Trouble in Paradise
A Tale of Love and Lust
Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
This year we are giving you love. In every shape and form. From courtly love to love for animals. From Plato to porn. From the idyll to the Waste Land. From refined and circuitous to crude and down-to-earth.
Famous loves will parade before you: Charlotte Brontë's unrequited love for her French teacher in Brussels; the requited love of Aldous Huxley's Flemish wife for her husband and for... Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich; the ill-matched love of an eighteenth-century soldier in Surinam and a mulatto girl; the love that supposedly never was between James Boswell and Belle van Zuylen alias Madame de Charrière and last but not least the discovery of unbridled sexuality in Congo by a Belgian colonial.
The Low Countries were far from immune to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, became a sanctuary for libertines. Sex became a matter of routine. It even got its own museum in the city on the ij. In the year 2008 Belgium and the Netherlands are among the few countries where same-sex marriage is legal. Does this mean that the Low Countries are a paradise for the delights of love and lust? The reality is more complex and more prosaic.
Just look at this photo. It is disturbing. The two lovers keep each other in equilibrium. But they are balancing on a knife edge. Love appears to be one sigh removed from death. And love also evidently demands absolute surrender and trust, concentration, focus and control.
Look upon this year's themed section as foreplay. The act itself consists of our annual mix of historical and contemporary topics. You can lose your heart to writers, architects and visual artists, to Magnum photographer Carl De Keyzer's photos of power and history or to the Design Academy in Eindhoven. You can contemplate a portrait of the Netherlands' most Latin city - Maastricht - and learn how Brussels has become Belgium's Gordian knot. And speaking of Belgium: you will notice that this yearbook contains no article on the country's longest-running political crisis. Not because we don't think it important, but because the political developments are such that they require rather greater critical distance. In the next yearbook you can expect an appraisal of a model and its boundaries, and quite possibly of a new, yet-to-be-discovered land.
Post coitum omne animal est triste? Not necessarily. By way of afterplay we are happy to inform you that as of the beginning of this year you can find the complete bibliographical survey of over 15 years of this yearbook on www.onserfdeel.be and www.onserfdeel.nl. Samuel Johnson, whose biographer was the same Boswell as above, once wrote that there are two kinds of knowledge: we either know a subject or we know where to find out about a subject. And incidentally, you might also like to take a look at thelowcountries.blogspot.com, the new electronic spin-off of this paper-and-ink yearbook: it will enlighten you about many a thing both Dutch and Flemish. So click, read and you shah be informed.
From the Low Countries with Tender Loving Care
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