notes from a city sinking into the sea

“It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” – Joan Didion

I had the idea for this newsletter nearly four years ago, a few months after I first moved to Amsterdam. I was sat in my little yellow flat, on the eleventh floor of an old newspaper building that had been converted into social housing, looking out over the western edge of the city, as I thought about how different living here was from the view presented from the outside. 

When Joan Didion moved to New York in 1956, as a fresh-eyed twenty year old from the suburbs of Sacramento, she felt ‘some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, [which] informed me that it would never be quite the same again.’ To move is to create a new beginning; to leave is to create a new ending. 

For New York to begin, life in Sacramento had to end. That ending marked the beginning of Joan Didion: from here she would launch a literary career that spanned states of selfhood and location. There may be fewer stories, songs, and movies made about Amsterdam, but the city does have a kind of mystical and nefarious reputation, which made moving here feel close to fiction. When I arrived at Schiphol with the two suitcases which contained the total materiality of me, I suppose that was the beginning, although I didn’t realize it at the time. 

Living in a place which is not your home casts your life with the shadow of impermanence. When I moved into my little yellow flat, I knew that I could only stay for a year. It was a yellow year, one I tried to drink up with the vigour of Anne Sexton. Afterwards, I spent two months sleeping on an artist’s floor, six months in a mouse-infested flat, nearly a year in England, a month squatting in an abandoned bank, and eight months in the eastern docklands – until I found the flat I now live in, a place where I could start writing properly. 

‘There is no perfect ending,’ wrote Louise Gluck. ‘There are infinite endings. Or perhaps, once one begins, there are only endings.’ Leaving home, moving abroad, living in place after place after place: this gives our lives a temporariness which we try to weight with the recognition of beginnings and endings, bookmarking their place, sewing the frayed edges of our lives with the acknowledgment of time. 

We have housewarmings and leaving parties, birthdays and weddings and wakes. Many of us no longer recognise the will of God, but we still respect the will of Time. And we miss these acknowledgements too, when we are in another place. When you move to a country where you know no one, where there is no root and no anchor, what meaning is a date? We know the date of our birth because someone else recorded it, remembered it, took note. The edges of our lives are formed by other people, and when we lose community, part of ourselves is left in that former place. 

Amsterdam is a city that is perpetually being saved from the sea. In a place that is sinking, time seems to have more and less weight. Buoyed against the ever-present waters that spread in heavy arteries, Amsterdam has a slow propulsion which feels very foreign to the ceaseless urgency of London. Here, things brew and ferment – in London, they explode. 

And yet – there is so much happening in this small, waterlogged city. There are so many stories, often noted and understood only within the limits of the ring. And often, the tales of this place barely reach beyond their street. Notes is a glimpse of the many sided, unspoken and unheard facets of life in the Netherlands, of the nuances and narratives that keep this sinking city afloat.