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