Foreword
ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ - Water is best.
(Pindar)
Water. There's too much of it, or too little. It's too salty, or too sweet. It wells up from the ground, carves itself a way through the land, and then it's called a river or a stream. It descends from the heavens in a variety of forms - as dew or hail, to mention just the extremes. And then, of course, there is the all-encompassing water which we call the sea, and which reminds us of the beginning of all things.
The English once labelled the Netherlands across the North Sea ‘this indigested vomit of the sea’. But the Dutch went to work on that vomit, systematically and stubbornly: ‘... their tireless hands manufactured this land, / drained it and trained it and planed it and planned’ (James Brockway). As God's subcontractors they gradually became experts in living apart together.
Look carefully at the first photo. The water has struck again. We're talking 1926. Gelderland. The small, stocky woman visiting the stricken province is Queen Wilhelmina. Without turning a hair she allows herself to be carried over the waters. She is the embodiment of the stubborn Netherlands, the country that knows how to keep its feet dry.
And look at the other photo, taken in ‘that sullen swamp’ that was Flanders between 1914 and 1918. The horses are going up to the front. The wounded are coming back. The eternal movement to which mankind appears to be condemned. There is a fatalistic serenity about this photo. These men have learned to live with water. Do they still notice it? The sky seems to repeat itself in the mud.
The theme of this book, then, is water. In all its forms it keeps turning up where you don't expect it. Can you paint water? Flemish painters have tried it with a modest river, the Leie. Can you live on water? In the Netherlands they've specialised in that, from houseboats to floating brothels and new neighbourhoods and whole towns wrested from the sea or built defiantly next to or on it. The Dutch East India Company was a sea-borne multinational that wasn't too strict with its employees. Amsterdam's ring of canals at last gives up its secrets. The epic of the Frisian Elfstedentocht and other heroic deeds are paraded before you. In the poems it is freezing, snowing or foggy. In the prose the storm is apocalyptic.
But there is more than water in this book. It overflows with writers and painters, with Johan Cruyff and Eddy Merckx, the Greens in the Belgian and Flemish governments, conductors, musicians, architects and organs, airports and slave-traders, cabaret, and English that is actually Dutch.
All this and much more you can read in this eleventh edition of The Low Countries. They haven't yet been swallowed up like Atlantis. Come and see.
The Editors
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