Multitasking: I couldn’t do it before anyone ever heard of it. This means, among other things, that walking – I now do it on doctor’s advice – is a solitary activity for me. Because if you go for a walk with someone else (or with some others), you inevitably exchange some impressions and fleeting thoughts along the way. In other words, you are multitasking: you walk and talk at the same time. For me it’s one of two things: walking and talking simultaneously is impossible, or only with great effort.
So I’m ill-equipped for the pleasures of the audiobook. Just sit on the couch or at the kitchen table and listen to Loretta Schrijver listening to Loretta Schrijver ‘t Hooge Nest read aloud – I can’t see myself doing that as long as I’m healthy in body and limb. I imagine you are going to follow the flight of a bluebottle while listening anyway. Taking the audiobook to bed would mark a very radical break with ingrained habits. And you do Loretta Schrijver (and Roxane van Iperen) short when you doze off after two virtual pages – only to be woken up again in 1943.
Reluctance to headphones
A walk on the beaten track through the Haarlemmerhout should be easy to combine with the joys of an audio book. If only because you don’t have to talk back. But it’s not that simple. To start with, I have to overcome my resistance to wearing headphones in public places. In the past, in my view, headphones were used only by military personnel, air traffic controllers and record store visitors—who had to brave the sight of hair and dander on the porous rubber of the ear pads that had been warmed by the previous user. My fear of contamination meant that I only made limited use of this facility, and as a result regularly came home with LPs that I quickly regarded as a bad buy.
So when I spent a few weeks in the United States in the late 1970s, I was unprepared for the sight of numerous headphones on the streets of New York worn by the proud owners of a Walkman – a novelty from Sony. Only about ten years later, when I had quickly filled numerous audio cassette tapes with recordings of Hilversum 3, did I get over my hesitation. But the Walkman has never become an undivided pleasure. The cord was constantly snagging on something, and sometimes strangers in the tram, bus or train borrowed my Walkman, solicited or unsolicited – and then made an expert judgment about my musical preferences. Afterwards I always found injustices in the foam plastic of the ear cushions.
The cordless earbud should remove many of the objections to classic headphones, but my ear canals are apparently too wide for it. For the ambulatory enjoyment of music or audio books, I have to rely on the headphones – in my case a Philips, type SH402. However, with great hesitation I set out on the street or in nature with this. If only because I’ve wondered for years what possesses people to shut themselves off from the ambient sounds during a walk – which, after all, are part of the whole of impressions that you gain outside the home. It could be the honking of an approaching city bus, but also the lovely rustle of young foliage or the song of blackbirds and thrushes. Of course, the intensity of a walk across wastelands can be enhanced by a Bach sonata or by Rory Gallagher’s raspy voice. But you still reduce nature to part of a staging. She is made subservient to musical pleasure, and that cannot be the intention, I think as a Puritan.
With the music with which you make the walk more pleasant, you can still go in all directions. You can regulate the volume, you can put on Vivaldi when the sun breaks, Mahler when it starts drizzling. And Bach can always, I assume. But the audiobook lacks that mobility. And it demands more attention than a cheerful tune. I myself did not feel the inner need to put it to the test, but wanted to gain experience with the audiobook at the request of the Boeken editors. After all, I bought the e-reader after a long hesitation, so why couldn’t the audiobook meet a need?
Once I had overcome the hesitation to take to the streets with my Philips SH402 – where my dirt grabber causes considerably more attention than the umpteenth headphones – I was surprised by the audiobook provider with whom I had a free two-week trial subscription. locked. I myself couldn’t quite figure it out: should I listen to a book that I already know, so that I wouldn’t lose myself in it, or should I look for a book that somehow fits the environment in an atmospheric way? That could mean that I would expose myself to the award-winning novel during a holiday on a Wadden Island (which is not on the roll by the way) worm moon, by Mariken Heitman. Or that I would let Hildebrand/Nicolaas Beets accompany me on my walks through the Haarlemmerhout – although I do not know whether his Camera obscura can be heard. But that would unnecessarily limit my freedom of choice.
Striking characterizations
So I heeded the audiobook supplier’s tip to Amalia by Claudia de Breij. Well, the good mood with which I walked out the door on a beautiful morning in May was in no way affected by that. De Breij’s voice is pleasant to listen to, and she manages to escape the dangers you run as the writing companion of a crown princess. Nevertheless, my attention occasionally slackened, and Claudia de Breij cannot be blamed for that. When she spoke about Hella Haasse, who wrote a book about the then crown princess Beatrix in the 1950s, my thoughts mechanically went back to the memorable interview that the writer had with Beatrix – queen at that time for eight years – in 1988. . And once you dwell in that year, other memories surface – well beyond Amalia’s scope.
De Breij once again caught my attention with a striking characterization of the impossible task facing contemporary monarchs: in national disasters they are expected to show their humanity, but their human weaknesses are not tolerated. De Breij formulated it a little better, but that’s about it. In a book you mark such a passage with a pencil (never with a pen) but an audio book does not offer that possibility – to my knowledge. So rewind a bit, a skill that takes a little too much of my fine motor skills.
When listening to Most people are good, written and read by Rutger Bregman, the need to fast-forward regularly arose. Since I would have to interrupt the walk more often than I would like, I started walking faster – ignoring the greetings of other walkers sullenly. No: Bregman did not contribute in the least to my peace of mind. Despite the encouraging title of his bestseller and his dragging way of speaking. My annoyance could not have been aroused by the contents of the book alone. After all, Bregman is not the only thinker who first invented a generally accepted misunderstanding – in this case: that man is naturally inclined to evil – and then countered that misunderstanding with platitudes.
My emotions were probably also fueled by the sheepish behavior of people who buy a book en masse because of its nice title and the warm recommendation of Matthijs van Nieuwkerk – who may have given them the idea that the purchase alone was a certificate of virtue. But it could also be that I listened to Bregman to confirm my negative bias about his book—although I always tell myself (and sometimes others) that it’s much more enjoyable not to be confirmed in a bias. Perhaps ordinary jealousy was playing tricks on me. Because who wouldn’t want to sell 1 million books? Be that as it may: from Most people are good I didn’t recover. And I renounced my intention to also The Seven Checkmarks by Joris Luyendijk.
Captivated by melancholy
The expectations of the high nest weren’t high-strung either, I must confess. A relatively young lawyer who suddenly gains star status with a story about the fortunes of the Jewish people in hiding who once lived in her house in Naarden, for some reason aroused my suspicion. But it was all right. Admittedly, an academic sharpener might object to her portrayal of some facts – such as the dismissal of Leiden professor Cleveringa, Arthur Seyss-Inquart’s spit lock, or the jeeps with which the Germans, according to Roxane van Iperen (or Loretta Schrijver), were driven through the streets of Amsterdam – but this hardly detracts from the oppression that the story evokes. While listening to the first chapters, you sometimes get lost when a new name is mentioned, but that will mainly be due to the fact that this reader has not been conditioned as a listener.
All in all, the first experiences with the audiobook did not invite people to take out a subscription. But that could change if I end up in the hospital for a longer period of time. However, I did not want to deprive myself of one pleasure before the end of my relationship with Storytel: the novel Two weeks away (The Fortnight in September) by the British writer RC Sherriff, read with great empathy by Adeline van Lier. I already knew the facsimile of the original 1931 edition, so I was able to sit through the audiobook with the happy assurance that nothing shocking would happen. Because that’s the charm of Two weeks away: In the coastal town of Bognor Regis, a middle-class English family cherishes the modest happiness of two weeks by the sea. The only drama hangs like a thin mist over the story: this will probably be the Stevens family’s last vacation together. I had already read it, but again I was seized by melancholy, the finest of all walking moods.