Foreword
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again?
Movement. It's the nature of the beast. Within each of us lurks an Odysseus who wants to go home, but only after much wandering.
Man walks, strolls and runs, e.g. from Marathon to Athens. He gets on the back of a horse, on carts and in carriages and stage-coaches. He travels the rivers in canoes, sloops, boats and barges and sails the deep blue sea. He lays tracks on which trains and later trams will run, he rides bicycles, mopeds, and finally comes up with that ideal extension of his body known as the car. He flies around the world in eighty days in hot-air balloons and eventually raises himself aloft in aeroplanes and airships. He flies out into space, to the moon and, soon, to Mars.
Citius, altius, fortius.
Until he runs into the limits of his own mobility, his own desire to be with as much as possible as often as possible as far as possible as fast as possible. Everything clogs up, grinds to a halt. And then he sits in his 4 × 4 in a tailback on a motorway going nowhere.
Stuck in motion he broods about mobility, thinks nostalgically of the saddle-horse, the Orient Express, the barge, the stage-coach and the Paris-Peking Rally. With the skies now stripped of airships (too dangerous) and Concordes (too expensive) he curses Henry Ford, sits in his jam-packed charter flight to Corfu dreaming of Louis Blériot and Charles Lindbergh and knows he is condemned to one of the most densely populated regions in the world: the Low Countries. There they lie, squeezed between London, Paris and Cologne, delighting in and burdened by their strategic situation as they try to steer a course between the Scylla of economic interests and the Charybdis of culture and ecology.
That culture in its broadest sense is also reflected in the other contributions in this book. Here you will find articles on artists and sculptors, architects, film-makers, musicians, an American woman who has become a Dutch writer, gardens, how the Netherlands lost its innocence, and its still stubborn sense of identity, on zoos and Flemish beguinages, The Hague as the city of international law, the melancholy of Mechelen and a good deal more besides.
So you don't need to take an airship or a bicycle anywhere for this book. Its object is to give you a ‘Voyage autour de ma chambre’.
LUC DEVOLDERE | Chief Editor
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