Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
Explore your Prison
I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions (Claude Levy-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques)
Why does someone take the trouble to get up and go somewhere, to travel? Out of boredom or curiosity? Or restlessness? Or because he once had to follow his herds or his empty belly? For all these reasons and a good many more beside. In the best case he becomes wiser for his travels. Because he has to hone his prejudices on those of other people, because he discovers different conventions which render his own more fragile and more precious.
The travels in this book go to and from the Low Countries. The travellers are tourists who produce statistics, they are writers and artists who sometimes proclaim the journey itself a work of art. In the thirteenth century a Flemish monk journeys to the Mongols ‘with his eyes wide open and a steadfast heart’ to convert the Great Khan. He comes back with a report on his travels for the King of France. In Frankfurt the De Brys publish their monumental collection of voyages from 1590 on; its illustrations will make their way throughout Europe.
But there are pocket-sized journeys too: from Brussels to Antwerp, for example, along the Nl, a road running through deepest Flanders which few people take any more. And a book about travellers must also find space for the incorrigible non-traveller, who stays at home because he agrees with Pascal that all the evils that befall mankind spring from the fact that he can't stay put in his own room. Which brings us seamlessly to the travels of the mind which this book still has in store for you. Through the Netherlands, a country in confusion after Fortuyn and Van Gogh where the Dutch have raised their voices. Through Belgium, that weirdly cobbled-together Absurdistan which sometimes makes one wonder whether it will live to see its two hundredth birthday, now that its people are more and more torn between blood and soil.
On top of all this, the Netherlands cherishes its art in public space and does its best to be simply happy to live in Vinex-Land; in Flanders we tour the monuments to the memory of the Great War. Mystery is on the march in literature and photos. Pop groups hitting the road seek audiences abroad. Rembrandt stays hidden at home and Bruegel travels to Italy. Verhaeren treks through Europe and Khnopf plays the dandy, while in the writer Brusselmans' life ‘nothing worthwhile ever happens’. Leeuwenhoek looks through his microscope and sees for the first time the migrations of bacteria and spermatozoa. ‘Who would be so besotted as to die without having made at least the round of this, his prison?’: so says Marguerite Yourcenar's hero Zeno in The Abyss, at the moment when he leaves Flanders for the South, to discover himself, the world and life.
I most heartily invite you to explore the prison of the Low Lands by the Sea. It's worth the trip.
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