I was trying to be an adult; I was trying to be a writer; I was constantly, I felt, failing at both. To come abroad is to understand yourself as a product of your own culture, and to see just how specific that culture is. Away from it, I realized that many things I thought of as normal are not, in fact, normal. Learning to live here meant mastering a grammar that gave me access to other ways to see — other ways to be. In the past nearly 400 years, their country, like every other country, had changed so much as to be unrecognizable.

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Persons: —, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals Locations: United States, Europe, Netherlands