s the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.

I point at Drew, as I turn to Dawn. "See? My sister finds her soulmate, and not only does she get rewarded with love and happiness, she gets free champagne flutes, and dutch ovens, and fifty-dollar checks. And what do I get? What do I get on a day when I still haven't found anyone to love? When I'm waiting by the phone for some jerk to call me, and acting like a crazy woman, e-mailing him at three a.m., clutching at straws that I might ever find anyone? Do I get gifts? No! I get condemnation from my grandmother, and I get to wear a dress that makes me look like a baked potato.

In the Netherlands, we give feedback very directly, but we are always polite.” I love this comment, because a Dutch person’s feedback can indeed be both brutally honest yet delightfully polite—but only if the recipient is Dutch. If you happen to come from one of the 195 or so societies in the world that like their negative feedback a bit less direct than in the Netherlands, you may feel that Maarten’s “politeness” is downright insulting, offensive, and yes, rude.

There's a curious thing about pain, said Audrey. 'In the beginning, it's an enemy, it's something that you don't want to face or think about or deal with. Yet with time it becomes almost a friend. If you've lost someone you love very much, in the beginning you can't bear it, but as the years go by, the pain of losing them is what reminds you so vividly of them- that they were alive. My experiences and the people I lost in the war remain so vivid for me because of the pain.

De liefde tussen mensen loopt zelden synchroon. Mensen vinden elkaar op verkeerde momenten, overtreden wetten en regels om de feiten alsnog naar hun hand te zetten, bagatelliseren de gevolgen van ontrouw, ontkennen de overmijdelijke pijn waarmee afscheid gepaard gaat.

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break. Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.

We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing.” —

Hoofdrekenen hoeft niet,’ grijnst hij. ‘Je mag voortaan op mij rekenen.

For the first time in my life I wondered if my father might have loved my sister, beyond the abstract and inattentive way I had always imagined he loved her.

Misschien is zwakker het juiste woord niet, maar wat ik bedoel: liefde is een wedstrijd en degene die het meest voelt verliest. (Altijd.)

I’ve had a taste of your treasures and now I want it all—slow and easy, until we’re spent and satisfied.

Verliefd worden moet je eigenlijk met je ogen dicht doen". - Andy Warhol Helemaal mee eens. Dan hoef je degene die je leven heeft verwoest niet steeds voor je te zien.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch, They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch; They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings; So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life (Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife) Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more. As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire; And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. HOWEVER, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world . .

There is a love for the real, an affection for the true, in all of Dutch art. A church interior with its stillness. A hand with its gesture. A landscape with its distances. A cloud with its motion.

Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do. There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time’s power even over this—which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments’ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge—no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence—if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert. But the still life resides in absolute silence. Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard. But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver. These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time. Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life—this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife—and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented. These things exist—if indeed they are still around at all—in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife’s pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said?

It was better to die, like Eugénie and Digby, in the prime of life with all one's faculties about one. But he wasn't like that, she thought, glancing at the press cuttings. 'A man of singularly handsome presence... shot, fished, and played golf.' No, not like that in the least. He had been a curious man; weak; sensitive; liking titles; liking pictures; and often depressed, she guessed , by his wife's exuberance. She pushed the cuttings away and took up her book. It was odd how different the same person seemed to two different people, she thought. There was Martin, liking Eugénie; and she, liking Digby. She began to read. She had always wanted to know about Christianity - how it began; what it meant, originally. God is love, The kingdom of Heaven is within us, sayings like that she thought, turning over the pages, what did they mean? The actual words were very beautiful. But who said them - when? Then the spout of the tea-kettle puffed steam at her and she moved it away. The wind was rattling the windows in the back room; it was bending the little bushes; they still had no leaves on them. It was what a man said under a fig tree, on a hill, she thought. And then another man wrote it down. But suppose that what that man says is just as false as what this man - she touched the press cuttings with her spoon - says about Digby? And here I am, she thought, looking at the china in the Dutch cabinet, in this drawing-room, getting a little spark from what someone said all those years ago - here it comes (the china was changing from blue to livid) skipping over all those mountains, all those seas. She found her place and began to read.

Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation.

Oh well,' said Jack: and then, 'Did you ever meet Bach?' 'Which Bach?' 'London Bach.' 'Not I.' 'I did. He wrote some pieces for my uncle Fisher, and his young man copied them out fair. But they were lost years and years ago, so last time I was in town I went to see whether I could find the originals: the young man has set up on his own, having inherited his master's music-library. We searched through the papers — such a disorder you would hardly credit, and I had always supposed publishers were as neat as bees — we searched for hours, and no uncle's pieces did we find. But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.' 'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.' 'And this father, this old Bach, you understand me, had written piles and piles of musical scores in the pantry.' 'A whimsical place to compose in, perhaps; but then birds sing in trees, do they not? Why not antediluvian Germans in a pantry?' 'I mean the piles were kept in the pantry. Mice and blackbeetles and cook-maids had played Old Harry with some cantatas and a vast great passion according to St Mark, in High Dutch; but lower down all was well, and I brought away several pieces, 'cello for you, fiddle for me, and some for both together. It is strange stuff, fugues and suites of the last age, crabbed and knotted sometimes and not at all in the modern taste, but I do assure you, Stephen, there is meat in it. I have tried this partita in C a good many times, and the argument goes so deep, so close and deep, that I scarcely follow it yet, let alone make it sing. How I should love to hear it played really well — to hear Viotti dashing away.

This youngster gradually became an intimate visitor of the family. He talked little, but he sat long. He filled the father's pipe when it was empty, gathered up the mother's knitting needle, or ball of worsted, when it fell to the ground, stroked the sleek coat of the tortoise-shell cat, and replenished the teapot for the daughter from the bright copper kettle that sang before the fire. All these quiet little offices may seem of trifling import, but when true love is translated into Low Dutch it is in this way that it eloquently expresses itself.

I thought that there was only one kind of love, one that developed instantaneously and struck you like a bolt of lightning, made you irrational and selfish like it did my parents. I realized too late that love took different forms and the one we had—” He cupped her face. “It was there, the first day we met, growing “gradually from friendship into what’s inside my heart now.” He brought her hand to his chest. “It’s there, steady, constant, making my heart beat for you, making my heart race when you’re near, making my heart sing like a goddamn canary when you’re happy. I never thought this kind of love existed until I had lost you.

I immersed myself in my relationship with my husband, in little ways at first. Dutch would come home from his morning workout and I’d bring him coffee as he stepped out of the shower. He’d slip into a crisp white shirt and dark slacks and run a little goop through his hair, and I’d eye him in the mirror with desire and a sultry smile that he couldn’t miss. He’d head to work and I’d put a love note in his bag—just a line about how proud I was of him. How beautiful he was. How happy I was as his wife. He’d come home and cook dinner and instead of camping out in front of the TV while he fussed in the kitchen, I’d keep him company at the kitchen table and we’d talk about our days, about our future, about whatever came to mind. After dinner, he’d clear the table and I’d do the dishes, making sure to compliment him on the meal. On those weekends when he’d head outside to mow the lawn, I’d bring him an ice-cold beer. And, in those times when Dutch was in the mood and maybe I wasn’t, well, I got in the mood and we had fun. As the weeks passed and I kept discovering little ways to open myself up to him, the most amazing thing happened. I found myself falling madly, deeply, passionately, head-over-heels in love with my husband. I’d loved him as much as I thought I could love anybody before I’d married him, but in treating him like my own personal Superman, I discovered how much of a superhero he actually was. How giving he was. How generous. How kind, caring, and considerate. How passionate. How loving. How genuinely good. And whatever wounds had never fully healed from my childhood finally, at long last, formed scar tissue. It was like being able to take a full breath of air for the first time in my life. It was transformative. And it likely would save our marriage, because, at some point, all that withholding would’ve turned a loving man bitter. On some level I think I’d known that and yet I’d needed my sister to point it out to me and help me change. Sometimes it’s good to have people in your life that know you better than you know yourself.

VOC’s military campaigns in Indonesia were financed by upstanding Dutch burghers who loved their children, gave to charity, and enjoyed good music and fine art, but had no regard for the suffering of the inhabitants of Java, Sumatra and Malacca. Countless other crimes and misdemeanours accompanied the growth of the modern economy in other parts of the planet.

She had taken an almost instant dislike to him over a dinner at Nopi which, when the bill arrived, he had been more than happy to go Dutch on, thereby failing one of her first requirements of a suitor, which was to behave like a gentleman. She wanted doors opening, meals paid for, flowers. Billets-doux (lovely words, made her think of doves – bill and coo). She wanted to be courted. Gallantry. What a lovely word.

Do I?” I leaned back in the booth. “This isn’t disappointment.” We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop. But I didn’t need to say any of that because Maeve understood it all perfectly. “Just imagine if she’d come to get the paper sooner,” she said. “Say, twenty years ago.” “We could have had our lives back.

Some 480 suspected enemy spies were detained in Britain in the course of the war. Just 77 of these were German. The rest were, in descending order of magnitude, Belgian, French, Norwegian, and Dutch, and then just about every conceivable race and nationality, including several who were stateless. After 1940, very few were British. Of the total intercepted, around a quarter were subsequently used as double agents, of whom perhaps 40 made a significant contribution.

There's a curious thing about pain," said Audrey. "In the beginning, it's an enemy, it's something that you don't want to face or think about or deal with. Yet with time it becomes almost a friend. If you've lost someone you love very much, in the beginning you can't bear it, but as the years go by, the pain of losing them is what reminds you so vividly or them- that they were alive. My experiences and the people I lost in the war remains so vivid for me because of the pain.

There's a curious thing about pain, said Audrey [Hepburn]. In the beginning it's an enemy. It's something that you don't want to face or think about or deal with. Yet with time it becomes almost a friend. If you lost someone you love very much, in the beginning you can't bear it, but as the years goes by, the pain of losing them is what reminds you so vividly of them that they were alive. My experiences and the people I lost in the war remain so vivid for me, because of the pain.

Het ligt niet in de menselijke aard alleen op herinneringen te teren, en zoals planten en welk schepsel dan ook voedsel uit de aarde en steeds nieuw gefilterd licht uit de hemel nodig hebben, zodat hun kleuren niet verbleken en de bloemkelken niet verwelkt hun bladeren verliezen, zo hebben ook dromen, ook dromen die schijnbaar niet van deze aarde zijn, voedsel nodig van het zinnelijke, ondersteund door tederheid en beelden, anders stolt hun bloed en de intensiteit van hun licht verbleekt.

You are the new religion. You are the new craze. You are the next stage in evolution. You are so palpably my superior, in every way, that I tremble like a child in your presence. You make my head spin. You make my heart burst. You make my soul explode, every fucking minute I am with you. What I am inescapably heading towards is , in this monologue, which might be the last thing I ever say, is: Dutch, I'm in love with you." His face was as open and wondering as a child, looking at snow. "I love you, Jo.

Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada

Life is a hospital, in which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed. This one would prefer to suffer in front of the stove, and that one believes he would get well if he were placed by the window. It seems to me that I should always be happier elsewhere than where I happen to be, and this question of moving is one that I am continually talking over with my soul. "Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, what do you say to living in Lisbon? It must be very warm there, and you would bask merrily, like a lizard. It is by the sea; they say that it is built of marble, and that the people have such a horror of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. There is a landscape that would suit you -- made out of light and minerals, with water to reflect them." My soul does not answer. "Since you love tranquillity, and the sight of moving things, will you come and live in Holland, that heavenly land? Perhaps you could be happy in that country, for you have often admired pictures of Dutch life. What do you say to Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships anchored at the doors of houses?" My soul remains silent. Perhaps Batavia seems more attractive to you? There we would find the intellect of Europe married to the beauty of the tropics. Not a word. Can my soul be dead? "Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that only your own torment gives you pleasure? If that be so, let us flee to those lands constituted in the likeness of Death. I know just the place for us, poor soul! We will leave for Torneo. Or let us go even farther, to the last limits of the Baltic; and if possible, still farther from life. Let us go to the Pole. There the sun obliquely grazes the earth, and the slow alternations of light and obscurity make variety impossible, and increase that monotony which is almost death. There we shall be able to take baths of darkness, and for our diversion, from time to time the Aurora Borealis shall scatter its rosy sheaves before us, like reflections of the fireworks of Hell!" At last my soul bursts into speech, and wisely cries to me: "Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!

There is a saying in Dutch; Never do you forget the language in which your mother loved you. For me, that language is English. Like many new immigrants, my parents raised my siblings and I to speak and think in the language of the new home. My mother watched in quiet curiosity as I hoarded books from the library. Like my sister’s daughter, who is now 11, I read at the breakfast table, in the car, on the bus, even while walking. She must have been certain that I dreamed in English because it was the only language that I had, and the one in which she had loved me.

But this is the only account hand-copied and tacked to my bulletin board, the testimony of a Dutch pilot caught on shore near Anjer, a city now gone: 'The moment of greatest anguish was not the actual destruction of the wave. The worst part by far was afterwards, when I knew I was saved, and the receding flood carried back past me the bodies of friends and neighbors and family. And I remember clawing past other arms and legs as you might fight through a bramble. And I thought, 'The world is our relentless adversary, rarely outwitted, never tiring.' And I thought, 'I would give all these people's lives, once more, to see something so beautiful again.

After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.” Hall goes on to note that third things might be John Keats or the Boston Symphony Orchestra or Dutch interiors or children.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

inhabitants. While resistance groups in other parts of Europe could count on the silent acquiescence of the rest of the population, Hitler’s regime maintained its generally accepted authority in Germany almost until the bitter end. In fact, large parts of the population supported that regime enthusiastically. Resistance was so uncommon that it could easily be nipped in the bud. Propaganda was readily believed, repression was a matter of loving one’s country, obedience was the rule, informing on neighbours a patriotic duty. In his reconstruction of the workings of Nazi terror, Eric Johnson – using recovered Gestapo dossiers – described the sophistication of the system of informing in a town like Krefeld, close to the Dutch border: a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl was turned in for having a

Mark Vink is a physician in the Netherlands who suddenly fell ill with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). He wasn’t just your typical physician; he also happened to have a brown belt in judo, was the former captain of a Dutch national field hockey championship team and was a marathoner and triathlete. In other words, the guy was a stud who loved to test himself physically – the last person anyone would ever expect to get ME/CFS. Or end up bed bound. Or end up using a six yard tramp from his bed to the bathroom to test his exercise capacity. But that’s what happened. Mark Vink’s ME/CFS story – like many stories – is so striking in its suddenness and so devastating in its comprehensive that it beggars the mind to think that anyone could believe his downfall could have other than a physiological cause.

In comparing Dutch and American families' attitudes toward teen sexuality, for instance, sociologist Amy Schalet found that parents in the Netherlands considered boys to be both capable and desirous of emotional connection; US parents by contrast, dismissed young men as 'driven by hormones' and only interested in sex. Perhaps not surprisingly, although teen boys in both countries overwhelmingly said they wanted to combine lust with love, only the Dutch saw that as normal: American boys each thought his perspective was a personal quirk, unusual among his peers. Yet, a large-scale survey of high school students found our boys were as emotionally invested in their relationships as girls; perhaps having had less practice or support in sustaining intimacy, though, they were less confident in navigating them.

The hospital to which I had been assigned was run by Franciscan sisters. I soon fell in love with every one of them. From dawn until midnight they were busy in the wards, cleaning bedpans, swabbing wounds, writing letters for us, laughing, singing. I never once heard them complain. One day I asked the nun who came to bathe me how it was that she and the other sisters were always so cheerful. 'Why, Andrew, you ought to know the answer to that - a good Dutch boy like you. It's the love of Christ.' When she said it, her eyes sparkled, and I knew without question that for her this was the whole answer: she could have talked all afternoon and said no more. 'But you are teasing me, aren't you?' she said, tapping the well-worn little Bible where it still lay on the bedside table. 'You've got the answer right here.

When we got back to Manhattan, Maeve took me to a men’s store and bought me extra underwear, a new shirt, and a pair of pajamas, then she got me a toothbrush at the drugstore next door. That night we went to the Paris Theater and saw Mon Oncle. Maeve said she was in love with Jacques Tati. I was nervous about seeing a movie with subtitles but it turned out that nobody really said anything. After it was finished, we stopped for ice cream then went back to Barnard. Boys of every stripe were expressly forbidden to go past the dorm lobby, but Maeve just explained the situation to the girl at the desk, another friend of hers, and took me upstairs. Leslie, her roommate, had gone home for Easter break and so I slept in her bed. The room was so small we could have easily reached across the empty space and touched fingers.

All of this happened around the time I’d fallen in love with one of the VanHoebeek daughters, or rather with her portrait, which I called Julia. Julia had narrow shoulders and yellow hair held back by a green ribbon. Her portrait hung in a bedroom on the third floor of the Dutch House above a bed no one ever slept in. With the exception of Sandy, who ran the vacuum and wiped things down with a dust rag on Thursdays, no one but me set foot up there. I believed that Julia and I were true lovers thwarted by the misalignment of our births. I worked myself into such a state over the injustice of it all that I once made the error of calling my sister at Barnard to ask if she had ever wondered about the girl whose painting hung in the third-floor bedroom, the girl with the gray-green eyes who was one of the VanHoebeek daughters

I kind of conned you into believing you were falling in love with a healthy person,” he said. I shrugged. “I’d have done the same to you.” “No, you wouldn’t’ve, but we can’t all be as awesome as you.” He kissed me, then grimaced. “Does it hurt?” I asked. “No. Just.” He stared at the ceiling for a long time before saying, “I like this world. I like drinking champagne. I like not smoking. I like the sound of Dutch people speaking Dutch. And now…I don’t even get a battle. I don’t get a fight.” “You get to battle cancer,” I said. “That is your battle. And you’ll keep fighting,” I told him. I hated it when people tried to build me up to prepare for battle, but I did it to him, anyway. “You’ll…you’ll…live your best life today. This is your war now.” I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have? “Some war,” he said dismissively. “What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.” “Gus,” I said. I couldn’t say anything else. He was too smart for the kinds of solace I could offer. “Okay,” he said. But it wasn’t. After a moment, he said, “If you go to the Rijksmuseum, which I really wanted to do—but who are we kidding, neither of us can walk through a museum. But anyway, I looked at the collection online before we left. If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You’d see Jesus on the cross, and you’d see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you’d see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in

Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.

Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

Fortunate beyond measure… wise and provident in counsel, well-learned in law, history, humanity and divinity. He understood Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and High and Low-Dutch, besides his native language. He was of quick apprehension, judicious and skillful in nature, elegant in speech, sweet, familiar and affable in behaviour; stern to the obstinate, but calm and meek to the humble. Magnanimous and courageous above all the princes of his days; apt for war but a lover of peace; never puffed up with prosperity nor dismayed at adversity. He was of an exalted, glorious, and truly royal spirit, which never entertained anything vulgar or trivial, as may appear by the most excellent laws which he made, by those two famous jubilees he kept, and by the most honourable Order of the Garter, which he first devised and founded. His recreations were hawking, hunting and fishing, but chiefly he loved the martial exercise of jousts and tournaments. In his buildings he was curious, splendid and magnificent, in bestowing of graces and donations, free and frequent; and to the ingenious and deserving always kind and liberal; devout to God, bountiful to the clergy, gracious to his people, merciful to the poor, true to his word, loving to his friends, terrible to his enemies… In short he had the most virtues and the fewest vices of any prince that ever I read of. He was valiant, just, merciful, temperate, and wise; the best lawgiver, the best friend, the best father, and the best husband in his days.5

He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It's a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhales some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night.

Dear Kitty, Another birthday has gone by, so now I’m fifteen. I received quite a lot of presents. All five parts of Sprenger’s History of Art, a set of underwear, a handkerchief, two bottles of yoghurt, a pot of jam, a spiced gingerbread cake, and a book on botany from Mummy and Daddy, a double bracelet from Margot, a book from the Van Daans, sweet peas from Dussel, sweets and exercise books from Miep and Elli and, the high spot of all, the book Maria Theresa and three slices of full-cream cheese from Kraler. A lovely bunch of peonies from Peter, the poor boy took a lot of trouble to try and find something, but didn’t have any luck. There’s still excellent news of the invasion, in spite of the wretched weather, countless gales, heavy rains, and high seas. Yesterday Churchill, Smuts, Eisenhower, and Arnold visited French villages which have been conquered and liberated. The torpedo boat that Churchill was in shelled the coast. He appears, like so many men, not to know what fear is—makes me envious! It’s difficult for us to judge from our secret redoubt how people outside have reacted to the news. Undoubtedly people are pleased that the idle (?) English have rolled up their sleeves and are doing something at last. Any Dutch people who still look down on the English, scoff at England and her government of old gentlemen, call the English cowards, and yet hate the Germans deserve a good shaking. Perhaps it would put some sense into their woolly brains. I hadn’t had a period for over two months, but it finally started again on Saturday. Still, in spite of all the unpleasantness and bother, I’m glad it hasn’t failed me any longer. Yours, Anne

AIA is about this girl named Anna (who narrates the story) and her one-eyed mom, who is a professional gardener obsessed with tulips, and they have a normal lower-middle- class life in a little central California town until Anna gets this rare blood cancer. But it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the cancer person starts a charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? And this commitment to charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing legacy. But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera. Also, Anna is honest about all of it in a way no one else really is: Throughout the book, she refers to herself as the side effect, which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible. So as the story goes on, she gets sicker, the treatments and disease racing to kill her, and her mom falls in love with this Dutch tulip trader Anna calls the Dutch Tulip Man. The Dutch Tulip Man has lots of money and very eccentric ideas about how to treat cancer, but Anna thinks this guy might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and then just as the possibly Dutch guy and her mom are about to get married and Anna is about to start this crazy new treatment regimen involving wheatgrass and low doses of arsenic, the book ends right in the middle of a I know it’s a very literary decision and everything and probably part of the reason I love the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that ends.

They came in to look. I watched them. Most people go through museums like they do Macy's: eyes sweeping the display, stopping only if something really grabs their attention. These two looked at everything. They both clearly liked the bicycle picture. Yup, Dutch, I decided. He was a few steps ahead when he got to my favorite painting there. Diana and the Moon. It was-surprise surprise-of Diana, framed by a big open window, the moon dominating the sky outside. She was perched on the windowsill, dressed in a gauzy wrap that could have been nightclothes or a nod to her goddess namesake. She looked beautiful, of course, and happy, but if you looked for more than a second, you could see that her smile had a teasing curve to it and one of her hands was actually wrapped around the outside frame. I thought she looked like she might swing her legs over the sill and jump, turning into a moth or owl or breath of wind even before she was completely out of the room. I thought she looked, too, like she was daring the viewer to come along. Or at least to try. The Dutch guy didn't say anything. He just reached out a hand. His girlfriend stepped in, folding herself into the circle of his outsretched arm. They stood like that, in front of the painting, for a full minute. Then he sneezed. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue.He took in and, without letting go of her, did a surprisingly graceful one-handed blow. Then he crumpled the tissue and looked around for a trash can. There wasn't one in sight. She held out her free hand; he passed over the tissue, and she stuck it right back into her pocket. I wanted to be grossed out. Instead, I had the surprising thought that I really really wanted someone who would do that: put my used Kleenex in his pocket. It seemed like a declaration of something pretty big. Finally,they finished their examination of Diana and moved on.There wasn't much else, just the arrogant Willings and the overblown sunrise. They came over to examine the bronzes. She saw my book. "Excuse me. You know this artist?" Intimately just didn't seem as true anymore. "Pretty well," I answered. "He is famous here?" "Not very." "I like him." she said thoughtfully. "He has...oh, the word...personism?" "Personality?" I offered. "Yes!" she said, delighted. "Personality." She reached behind her without looking. Her boyfriend immediately twined his fingers with hers. They left, unfolding the map again as they went, she chattering cheerfully. I think she was telling him he had personality. They might as well have had exhibit information plaques on their backs: "COUPLE." CONTEMPORARY DUTCH. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LOVE, FOR THE VIEWING PLEASURE (OR NOT) OF ANYONE AND EVERYONE.

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

Elizabeth?” Ian said in a clipped voice. She whirled around, her heart slamming against her ribs, her hand flying to her throat, her knees turning to jelly. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You-you startled me,” she said as he strolled up to her, his expression oddly impassive. “I didn’t expect you to come here,” she added nervously. “Really?” he mocked. “Whom did you expect after that note-the Prince of Wales?” The note! Crazily, her first thought after realizing ti was from him, not Valerie, was that for an articulate man his handwriting verged on the illiterate. Her second thought was that he seemed angry about something. He didn’t keep her long in doubt as to the reason. “Suppose you tell me how, during the entire afternoon we spent together, you neglected to mention that you are Lady Elizabeth?” Elizabeth wondered a little frantically how he’d feel if he knew she was the Countess of Havenhurst, not merely the eldest daughter of some minor noble or knight. “Start talking, love. I’m listening.” Elizabeth backed away a step. “Since you don’t want to talk,” he bit out, reaching for her arms, “is this all you wanted from me?” “No!” she said hastily, backing out of his reach. “I’d rather talk.” He stepped forward, and Elizabeth took another step backward, exclaiming, “I mean, there are so many interesting topics for conversation, are there not?” “Are there?” he asked, moving forward again. “Yes,” she exclaimed, taking two steps back this time. Snatching at the first topic she could think of, she pointed to the table of hyacinths beside her and exclaimed, “A-Aren’t these hyacinths lovely?” “Lovely,” he agreed without looking at them, and he reached for her shoulders, obviously intending to draw her forward. Elizabeth jumped back so swiftly that his fingers merely grazed the gauze fabric of her gown. “Hyacinths,” she babbled with frantic determination as he began stalking her step for step, pas the table of potted pansies, past the table of potted lilies, “are part of genus Hyacinthus, although the cultivated variety, which we have here, is commonly called the Dutch hyacinth, which is part of H. orientalis-“ “Elizabeth,” he interrupted silkily, “I’m not interested in flowers.” He reached for her again, and Elizabeth, in a frantic attempt to evade his grasp, snatched up a pot of hyacinths and dumped it into his outstretched hands. “There is a mythological background to hyacinths that you may find more interesting than the flower itself,” she continued fiercely, and an indescribable expression of disbelief, amusement, and fascination suddenly seemed to flicker across his face. “You see, the hyacinth is actually named for a handsome Spartan youth-Hyacinthus-who was loved by Apollo and by Zephyrus, god of the west wind. One day Zephyrus was teaching Hyacinthus to throw the discus, and he accidentally killed him. It is said that Hyacinthus’s blood caused a flower to spring up, and each petal was inscribed with the Greek exclamation of sorrow.” Her voice trembled a little as he purposefully set the pot of hyacinths on the table. “A-Actually, the flower that sprang up would have been the iris or larkspur, not the modern hyacinth, but that is how it earned its name.” “Fascinating.” His unfathomable eyes locked onto hers. Elizabeth knew he was referring to her and not the history of the hyacinth, and though she commanded herself to move out of his reach, her legs refused to budge.

Jase opened his door, stepped down, and leaned into her window. “Hungry?” Taking a big breath didn’t help when his sexy scent of cologne had hit her in the face. Hallelujah. “Yeah, I’m getting there.” “Let’s go. The cowboy just came to take you away.” He reached in and turned off the ignition, clasped her keys and opened the door. When she stepped out, he didn’t bother to move back any and they were close. This man was hot and not only his temperature. Whatever kind of chemistry radiated off him, soaked right into her.

Jase took a step around the desk, moving closer, narrowing his eyes. Rebecca placed her hands on her hips, defiance in her stance and voice. “My kids, too.” Two steps brought him in front of her. “You don’t have a job if you leave. Your job is here working the ranch with me. If you want to go, go, but don’t take off with my children. You can’t even fix them dinner.” When she turned, he took hold of her arm, hating this deceit…and loss. “Why, Rebecca? I’ve been a good husband to you.

Whatever it was that came over him that night pulled a cord—her laugh, or her surprise gasp slipping out to think he’d do something so bold.

Sam Anderson. “The Greatest Novel.” New York Magazine (outline). Jan. 9, 2011. New York is, famously, the everything bagel of megalopolises—one of the world’s most diverse cities, defined by its churning mix of religions, ethnicities, social classes, attitudes, lifestyles, etc., ad infinitum. This makes it a perfect match for the novel, a genre that tends to share the same insatiable urge. In choosing the best New York novel, then, my first instinct was to pick something from the city’s proud tradition of megabooks—one of those encyclopedic ambition bombs that attempt to capture, New Yorkily, the full New Yorkiness of New York. Something like, to name just a quick armful or two, Manhattan Transfer, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, Invisible Man, Winter’s Tale, or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—or possibly even one of the tradition’s more modest recent offspring, like Lush Life and Let the Great World Spin. In the end, however, I decided that the single greatest New York novel is the exact opposite of all of those: a relatively small book containing absolutely zero diversity. There are no black or Hispanic or Asian characters, no poor people, no rabble-rousers, no noodle throwers or lapsed Baha’i priests or transgender dominatrixes walking hobos on leashes through flocks of unfazed schoolchildren. Instead there are proper ladies behaving properly at the opera, and more proper ladies behaving properly at private balls, and a phlegmatic old Dutch patriarch dismayed by the decline of capital-S Society. The book’s plot hinges on a subtly tragic love triangle among effortlessly affluent lovers. It is 100 percent devoted to the narrow world of white upper-class Protestant heterosexuals. So how can Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence possibly be the greatest New York novel of all time?

Here I am on a second date with a man I already like a lot and I’ve just turned his front room into a gigantic Dutch oven.

We mourn with those who mourn; weep with those in tears. John Ruusbroec, the fourteenth-century Dutch mystic, said “compassion is a wounding of the heart which love extends to all without distinction.” At the end of life, as at the beginning of life, we need communities of compassion to hold our pain.

The sky had lightened when they got up from the sand. They shook the blanket before wrapping it around them both. Cuddling close they entered the hotel, shivering as they stood in the elevator.

Remember always where the dreaming ends and the being begins. Draw a line for everything you care about and then step over it.

And there was time enough--or so it seemed--for all the cherries atop all the ice-cream sundaes in all the world to fall from their frozen perches, as the heat of a treasure chest summer melted them away. Down and down into the cups of what it would all become, trusting on the ingredients, and how much love had been used to unite them.

Now I know why she

The hospital to which I had been assigned was run by Franciscan sisters. I soon fell in love with every one of them. From dawn until midnight they were busy in the wards, cleaning bedpans, swabbing wounds, writing letters for us, laughing, singing. I never once heard them complain. One day I asked the nun who came to bathe me how it was that she and the other sisters were always so cheerful. 'Why, Andrew, you ought to know the answer to that - a good Dutch boy like you. It's the love of Christ.' When she said it, her eyes sparkled, and I knew without question that for her this was the whole answer: she could have talked all afternoon and said no more.

and things are about to get pretty crazy in this alleyway. Even for Amsterdam.

I know that Dutch loves Dior and she loves him. Hopefully, they will stop this shit and get it together. I

Dutch had a fucked up child hood. He has never gone into details, but I can tell that there is some serious shit going on inside of him. Regardless of his flaws, I love him with all my heart and I know that he feels the same way about me.

desert than I

PRAY the Power of Hope Father, I am so grateful for the treasury of tools purposely placed in Your Word for overcoming hope deferred. Your mercy, love, and power are so great that the moment I reposition my heart toward You, You meet me at my point of pain with Your healing presence. Today I choose to draw close to You, and I choose to come into agreement with Your words of life and truth. Come and enthrone Yourself in my heart. No longer will I allow painful circumstances to control my life. I position my heart to heal. SCRIPTURES

Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin's conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portugese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.

The silence of metaphor accompanies the act of cruelty, as for example with the cannibalistic Japanese who moved directly from the metaphor of love to devouring that marvellous Dutch girl. Or the woman who made a present of her eye to the man who said he was so in love with her gaze. The effacement of metaphor is characteristic of the object and its cruelty. Words are left with only a literal, material tenor. They are no longer signs in a language. This is the silence of pure objectality.

Murray nodded knowingly. “CRUSH and SKORPION have never liked SPYDER much, though I’d put my money on ITGA. They’re about as evil as people get.” “ITGA?” Alexander asked curiously. “Yes. The International Tulip Growers Association.” “Um… ,” Mike said. “That doesn’t sound very evil.” “That’s the whole point,” Murray said. “It’s a front. If they called themselves the International Association of Evil People Who Commit Crimes for a Living, the good guys would have caught on right away.” Alexander gasped in shock. “Are you telling me that every tulip grower in the world is part of an international criminal consortium?” “No,” Murray explained patiently. “The legit growers are part of ITFA, the International Tulip Farming Association. From what I understand, they’re a lovely group of people, mostly Dutch. Although I wouldn’t mess with the International Daisy Farmers Association if I were you.” “Are they also a front for evil?” I asked. “No,” Murray said. “Daisy farmers are just jerks.

From her father, Anna-Sophia had inherited a love of burning down houses. Dutch remembered exactly the first words he'd said to her. 'This is somebody's home.' Anna-Sophias face had been puzzled. 'Of course it is.' And then she dropped the burning rag onto the couch.

Smith had imagined that there would be time again for serious speech between the two of them, on the return leg to New-York; but as well as a hold full of sacks and a deck laden with casks, the lugger had also taken on a moderate clutch of New-York-bound passengers, from Dutch farm-wives carrying baskets of eggs to several more would-be sailors for the Indies voyage, and a talkative attorney, up, he said, from Baltimore to view the northern colonies. Smith and Tabitha were parted by the casks and the crowd, and he spent the journey back into fog and darkness on the ebb tide, obliged to lob back the attorney’s conversational sallies; and thinking wonderingly, where he could betwixt the distractions, as young men are likely to do in these circumstances, how very ordinary and general and unremarkable a destiny it must be, how predictable a part of the universal portion of mankind it is, to love and to feel oneself beloved; and yet how astonishing it seems when it happens to you, yourself; what a stroke of glorious, undeserved, unprecedented, unsuspected luck it turns out to be, that you should be permitted, in your own person, to share in the general fate. It was not until the end of the voyage that she squeezed her way back to his side. They

a good soldier is a well-informed soldier concerning his enemy. Be infatuated with and in awe of Jesus. Be aware of the enemy. Love worship, not warfare; but when necessary, go to war. And post the sentries!

No,” Murray explained patiently. “The legit growers are part of ITFA, the International Tulip Farming Association. From what I understand, they’re a lovely group of people, mostly Dutch. Although I wouldn’t mess with the International Daisy Farmers Association if I were you.” “Are they also a front for evil?” I asked. “No,” Murray said. “Daisy farmers are just jerks.

The Dutch famine of the ‘Hunger Winter’ of 1944 had helped spur the creation of a beneficent welfare state that provided cradle-to-grave security for citizens, and perhaps helped shape Dutch attitudes to work and family. Even the Dutch love of bicycles was rooted partly in the planning decisions taken during post-war reconstruction. To understand the Netherlands, then, one had to understand the war.

...you chose someone who was an impenetrable mystery, but whose elusiveness did not tug at you; their distance gave you space to breathe and abide in a sphere of possibility, whereas the gravitational panic he felt for Blake was a precarious compound that would darken and decompose until it had burned way the surface of the earth and killed everything it touched.

mix. Looking back, I realize he was doing his best to bring me up with good morals and an honest, strong work ethic. But what I desperately longed for was encouragement and affirmation. I don’t remember ever getting a hug from Dad or hearing him tell me that he loved me, but that’s not uncommon in the Amish community. Most Amish people don’t show affection. It’s just the way it was. In fact, the word love isn’t in the Pennsylvania Dutch vocabulary – the closest word for love is like.

The whole purpose of the coming of the Word into the world is to produce people in whom the power of the kingdom will bear fruit. But since the kingdom is fully, albeit mysteriously, present in the Word (since, in other words, the Word's fruitfulness is not in question but is already an accomplished fact), it is chiefly for our sakes that the parable enjoins the necessity of response. The biggest difference made by responses to the Word is the difference they make to us, for us, and in us. They decide not whether the Word will achieve his purposes but whether we will enjoy his achievement - or find ourselves in opposition to it. Admittedly, I am leaning once again in the direction of a descriptive rather than a prescriptive interpretation ofJesus' words. What he is saying in this parable seems to me to be of a piece with all his other loving, if often sad, commentaries on our condition. He is not threatening some kind of retaliation by the Word against people who fail to make the best response; rather, he is almost wistfully portraying what we miss when we fall short and fail to bear fruit. And there is the Word. In the case of even the most promising of the deficient responses to the sowing of the Word (namely, in the verse about the seed that fell among thorns - Matt. 13:22; Mark 4:18), the result specified is that it becomes dkarpos, without fruit, unfruitful. For a plant, the failure to bear fruit is not a punishment visited on it by the seed, but an unhappy declination on the plant's part from what the seed had in mind for it. It is a missing of its own fullness, its own maturity - even, in some deep sense, of its own life. So too with us. If we make deficient responses to the Word, we do not simply get ourselves in dutch; rather, we fail to become ourselves at all.

Our Dutch hostess—or rather, the woman we are hoping will host us once we show up on her doorstep—is known to everyone but me. And though I had been warned about Johanna Hoffman’s friendliness and large dogs, there is no way to be truly prepared for either. When the door to her canal house opens, three dogs that look as though they each weigh more than I do spill out, followed by a plump, bright-faced woman in a pink dress that matches the bows around each dog’s neck. When she sees Felicity, she screams. In spite of not having anything in her hands, I swear she somehow still drops a vase. She throws her arms around Felicity, squeezing her so hard she nearly lifts her off the ground. “Felicity Montague, I thought you were dead!” “Not dead,” Felicity says. One of the dogs tries to wedge itself between the two of them, tail wagging so furiously it makes a thumping drumbeat against the door frame. A second snuffles its nose against my palm, trying to flip my hand onto the top of its head in an encouragement to pet. “It’s been years. Years, Felicity, I haven’t heard from you in years.” She takes Felicity’s face in her hands and presses their foreheads together. “Hardly a word since you left! What on earth are you doing here? I can’t believe it!” She releases Felicity just long enough to turn to Monty and throw open her arms to him. “And Harold!” “Henry,” he corrects, the end coming out in a wheeze as she wraps him in a rib-crushing hug. The dog gives up nudging my hand and instead mashes its face into my thigh, leaving a trail of spittle on my trousers. “Of course, Henry!” She lets go of him, turns to me, and says with just as much enthusiasm, “And I don’t know who you are!” And then I too am being hugged. She smells of honey and lavender, which makes the embrace feel like being wrapped in a loaf of warm bread. “This is Adrian,” Felicity says. “Adrian!” Johanna cries. One of the dogs lets out a long woof in harmony and the others take up the call, an off-key, enthusiastic chorus. She releases me, then turns to Felicity again, but Felicity holds up a preemptive hand. “All right, that’s enough. No more hugs.” She brushes an astonishing amount of dog hair off the front of her skirt, then says brusquely, “It’s good to see you, Johanna.” In return, Johanna smacks her on the shoulder. “You tell me you’re going to Rabat with some scholar and then you never come back and I never hear a single word! Why didn’t you write? Come inside, come on, push the dogs out the way, they won’t bite.” As we follow her into the hallway and then the parlor, she’s speaking so fast I can hardly understand her. “Where are you staying? Wherever it is, cancel it; let me put you up here. Was your luggage sent somewhere? I can have one of my staff collect it. We have plenty of room, and I can make up the parlor for you, Harry—” “Henry,” Monty corrects, then corrects himself. “Monty, Jo, I’ve told you to call me Monty.” She waves that away. “I know but it always feels so terribly glib! You were nearly a lord! But I’m happy to set you up down here so you needn’t navigate the stairs on your leg—gosh, what have you done to it? Your lovely Percy isn’t here, is he? Though we’ll have to do something so the dogs don’t jump on you in the night. They usually sleep with Jan and me, but they get squirrely when we have company. One of Jan’s brokers from Antwerp stayed with us last week and he swears he locked the bedroom door, but somehow Seymour still jumped on top of him in the middle of the night. Poor man thought he was being murdered in his bed. Please sit down—the dogs will move if you crowd them.