Today a small experiment in which it is not about the opinion of the columnist, but about that of someone whose name I will only reveal after the quote. Please do not cheat, but first read the entire quote and then try to guess who the author is and in which year this quote was published.
The writer himself begins with a sentence by the French writer Jules Renard in 1905: “Peasants are perhaps the only kind of people who do not like nature and never look at it.” He then writes: “I did not realize that it was so then, but in the past fifteen years I have learned, with exceptions, to my disappointment, the peasants as greedy and indifferent violators and exterminators of nature. In the area where I live, as everywhere else, they have cut down thousands of trees and poisoned all the ditches and the groundwater. At night they dream of endless woodless fields on which artificial crops grow that they no longer have to lift a hand to. They imagine the ideal cow as a ruminating milking machine on steel legs. They have a well-to-do purse and feel emancipated because nowadays they watch sex movies on television late at night, but stubbornly remain members of the intellectual lumpen proletariat. Renard confirms my opinion that the former beauty of the landscape with long, winding rows of elms and poplars, with alders and pollard willows, elderberry, beech and hawthorn hedges, was merely a coincidence determined by functionality and economy. The farmers themselves have never seen that beauty, so they stupidly cleaned it up with a generous subsidy from the government, in the euphoria of oil, pesticides and machinery.”
Did you already guess? Good looking!
The writer was indeed the Belgian Paul de Wispelaere (1928 – 2016), who lived in the Flemish countryside and knew a lot about nature there. I was unfamiliar with his work – especially novels and essays – but became curious about it because of the admiration with which his colleague, the poet Herman de Coninck, wrote of him in his published letters.
That’s how I came to The charred alphabet, a book that De Coninck rightly called a masterpiece. They are beautifully written memoirs in the form of a diary, in which De Wispelaere writes about his life with great awareness of his own transience – his youth, his writing, but above all his turbulent love life. The book is dedicated to ‘Ilse’, a woman – Ilse Logie – with whom De Wispelaere started a lasting relationship when he was fifty-four and she was eighteen. De Wispelaere was professor of Dutch literature in Antwerp, Logie became professor of Latin American literature in Ghent.
The quote in question comes from this book, which was published in 1992 in the Privé-Domein series by De Arbeiderspers. It was critically acclaimed at the time, but is now more or less forgotten. I was struck by the fierce rejection with which De Wispelaere wrote about the farmers more than thirty years ago. His remark about “the mental lumpen proletariat” was unnecessarily insulting, but the image of that “ruminant milking machine” has now become the truth about the cow.
A version of this article also appeared in the June 21, 2023 newspaper.