War and Turpentine

I take another look at the stone, run my fingertip over the meticulous brushstrokes, and realize that nothing ever returns to time unless it is stored in mute, voiceless objects; rocks do tell tales after all.

Nothing makes a deeper impression on a boy than seeing his strong mother suddenly girlish and hurt

The truth in life often lies buried in places we do not associate with authenticity. Life is more subtle, in this respect, than linear human morality. It goes to work like a painter-copyist, using illusion to depict the truth.

Ik weet niet voldoende over neurologie om te kunnen peilen wat er precies gebeurt wanneer je halsoverkop getroffen wordt door een bepaalde gestalte, een bepaalde blik, een houding, iets waardoor een persoon plots uniek voor je wordt. Ik vermoed dat er heel ingewikkelde dingen samenkomen in één ogenblik, een soort associatieve explosie die een indruk van het unieke oplevert, het gevoel dat dit alles zonder meer onmiddellijk en onvoorwaardelijk betekenis en zin heeft. Wie verliefd is, ziet symbolen in de triviaalste dingen.

For some people, no life is long enough to recover from the shock of love, not even if they live to be nearly a hundred. - Page. 270

Zijn huwelijk met Gabrielle was wolkeloos voor wie niet beter wist. Vergroeid met elkaar als twee oude bomen die decennia door elkaars kruinen heen hebben moeten groeien omwille van het schaars bevochten licht, leefden ze hun eenvoudige dagen, alleen doorbroken door de frivool aandoende vrolijkheid van hun dochter, hun enig kind. De dagen verdwenen in de plooien van verstrooide tijd. Hij schilderde. (p. 18)

Soldiers are destroyers and bitter men when they return from furlough to the front.

Clues like these turn out to have been present throughout my childhood, invisible to me, and only by drawing links between my memories and what I read could I begin work on a modest form of restitution, inadequate reparations for my unforgivable innocence in those days.

The war had shot humanism full of holes, and what came rushing in was the infernal heat of a barren moral wasteland that could hardly be sown with new ideals, since it was abundantly clear how far astray the old ones had led us. The new politics that would now flare up was fueled by wrath, resentment, rancor, and vengefulness, and showed even greater potential for destruction.

My story is growing monotonous, just as the war grew monotonous, death monotonous, our hatred of the Huns monotonous, just as life itself grew monotonous and finally began to turn our stomachs.

We turn tough and get sentimental; we laugh as we cry; our life’s a waking slumber, a slumberous wake; we quarrel with our arms around each other; we lash out at each other while shrugging our shoulders; no part of our bodies or minds remains intact; we breathe as long as we live, and live merely because we are breathing, as long as it lasts.

This task confronted me with the painful truth behind any literary work: I first had to recover from the authentic story, to let it go, before I could rediscover it in my own way.

To me, he was still a hero; he gave me fencing lessons, sharpened my pocketknife, taught me how to draw clouds by rubbing an eraser over shapes sketched with a piece of charred wood from the fireplace, and how to render the myriad leaves of a tree without drawing each one separately—the true secret of art, as he called it.

They’re all daubers, today’s painters; they’ve completely lost touch with the classical tradition, the subtle, noble craft of the old masters. They muddle along with no respect for the laws of anatomy, don’t even know how to glaze, never mix their own paint, use turpentine like water, and are ignorant of the secrets of grinding your own pigments, of fine linseed oil and the blowing of siccatives—no wonder there are no more great painters.

It is like the wrath of God, minus God: every action is weighed in some unfathomable balance, and at any time, the most trivial movement may be punishable by death. The slightest misjudgment could easily be the last judgment. Not that this makes death trivial, but dying does seem more absurd than ever—the hellish pain, the formless horrors that bulge out of the body, the unbearable wailing of the lads in their final moments, their hands on their torn-up bodies as they clutch at their own entrails and moan for their mothers. They are children, countless wasted boys of barely twenty, who should be out in the sun, living their lives, but have sunk into the muck here instead.

They were so posh that even their Dutch sounded French.

Ik heb van oudsher een voorliefde voor de zilte, aan verdwenen zee herinnerende geur die op nevelige dagen over een polderlandschap han hangen -- aarde, zo vlak als water, zo onpeilbaar en stil als een verzonken zee. Brak water in de kreken, zilt in de lucht, de zware geur van grond en vee, de zo vertrouwenwekkende, eenvoudige aarde, de troost die uitgaat van dat rurale, in zichzelf berustende leven. ... de polders, op dagen in mei of in september, met hun door de lucht buitelende kieviten boven de velden, de zerpe geur van populieren, de varkensstallen, de einders overal rondom. De betovering van de zintuigen sloeg toe.

What remains to us here, behind the Yser, is not much more than a strip of land almost impossible to defend; a few rain-soaked trenches around razed villages; roads blown to smithereens, unusable by any vehicle; a creaky old horse cart we haul around ourselves, loaded with crates of damp ammunition that are constantly on the verge of sliding into a canal, forcing us to slog like madmen for every ten yards of progress as we stifle our warning cries; the snarling officers in the larger dug-outs, walled off with boards, where the privates have to bail water every day and brush the perpetual muck off their superiors’ boots; the endless crouching as we walk the trenches, grimy and smelly; our louse-ridden uniforms; our arseholes burning with irritation because we have no clean water for washing them after our regular attacks of diarrhoea; our stomach cramps as we crawl over heavy clods of earth like trolls in some gruesome fairy tale; the evening sun slanting down over the barren expanse; infected fingers torn by barbed wire; the startling memory of another, improbable life, when a thrush bursts into song in a mulberry bush or a spring breeze carries the smell of grassy fields from far behind the front line, and we throw ourselves flat on our bellies again as howitzers open fire out of nowhere, the crusts of bread in our hands falling into the sludge at the boot-mashed bottom of the stinking trench.