I am not a
born adventurer.
But I do have
a Tookish side. So when my most esteemed Philosophy teacher, Dr. Fendt, said he
would be in Europe and asked if it would be possible to meet, I looked at all
the possibilities. Cardiff and Prague, where he would present his papers, were
too far away. He might be able to come to Munich, which was closer. But the
plane trip was still too expensive.
So it was that
on Friday evening, I found myself in a tourist waiting room of the coach
service Eurolines. People who went to Paris checked in. Then the ones bound for
London, together with us, bound for Germany or the Czech Republic. A large bus
would leave at 10.30pm to take us to Frankfurt, where a number of us would have
to take a further coach to Munich at 5am.
We waited, a
quiet group of individuals from various countries. There was not much more
talking in the bus. I tried to start a conversation with the girl next to me,
but she was disinclined. Behind me were a Dutch and a Czech person who were a
bit more talkative, especially, of course, the Dutch guy. He expressed his
opinion that the Turkish government was oppressive, but that the Turkish people
would become stronger because of it. I suppose he was a foreign policy expert
of some sort. The Czech guy said that Turkish people were strange. I suppose he
had inherited folk wisdom of some sort.
We picked up
more people at Utrecht and Arnhem. I dozed off. After midnight we got to
stretch our legs; many passengers smoked. The ritual was repeated around 2.30
(I think) and 4.30, just before we reached Frankfurt. By then it had started to
dawn, sunrise after the longest day of the year. When we transferred in
Frankfurt at 5am, it was light.
The next bus
did not stop to let us out; I was glad I had something to eat. We stopped only
to let people out: Mannheim, Stuttgart, Ulm. At the last stage, the bus was
almost empty. By chance, my neighbour from the first bus sat across the aisle
on the second. She and a few guys tried to sleep until we arrived, after 11am.
By then, I had been reading for several hours, sufficiently refreshed: the
Breviary, notes on Church history, and A
Song of Ice and Fire. A fellow seminarian had ‘lent’ me his Game of Thrones e-books, and a long bus
ride is a good place to start reading.
On arriving, I
took the underground to Karlsplatz. When I emerged, this was the first thing I
saw:
The Fendt couple had agreed to meet me at the Bürgersaalkirche, where we attended a beautiful German Mass. No better way to start the day together! The first word I said to Mrs. Fendt was ‘Peace’. The church was beautiful, high-ceilinged, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
When we walked
out, I said to Dr. Fendt, ‘I suppose you arranged the Augustine in the
postcommunion song?’ (The text had clearly been lifted from Confessions.)
He laughed in
his own way and said, ‘That was just a happy accident. Or – something else.’
We walked along
the Neuhauser Straße, visited a Jesuit church, sat down somewhere for lunch
(the Fendts not only made my day, but even paid my day) and talked about
anything that sprang to mind: family, people from UNK and Kearney (like people
Dr. Fendt had met in church, such as Scott Hahn’s son and an Evangelical
missionary out of Wheaton), seminary, recent developments. I ate Bavarian
sausages with mustard.
At Dr. Fendt’s
suggestion, we went to the Neue Pinakothek, an art museum with paintings and
some sculptures from the Modern period. Most of it was not ‘modern art’, but
figurative art from the 18th and 19th centuries. There was a room with a series
of paintings from the 1850s by Rottmann. When the German king Otto ascended the
throne of Greece, Rottmann depicted the remnants of many ancient Greek cities
like Corinth, Aulis, Eleusis. The works were made on plaster: we looked not at
canvas, but at pieces of wall (you could see the thickness). Dr. Fendt was
really impressed by the Rottmann room.
When I was
looking at The Disquieting Muses by
Georges de Chirico (more symbolist in nature), a few girls joined me. They were
not German, so I asked where they were from, which turned out to be South
Africa. I said a few words to them in Dutch and they asked in Afrikaans if I
could understand them.
Dr. Fendt had
heard that I still had exams – that I had ‘taken time off my busy schedule’ as
he put it – and predicted that I would look something like the poor guy on the
right (full
view):
(Hasenclever, Hieronymus Jobs im Examen, 1840)
While we’re at
it, I’d like to share some of my favourites among the paintings I’ve seen at
the Pinakothek:
(Appiani, Zwei Kinder, 1808)
(Overbeck, Italia e Germania, 1828)
(Riedel, Felice Berardi aus Albano, 1848)
Mrs. Fendt
liked this one:
(Waldmüller, Junge
Bäuerin mit drei Kinder im Fenster, 1840)
On exiting the
Pinakothek, we met Rasheed, Dr. Fendt’s nephew, who was probably about my age.
Since we were getting rather thirsty, we sat down somewhere for a Franziskaner
Weissbier. Rasheed told us what he was doing in life at the moment. Then we got
into a discussion about my thesis on Plato (whether it was appropriate to
disguise truth, in order to get the non-receptive to like it), and about civil
and ecclesiastical marriage.
We got up only
to have dinner somewhere else, and passed an anti-Erdogan demonstration:
Apparently the
issue gets lots of attention!
At dinner, the
discussion about the good life was renewed. When it seemed to get heated, I
asked Dr. Fendt: ‘If you could come back as an animal, what animal would it
be?’ He said he’d never really thought about that. Rasheed chose a large bird,
like a hawk; Mrs. Fendt opted for the swan (but not in England, as Rasheed
pointed out, as she would then be property of the Queen, and she is Irish). I
rejected wings (as I said, I’m not much of an adventurer), opining that I’d
probably be a squirrel in a park somewhere.
Finally, when
it was past 10pm, they took me to the Hauptbahnhof;
I would go back to Amsterdam by train. We said goodbye. It had been a good day,
more full of lightness than my arid narration could suggest.
The train
ride, unfortunately, was less comfortable than the bus ride. Across the aisle
were two guys, possibly American and probably younger than I, who talked loudly
and incessantly. One of them called his girlfriend, wheedled insufferably and
mentioned multiple times that he was drunk (that might explain some things).
They were quite full of themselves and quite impatient for the train to get
moving (it was somewhat delayed). Thankfully, they were told that they had to
be in another waggon. But after they had gone, some more noisy people came in.
They left, too. Around 3am, I was woken up by the older man next to me; he
wanted to change seats so that he could exit. A fair request.
It seems
counterintuitive that a night bus would be preferable to a night train, but
such was my experience of this weekend.
Arnhem – I was
getting close to home. Utrecht – I had to change trains. Amsterdam – I arrived
around 9.30 on Sunday morning, walked around a bit and into St. Nicholas’
Church when the gates opened. It was a beautiful Mass. The priest had once been
my fellow student (though over 30 years older). The choir sang very well, and
there seemed to be a fair proportion of youthful faces in the congregation.
Including my own, admittedly unwashed and unshaven, but bright-eyed.
