Why do I spend so much time looking at pictures?

Why do I spend so much time looking at pictures? I will come to that, but must admit to have been doing a lot of it lately. I have a growing, sneaking feeling that the weeks and months after ���Boar-iss���, the People���s Hero,  achieves his No Deal Exit may be turbulent. I also suspect that my favourite portal into the European continent, the Eurostar train service to Paris and Brussels may be, if not actually shut, a good deal harder to use.

 

So I have for some time been making swift dashes to much-liked continental destinations, especially art galleries and architectural marvels. As the Paris rail link already seems a little shaky, with long delays reported frequently from the (already pretty horrible) Gare du Nord, I���ve been tending to turn left at Lille, and to head into the Low Countries or even further North.

 

I have long sneered at silly people who make jokes about ���famous Belgians��� and laugh at that country as ���boring���. Countries which people classify as ���dull��� -  Belgium, Canada and Switzerland especially - are in fact fascinating and full of beauty of various sorts. Did you know, for instance, that Belgians made  what was ( as far as I know) the only attack on a rail transport of Jews bound for Auschwitz, holding it up and allowing dozens to escape, many successfully . This took place near Haacht on 19th April 1943. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_the_twentieth_convoy

Even if they were not the only ones to do this,  it is a notable act of courage and enterprise which any red-blooded person must admire and salute, and it should be better known. Jews in Belgium were, as it happens, far more often rescued or saved from persecution and murder than those in the next-door Netherlands, which probably flies in the face of what most people think of these two countries. William Shirer, in his Berlin diaries, also noted that there was much more evidence of hard fighting in Belgium than in the Netherlands, when he, as an American correspondent in Berlin, was allowed to follow the German Army into these newly-conquered countries.

 

I intend no slight on the Dutch people, who can hardly be blamed for the smallness and vulnerability of their country .  I have never faced battle, and hope I never shall. Some of you may remember the tribute to Dutch bravery in Lynne Olson���s recent book ���Last Hope Island���, in which she recounted the utterly selfless, steadfast modest behaviour of the women of Arnhem who took in General Sir John Hackett, a story which ought to move anyone who reads it to tears. See https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2017/07/a-review-of-last-hope-island-by-lynne-olson.html

 

I just think the Belgians deserve a better press.

 

 

Anyone who stands with his face towards such an enemy, as he comes across the fields to meet him arrayed with evil, and fights him, deserves admiration. Neither of these small nations could possibly hope to do more than delay the grey steel monster that came stamping across their quiet farms and woods, breathing destruction and melting the bowels of the kind and peaceful? Did you know that the German Stuka dive-bombers were actually fitted with sirens on their wingtips, to emit a terrifying scream as they hurtled towards their targets? It was called ���The Jericho Trumpet���, an allusion everyone in that age would have understood. You might like to think you would not have cared, but every personal account of those who faced this for the first time contains the same thing ��� everyone thought that the Stuka was aiming its bombs at them personally. People got used to it after a while, but the first encounter melted the bowels, even of experienced soldiers.

 

Enough of that, though as I wander (as I like to do) in the nondescript suburbs of Flemish towns, perhaps pottering by an old canal, and I look eastward, I always feel the pulse of power coming from that direction, and a faint, shapeless speculation about how it feels to live with that always over the horizon, and no sea between me and it.

 

But this is one of many things that gives an edge to my travels in these parts. After my recent dash to see the Rembrandts in Amsterdam (and a visit to the Van Gogh museum which persuaded me that I had been right all along to regard Van Gogh as the Hippies��� painter, beloved for his misfortunes and chaotic life rather than for his over-rated works) I went last week to a beautiful, picturesque and fascinating city in Belgian Flanders. Oddly, its English name ���Ghent��� is more foreign-looking than its local name, ���Gent���. In French it is called ���Gand���, though I don���t think there are many French-speakers there. This perhaps explains its older English name of ���Gaunt���, as in ���John of Gaunt���, who came from there. I was there largely to take another look at Van Eyck���s astonishing encompassing of the whole world, visible and invisible,  ���The Mystic Lamb , see https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/ghent/ . On a second visit I found myself overcome by the power of Van Eyck���s depiction of the Virgin Mary, one of the most beautiful depictions of the human face anywhere, ever.  You only realise its unique skill when you look at the attempts of others to copy it, which look like cheap plastic images at some small-town shrine.

 

But I also wanted to renew my acquaintance with the picture of Christ on his way to Crucifixion, attributed (in my view a bit shakily) to Hieronymus Bosch, which is one of the treasures to be found in the Ghent Fine Art gallery. Part of this picture, showing Our Lord serene amid the grotesque, rage-distorted faces of a hostile crowd, formed the cover of the English edition of my book ���The Rage Against God���, so I feel I should keep an eye on it.

 

 

 

This area is both like and unlike the Netherlands just next door ��� unlike in feeling poorer, less modern, brickier and darker (the Netherlands are still suffering from an almost frenzied modernisation, much of which involves very bad, flashy, gigantist cuboid architecture which overpowers the small brick cities - especially The Hague -  and abolishes much of the wistful countryside Dutch landscape painters recorded for us).  See https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/07/a-few-days-in-the-low-countries.html

 

Belgian Flanders, where the city streets have many closed shops or obvious short-lease low-rent establishments, is (I suspect) much less tightly integrated into the German Euro economy than the Netherlands, and, perhaps cannot afford the aggressive development going on there.

   

It is also unlike the Netherlands in being much more Roman Catholic in culture (I don���t think religion is especially strong) ; but it is very like its neighbour in language, and in the almost universal ability to speak English well enough to be effectively sarcastic in it.

 

I made a couple of dashes (Belgium has a very comprehensive and cheap rail network) to other places. One was to Antwerp, where I had two destinations in mind. The first was the station itself, which made a deep impression on me when I saw it first, while on assignment 15 years ago (to do with the growth of Islam in this part of Europe).

 

The Antwerp Central station is astounding. When I first saw it, in a winter dusk, you approached it at high level along a sort of causeway decorated with sculpted stonework like a processional way. It seems to me that this has now been in some way curtailed, though much of it is still there. It leads you into an enormous relic of the pre-1914 age, opulent grandeur piled upon opulent grandeur, with a big dose of complacency attached, great arches, much glass and marble and stonework decoration, commercial magnificence as it was before the age of concrete and the age of chrome, all done in a sort of dull, somnolent red.

 

I suspect it is best experienced in fading light, at the end of a moderately long journey spent largely in the dining car, where you have lingered over the Armagnac until very late in the dark afternoon. The ghosts of innumerable ticket inspectors in peaked caps and gold braid haunt its bare platforms, puzzled by a world that no longer wants or needs them. It is comfortable, placid, tranquil, deferential, formal, enjoyably pompous architecture, a last relic of a continent prosperous and at peace, ruled by a comfortable and (so it thought) secure middle class, any idea of war or danger thought to be safely in the past. Who would risk all this for war?

 

Modern travellers on the oddly-unsatisfactory Thalys train (which somehow manages to lack the grandeur and style of a real international express, while also lacking the easy step-on, step-off convenience of an ordinary intercity train) do not see it. The Thalys, which hurries between Paris and Amsterdam, is inserted into deep concrete tunnels beneath the old station, and then ejected on the other side without affording travellers so much as a glimpse of its staircases, designed for processions of giants,  and enormous arches. If you did not know it was there, you would not know what you were missing.

 

Then there was the Rubens House Museum, one of those clever exercises in imagination, in which the painter���s actual house, an island of antiquity in a modern city, with a lovely, serene stone courtyard and garden,  has been filled with credible furniture and paintings, some of them by the master himself. My favourite was a very jolly Annunciation, utterly different in form and mood from Van Eyck���s in Ghent, made even more light-hearted by the depiction of a sleeping cat in the corner, snoozing on as the Archangel Gabriel (looking a good deal less stern than usual) offers his earth-shaking salutation to a remarkably undismayed Virgin.   

 

These pictures, so many of them Biblical or mythical, are a constant reminder and education. Not only can you find huge pleasure in the artist���s skill (try painting,  just once, and see how hard it is to achieve these effects) in the portrayal of light (along with water the greatest source of life and inspiration) , in the feeling of a clear voice speaking directly to you from another time, without the need for an interpreter.  You learn the meanings of certain flowers and birds in the days when men read paintings and stained-glass windows but could not read words. You see, by the way the painters of the past inserted the great events of myth or scripture into landscapes and cities like their own, how they lived in the constant close knowledge of belief which has deserted us (or which we have deserted). I suppose Stanley Spencer���s portrayal of the day of resurrection in a 20th century English churchyard (which shocks us greatly) tells us how much we have changed.

 

I could not resist, while changing trains in Brussels, a quick dash to the Musee des Beaux Arts where W.H.Auden pondered on Bruegel���s ���Fall of Icarus��� in the sinister, tense December of 1938 when everyone knew they were living a few months from war. It is still there, almost 81 years later, just as strange and perplexing, its figures just as indifferent to the tragedy taking place in their midst. Does anyone know what happened to this painting during the German occupation? Astonishingly, after all the turmoil and plunder which followed, it is there now, roughly where Auden saw it, with several other beautiful Bruegel works close by.  

 

On the way back to the station, I paused to admire the Egmont Palace, where on a January day in 1972, Edward Heath signed the documents that took us into the European Union, and where an angry person rather prophetically splattered him with ink. That scene would make a good painting, if anybody still painted that sort of thing.