…Parallel ideas that came to me “out of the blue” as I sit in a hotel bedroom in Copenhagen, surely a more noticeable fact than that, for the first time in decades, I have no phone.
I didn’t choose to have no phone. It came about through frustration and impatience after three weeks, off and on, of trying to buy an iPhone online and in person. My soul-draining and mind-draining effort failed. More hours, more patience, more technical proficiency probably would have resulted in me having a phone in my pocket when I flew out of Albuquerque three days ago to meet my son and his wife and son in the hell of LAX and spend the next eleven hours flying to Copenhagen.
I was frightened at first by the prospect of flying “across the pond” (as one of my friends describes it) and spending ten days in a country I’ve never visited or thought or read about with no immediate and easy way of connecting.
How would we find each other in the midst of each day’s touristy complexities? How would I keep “in touch” so to speak with my dear ones at home? Of course, it is not in touch in these days of “touchless” everything, to avoid the infections of the pandemic but also to avoid the possibly more dangerous effects of touch.
Now, on the second day without a phone, I’m no longer afraid. We manage to meet, to go places, just as usual. My dear ones at home are far away and doing fine without me.
And then the thought came: “NO PHONE NO GUN.” Is every call a tiny act of aggression?
You must answer. You must respond. You must drop whatever you are doing or thinking because what someone else is doing is more important.
Yes, that is a tiny act of aggression and at first I was lost without the possibility of commanding someone else’s attention, immediately.
Now, in the freedom and lightness of empty hours—no way to fill every minute in an unknown place with no easy access to others—I notice the strange connection between the way life is lived in this country and my current and perhaps temporary status.
They are few phones used here, at least in public, although yesterday evening in a crowded and noisy Tivoli restaurant—the over-rated amusement park my grandson wanted to revisit—one scowling eight-year-old girl, perhaps sick of the family cartwheeling around her, was absorbed in her phone just as she would be in the U.S. But that’s the only exception I’ve seen.
The Danes are a practical people living within the limits of a limited world. Most of their energy is supplied by windmills that form a graceful line, seen from the airplane, along the harbor edge. That may be the reason the only city I’ve been in at night turns off the lights in its buildings between midnight and six am; the only city I’ve been in where a large percentage of the population gets around on bikes, moving so fast they prove a hazard to the walker crossing the wide bike lanes that parallel all the roads; the only hotel I’ve ever stayed in, renowned and expensive, where there is one small cake of soap in the bathroom for both sink and shower, one half-used tiny bottle of shampoo—and the sign on the wall asking that used towels be rehung rather than washed.
The design of this hotel by Arne Jacobsen and recently refreshed looked at first like an exercise in the cold minimalism we’ve all seen elsewhere: muted greys. Natural wood. Steel legs on uncomfortable looking stiff sofas.
After twenty-four hours in one of these rooms, I see it entirely differently: the long row of large, steel-framed windows (they leak, according to a warning sign for guests) look out on the grey and white reduced landscape of a city of low buildings (with a few tall box high-rises), grey skies, and white, shifting clouds. As though I never need to leave the room to experience the city, the design echoes this landscape: the Drop chair, reupholstered in velvet, the Egg chair, the surprisingly comfortable although stiff sofa with its subdued tweed cover, all conform to an aesthetic of less-is-more like the scene outside my window, where by eleven am big racks are spiked with hundreds of bikes.
Yesterday evening during a blustery rainstorm as the temperature dropped, those bikes were being driven pell-mell alongside the streets by young and old, dressed in ankle-length dresses, voluminous cloaks, ballooning rain ponchos, or the skimpiest warm weather shorts. Pedestrians needed to scurry out of the way and the cars moved in a world of their own.
A practical nation. Neutral during World War Two, the Danes did not resist the Nazi invasion and so were not bombed to dust. Instead, when they realized that the Storm Troopers were arriving to load their 7-8 thousand Jews into boxcars bound for the concentration camps, they spirited them away in canoes and fishing boats crossing in the night to Sweden (reluctantly accepting them because of Danish physicist Neils Bohr’s intervention), or hid them in barns or attics. The Nazis were only able to find and cart off a few hundred. The punishment for the enablers was swift and sure but what is remembered today is that of all the countries in Europe, little Denmark was the only one to save its Jews.
Practical: no use resisting invasion by the Nazi war machine. Now, without a military to consume sixty percent of its budget, Denmark can afford (with high taxes) to ensure a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, free education and health care for all.
Moral: no sacrificing of their Jews, connecting in ways perhaps not trivial to saving soap and electricity.
I wish we in the U.S. could say as much.
Diana says
Sallie, in few words you gave this reader a vivid glimpse into a country where actions are consistent with its values. The authenticity in it’s design and aesthetic is so refreshing and appealing! However, I’d be concerned about being a pedestrian or the sluggish bicyclist that I am. Thanks for this essay.