Benjamin Linder

Two weeks in Ghent

Ghent, Belgium. A small town with a university half an hour by train from Brussels. A nice place with a canal that winds its way through the old buildings and beautiful new architecture alike. The town shouts, progress uninterrupted. Neither destroyed only to rise from the ashes after World War II nor arriving, truly, in its wake, as so many American cities feel as though they did not exist a hundred years ago. The people are young and middle aged, Dutch-speaking and French-speaking Europeans and Arabic-speaking immigrants. They push strollers, smoke cigarettes and have nice haircuts and clean clothes. They meet, starting around two o’clock, in cafés. These cafes serve coffee, beer, wine and cocktails, as well as pastries and small, rich meals at a reasonable price. Cobblestone streets are everywhere. So are massive stone churches and towers, bicycles and trams. And everywhere is the sense of a reasonable past and a reasonable future for young and old, immigrant and non-immigrant. Persist and endure.

Paris and New York are filled to the brim with energy. Everywhere, important people strut on their important errands. At least half of that importance comes from nothing less than the fact that these errands are happening in Paris and New York. In that energy is also an idea that the future depends entirely on the ability of people to imagine it and invent it. And if these great visionaries were to cease activity, the whole world would come grinding to a halt.

Ghent is a normal place. The streets of stone buildings that are hundreds of years old attract tourists with the novelty of such an old place. But new apartment buildings across the canal from old houses give the sense that normal life, whatever that means, has been happening in this place for over a thousand years. When the world is covered in cities that feel like they are at some point on a time frame of a birth and death of an empire, a beer in a nice quiet pub is an excellent reminder that tomorrow will come, and will, for better or worse, look a lot like today.

While I was in Ghent, I ate some truly delicious food. A lot of it was home cooked but I could never beat the slices of cake I had at Ludo Café. VIERNULVIER was an excellent place to get work done and get a cappuccino. Also, in a part of the town that has almost no other shops is a restaurant called De Frietzketel. They serve fries. They’re delicious. Highly, highly recommend. Even the vegan burger, not a meat substitute but entirely plant based, was pretty damned good. There is also a beautiful old movie theater there, called studio Skoop with an old café. I got to see both Drive Away Dolls and All of Us Strangers there. The empty theater for Drive Away Dolls and the half full one for All of Us Strangers (almost all middle-aged people), created the impression that the people of Ghent are serious art people who care about serious issues affecting the LGBT community. Close ups of break downs are serious art. A couple of lesbians and an unexpected dildo in an Ethan Coen flick are not. Apparently.

Of course, the teeming, exhausting, endless, disillusioning possibilities of New York are inspiring. But normal promises, at least, tomorrow. Who could ask for more?