The Tile Maker

Georg Simmel was fascinated by the notion of "the stranger " and the role such outsiders play in the social order. Camus used "the stranger" as a metaphor for the human condition. Anthropologists are in a sense professional strangers, always half in and half out of the communities they study. This is the story, or rather nonstory, of a stranger in Friesland. Nobody knew him, but the villagers talked to me, their ethnographer, about and around him. In the end, I got a chance to meet him, but I declined. The mystery of the stranger of East‐of‐the‐Lake remains part of the aesthetic landscape of the Frisian lowlands. In this article I exercise poetic license to capture the mood of the small community, elusive in terms of traditional academic discourse. This short story—if one can call a hybrid like this a story—I find more evocative of the reality of East‐of‐the‐Lake than the scholarly papers I have written about it. Certainly, literary approaches ring truer to many of our interlocutors, who feel more comfortable being fictionalized than objectified. A Frisian friend said of this piece, "It's the first thing you've written that sounds like reality."