Good morning. Van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring has been stolen from a Dutch museum. “Exactly how the work was removed is still unclear, though local police said that whoever stole the work had to smash a glass door to gain access to the museum.”

Seth Mandel reviews Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel: “In Station Eleven, an Air Gradia plane lands at an airport during the outbreak and simply stays there with its passengers, an eerie sign of the way life just stops during a pandemic. In The Glass Hotel, the central villainous activity of the book, a Ponzi scheme, takes place in New York in the Gradia Building. In Station Eleven, Miranda dies from the flu on a beach in Malaysia, where a ghost fleet of container ships sits offshore. In a rare bit of optimism, Miranda muses about how the isolation has likely saved its crew. In The Glass Hotel, those ships are a problem to be solved because the financial crash of 2008 has curbed the demand for the goods they might otherwise have carried. The characters begin The Glass Hotel partying through Y2K, hoping the world doesn’t end. It doesn’t. Vincent and Paul soon go to work at a hotel on a remote island in British Columbia accessible only by boat and without cellphone service. ‘The truth of the matter is,’ the hotel’s general manager tells an interviewee, ‘there’s a certain demographic that will pay a great deal of money to escape temporarily from the modern world.’”

In praise of Encounter: “It is almost 30 years since the demise of Encounter, the London-based monthly review of culture and politics, but no other magazine has since come close to matching its influence.”

When Germans committed suicide en masse. “On April 30, 1945, as Nazi Germany was approaching its final collapse, the people of Demmin began to kill themselves. Early that afternoon, the Red Army entered the quiet Pomeranian town, a hundred miles north of Berlin, which had been abandoned by the Wehrmacht. A handful of diehards put up token resistance, among them Gerhard Moldenhauer, a local schoolmaster, who fired a few shots at the Soviet advance guard from the window of his apartment. He then shot himself in the head before the soldiers could storm the building. Moldenhauer had already killed his wife and three children in the cellar below. Over the next four days, hundreds more followed them to their graves. Since few had guns, many hanged themselves. Others took poison or slit their wrists. But the most common suicide method was drowning in nearby rivers, canals, and other waterways, with some using rucksacks full of stones to weigh themselves down.”

Young Rembrandt: “After his relatively late start, Rembrandt closed the gap and was probably sharing a studio with Lievens by their early twenties. The result is that we get to see the most famous of self-portraitists in an unfamiliar 3D: for it is a cocky and ruddy-faced youth that springs forth from Lievens’s likeness of his friend, painted c. 1628 – one ready to slap you on the shoulder then pose you some provocative argument, an argument only to be settled by resort to further drawing or painting. Rembrandt and Lievens played out their amicable contests via novel designs for pictorial dramas, setting themselves themes such as ‘Samson and Delilah’ or ‘Lazarus’. Lievens at an early age had gone to Amsterdam to train with Pieter Lastman, an inventor of history paintings, and perhaps this prompted Rembrandt to later follow suit. Their teacher’s first-hand experience of Roman painting meant that both these provincials had their sights set high. The evident contrast between them is that Lievens liked to swing his arms around more – his instincts were bolder and brasher – whereas Rembrandt preferred to zoom in, not allowing that any nuance of mark-making could be too fine. We see the latter making infinitesimal discriminations with the etching needle, while it was the former alone who at this stage took to canvas.”

The invention of travel: “Until the 17th century, travel to and on the European continent was commonly the concern of missionaries and pilgrims . . . Before Ruskin conceived of mountains as ‘Great cathedrals of the earth’, they were regarded as shadowy, menacing ructions in the landscape. Donne’s ‘An Anatomy of the World’ (1611) characterises mountains by their ‘warts and pock-holes’.

A choir practice turned deadly: “Skagit County hadn’t reported any cases, schools and businesses remained open, and prohibitions on large gatherings had yet to be announced. On March 6, Adam Burdick, the choir’s conductor, informed the 121 members in an email that amid the ‘stress and strain of concerns about the virus,’ practice would proceed as scheduled at Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church. ‘I’m planning on being there this Tuesday March 10, and hoping many of you will be, too,’ he wrote. Sixty singers showed up. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes . . . Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.”

Essay of the Day:

In Bicycling, Kim Cross writes about two cyclists—one British and one American—who were biking across Eurasia and crossed paths by chance:

“Once upon a road in Kazakhstan, two men converge in the desert. Strangers born an ocean apart, riding bicycles burdened like camels, they emerge from either horizon, slowly approaching a common point. Day by day, hour after hour, they make their way through a land as flat and featureless as a page without words. Thousands of miles spool out behind them. Thousands more lie ahead. One rides east. The other, west.

“For months now, each has been pedaling, alone, through sun, wind, rain, and snow, climbing mountains, crossing plains, and loading his bike onto boats to float across minor seas. Now, on a Sunday morning in August, they soldier down an unpaved Soviet road that never seems to bend. The only sound is tires crunching on gravel and, now and then, the lonely roar of a truck hurrying between two somewheres.

* * *

“Then, through the shimmering heat, a blur appears on their common horizon and gradually comes into focus: a simple white box of a building on the edge of the dusty road. Next to it, a metal shipping container marked by a hand-painted word, шaихaнa. Translation: chaikhana, a teahouse, where travelers can find water, food, and shade. The nearest city, on the Caspian Sea, is 235 miles away.

“Here, under a noon Kazak sun, two sagas, by chance, eclipse. The American is six feet tall, 200 pounds, smiling through the scraggly beard of a traveler who hasn’t seen a shower in days. He is 27 years old. The Brit is five-foot-seven, 143 pounds, smiling through a blue bandana and a slightly darker beard. He is 26 years old.

“‘What the hell are you doing here?’ says the American. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ says the Brit.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Dingle Lighthouse

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