The Netherlands - Gezellig en Tijd

There are numerous words that can't be possibly translated into English. These words are not difficult to understand and it's not they are incomprehensible, it is that they belong to the culture in which they were cradled and raised. We can get an idea of what they mean but they can't fully leave the arms of their native language. To better explain, it would be like transplanting a significant landmark, taking the Eiffel tower for instance to New York or the pyramids to Madrid - it simply doesn't work.

Such is the word 'gezellig' (pronounced hguh-zellick) for the Dutch.

When I first arrived in Amsterdam last week, I was jet-lagged and tired. I had spent over twenty long, inpatient hours travelling and felt irritable and melancholic (weemoed in Nederlands). When I finally got into my hotel, I wanted the rest of the world, the city, the streets, time itself to shut the up and let me disappear. 

I didn't feel at home until the following evening when my second-cousin Annette and her boyfriend took me to a 'gezellig' eetcafe (eatery, cafe...) on the Lijbaansgraacht, not far from the Museum District where my hotel was located. In true Amsterdam-fashion, we had biked there and locked our bikes beside the canal. In her email to me, Annette explained the place was 'cosy', the dictionary translation of 'gezellig', but it wasn't close to the meaning.

The dinner was excellent and peaceful, so different to what I'm used to. In North America, everything is rushed, especially our meals. We eat so fast that we rarely taste anything. In the eetcafe, there were no owners or servers eager to get us in and out. They didn't have the attitude of 'the more people in and out, the better the turnover, the better the profit.' No. The place, the atmosphere was urging us more or less to stay (blijven) and be content. The feeling there was beginning to help me fashion my understanding of 'gezellig'.

I kept hearing the word as I went about the streets, following Annette and Niels to the Dom Square for Dodenherdenking, the day of national mourning in The Netherlands, a day of commemoration. At eight o'clock there is two minutes of silence. Standing amidst the crowd, the queen and her family not far away, her face on the large television screen, I could only hear the flapping wings of the pidgeons as they fluttered about the balustrades and balconies. In a city of ringing trams and methane-coughing scooters, bike paths perenially flooded with cyclists hurrying by, the stillness was vast and laden with a gentle sorrow. People had come together gladly to the Dom, pilgrims of memory to honor the past.

Later, meeting up with Annette and Niel's friends, Martin, Joep and Saunders, Martin better explained the word. "It's a getting-alongness. It's family but like everyone is your family and you just relax. You know what I mean." I nodded and watched as Saunders, the architect student mischeviously poked Marin in his belly.

At Cafe Brand, a local hang-out Joep told me to look around. This is 'gezellig' he explained. All of this. Heads close together in conversation, rounds of beers being bought. The intimacy that is cheerful and reflective, never forced, a being-human-in-a-place without worrying about when to leave or where to go next.

I also noticed the lack of televisions hanging from the walls. How often I 've walked into North American bars to be bombarded with flickering screens showing sports highlights and games, the programs and replays all geared to short attention spans.

In The Netherlands, people focus on each other, on talking and sharing. There is nothing to distract your attention, nothing superficial to take you away the moment.

The following day, Annette's father Piet came to pick me up from my hotel. In the backseat, his parents, Oom Dirk and Tante Tinni. Dirk is my Oma's youngest brother. When we were in Amsterdam Noord (North), he pointed out the homes and the places where his family used to live. Time and circumstances have changed little. The light brown brick walls and the curtained windows of these modest, quaint homes still stand in their tucked-away places. The narrow streets are still narrow. It was interesting to be in the place where my father walked and played. Oom Dirk pointed to a new building, the originally having been bombed. When I was a child, I remembered my Oma telling me the same story, how her friends were killed during an air raid.

Today, the faces here in Amsterdam Noord aren't all Dutch. The people living in my father's old neighborhood are mainly immigrants and there is more garbage on the roads and sidewalks. Nonetheless, I felt moved to see a place connected to my own history, a piece of my life before my own life began. 

Later that day and in the days to come I realized I had experienced 'gezellig' in my childhood. The four of us went on to visit Oom Dirk's sister, Corri in a nearby apartment. We had coffee and kookje and I saw many pictures. I didn't understand much of the conversation but it was like being six years old again, sitting in my Opa and Oma's living room, listening to my dad converse with his parents, the clock gently, timidly ringing in the background, the chimes tinkling through the air. The past reclaimed, so to speak.

From there we headed to father's cousin home in Monickendam, north of Amsterdam. Feijke and her husband Jacob offered to host me at the beginning of my trip. I met their son and daughter, Bart and Marleen (also second-cousins) and they took me to dinner. The family came over that evening and I met Corri's son and daughter, Kees and Seike. Kees and I talked at length about politics, history and culture and he too reminded me of the word 'gezellig'. I told him I had experienced similar mornings, afternoons and evenings long ago with my father's family back in Canada.

Besides dropping in now and then, during my childhood it was custom to visit my grandparents on Sunday mornings. Living so close to my grandparents, my family often walked over in good weather. Everyone else arrived from car, usually after church. The cousins sat in the sunroom where Oma brought us cookies and snacks while the grown-ups sat in the living room, my Opa in his favourite chair beside the window.  

Talking with Kees, images from that time tip-toed through me. I told him how much I missed that world. The earthy, chocolate aromas of mocha moving from room to room, the smell of cookies on the plate, the Delft-blue porcelain on the shelves. And of course, the conversation, how the Dutch language traveled boistrously from the living room to the sunroom, the stories, the arguments and of course the laughter. When my Opa died in 1997, the 'gezellig' in my life disappeared or better yet, was dismantled. There were still Sunday morning coffee at Oma's but it was different. The language was still spoken but less joy in the air. My uncles and aunts still gathered but perhaps more out of fear of the future - how soon Oma would die? - than through the original spirit of coming together. I still went but none of my cousins bothered anymore, their lives being busier and more concerned about work and school.

I suppose for me and many others it is true to say there would be no apprecition of 'gezellig' without the presence and impact of time or tijd.

The Dutch are very aware of time. Clocks are everywhere, on churches, on the towers of town halls (stadhuisen) and in museums. In the Rijks, for example, there is a display showing a human Grandfather clock by artist Martin Baas. It appears that a man is trapped inside and with every passing minute, he erases the minute hand of the clock and draws it anew to keep the correct time. The screen on which the face of the clock is displayed looks frosted-over and the man behind it blurred. Baas may be pointing to the blurr of time, how sad and insignificant we are, nameless and faceless.

Such melancholic art is not foreign to The Netherlands. In the Golden Age of Dutch painting, many of the masters created still lifes (or stilleven). On the surface these paintings depict seemingly harmless groupings of flowers, food, books and other objects. But on closer inspection, the flowers are a little wilted, the fruit is going bad and the cup is overturned. The page in the book says 'finis' and the hour-glass with its draining sand is almost done. Everything points to death and time's passing. 

Sometimes the 'momento mori' ('you too will die') is obvious: a skull sits on the pile of books, indicating the futility of life and learning. 

Sometimes the grouping's message is subtle - the walnuts here, for instance. You have to crack them open before you can enjoy them, pointing to how in time, you must live and by living, you are always nearing death, the moment disappearing through its flow and all the pleasures inherit. What else is there? these paintings seem to also ask. If we don't eat the fruit, it will rot without us. If we don't read the books, how else will we learn. We have no choice. The glass of wine or beer must be exhausted otherwise you can't enjoy it without drinking it.

The same with us. The people in our lives, even to love someone else, to hold them, kiss them, talk with them all eventually and irrevocably mean we must prepare ourselves for losing them or being lost. 

Though we don't see people in these pictures, we do manage to see ourselves. The objects are us, the overturned glass like a man lying in his death bed.

(Speaking of art and time, when I visited the Rembrandthuis, I saw how time-consuming it is to make oil paint. The musuem employee demonstrated how the artist had to take oil and powdered stone and mix them using a block-like pummel on a marble board. Rembrandt used fourteen colours. And I could see why. Not only did it take awhile to mix the paint but also the muscle-work required could make you tired. Moving the stone around on the board, the oil and powder together form a sticky substance and you have to hold on and force it.)

Reflecting on our death, we can understand why art is so precious and at times, inexplicably expensive. The artist is dead. They can no longer give us their talent and create their singular, all-too-human beauty and vision. They lived in time, their scenes expressed moments in time, fleeting but made eternal through their work. No more will they paint their drinking peasants, their Biblical scenes or their still lifes. For this we appreciate them but maybe we can't always explain it.

Like with artists, we hold on to whatever trace we can of the people who have passed on before us, what they gave us, what in turn becomes priceless to us.

Sitting with Oom Dirk, the day after the above mentioned family gathering, going through his photoalbums, it felt like I was sitting with my Opa once again, enjoying his presence, his humor, his memories. It was as if time decided to be kind, bringing me a gift instead of taking something or someone away, as if the moments of those long ago Sunday afternoons were in fact lines in a poem and being here in Holland, I could hear the accompanying rhyme.

I have travelled and lived in many places in Canada but never felt as close to the beauty of my past as I felt sitting there with the smell of coffee in the air, the taste of it on my palate and almondel kookje in my hand. And after the coffee and snack, I had some jenever - Dutch gin - and it was like I was having a drink with my Opa.

Now, I know what I've been searching for. And it's nice to give it a name. In English, it is nameless but here in The Netherlands it is alive and important. It's everywhere. In the vibrant, spacious town squares (groot markts) lined with 17th and 18th century houses, in the restaurants, and the brown cafes with their cheery flow of Dutch discussions. Even in the museums. I know I've seen hints of it in the art I've loved and studied since high school and university: the tender, timeless scenes from Vermeer, his milk maid, the jovial group portraits of Hals, soldiers with raised glasses and the works of Rembrandt, paintings of himself and his family, all of them showing a dignity mixed with wistfulness and wonder.

Gezellig. It's in the blood. My blood as well. Seeing my grandfather's face again I feel a familial, timeless peace, a homesickness healed.

Yes...a beautiful word. Untranslatable. I'm finding it everywhere. In the photographs, the conversations, the streets, canals, the people... always the people...