A letter from Brussels
On a lonely winter
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I moved to Brussels, the capital of Belgium, at the start of October. I had a job there. I’d been doing the job remotely for six months, and it had been fulfilling, but they wanted me in Brussels now. I can’t say I was unconflicted about leaving my house and spouse – I wouldn’t be, you would hope – but moving to Brussels offered me a chance to fulfill some long-held and tangible objectives, such as to improve my French.
Arriving, I fell into an unexpected loneliness. All I had in Brussels was a job, and my spouse remained in London. I did have relatives in Antwerp, an uncle, aunt and three cousins. My grandfather was Belgian you see; Flanders wasn’t terra incognito to my family. I visited my Antwerp relatives within weeks of arrival but I needed to build my own thing. Soon my weekends had slid into intense social isolation; one weekend, I found myself talking to the mop.
I tried to think why I was so lonely. After all it wasn’t as if I’d necessarily been excessively social in London. I’d lived abroad before too, but I’d been young then. When I walked into certain parties or certain events, I felt I was retracing steps in a computer game I’d already completed, with only the merest of Easter Eggs left to discover; my spouse had already provided a question to the great question of young adulthood, who and whether to partner up with someone. I went to parties and got into arguments about Israel.
There are, as has been observed, two lonelinesses, that of being on your own, of being with nobody, and the loneliness that can come being surrounded by other people. They can, to be clear, be perfectly nice people, even excellent people, but you just have a feeling that they are not your people.
At the age of 41, as a moderately gregarious man, it is rare to find myself thoroughly immersed in the former loneliness, not least because of a quietly substantial online presence, enough for my modest if perrenial needs of attention and celebration. There is always someone or other from some phase of my life about. In the digital age, one of the odder things about getting older is the way you reencounter people from other stages of your life and pick up the strands and preoccupations of other times. Suddenly you’re back chatting with someone you knew in 2012.
Now though, for the first time in years, I found myself again in that latter social loneliness. This winter became an intense experience of it; of constantly meeting people and feeling on the outside, of not quite fitting in, of being on the periphery in a way that wasn’t really fun.
Language contributed to my isolation. As my French improved, I noticed the language always stood at a slight distance from me, in a way that never second seemed the case with my other fluent language, German. We might supply a linguistic reason for this; German is closely related to my native English, eine Brudersprache as it were, and might be said to have an instinctive way of speaking and doing things closer to English than French. But I’m not sure it’s a matter of the relative proficiency in the language. Chinese, a language I speak to a very limited degree and read not at all, has an intrinsically positive association to me as the language of my spouse and her family, a language spoken by people whom, at least if they’re being translated correctly, love me.
French though, and this somewhat befits the language’s historical role in diplomacy, felt like a tool, one which I wanted to use as best I couldbut which did not express the deepest timbres of my soul – I speak French, it might be said, something like a 19th-century exiled Russian political dissident, never really getting onto my deepest passions.
Perhaps if I stayed in the Région de Bruxelles-Capitale for many years, accumulating memories and associations in the language, I would feel exactly the same warmth to it, the sense of ‘This is the language of my people’, that I did and still feel toward German. But for now my language felt just another part of the city’s cold. I could hear my accent in French; it alienated even me from the words I myself spoke.