‘Celebrating a holiday on a volcano’. This is how Merijn de Waal described Saturday in NRC the feeling of this summer. Against a backdrop of asylum mismanagement, nitrogen crisis, war, climate catastrophe and inflation, we drank cocktails and packed our bags; Me, too. Last week I flew to Florence with two school friends. The hours-long queue at Schiphol felt like deserved self-flagellation.
We speculated which of us would suffer from Stendhal syndrome: in school our history teacher, Bonno, had once told us how tourists in Florence can be captivated by the beauty of all art. Fainting at Michelangelo’s David, palpitations at Botticelli’s Venus.
In the Uffizi Gallery, it was mainly the crowds that overwhelmed me. Strolling from Da Vinci to Caravaggio, crowds in selfie mode. But when I saw a statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön, strangled by giant snakes, I suddenly became really unwell. I reached the toilets just in time.
I came to my senses on the cool marble next to the toilet. Was it the pizza margherita or was it Laocoon? In Haarlem I used to cycle past a replica of the statue every day. Now, face to face with the original, I had heard Bonno’s voice again. About Laocoön, who warned of the Trojan horse. In vain. No one believed him when he said the wooden horse would be their downfall.
Back from vacation was la dolce vita over soon. Doctors Without Borders in Ter Apel. A failed UN summit on ocean protection. Deals with nitrogen brokers to widen the A27 at Amelisweerd after all. I read the piece by De Waal and thought of the film Fire of Love, about the couple Maurice and Katia Krafft. Disappointed in their fellow humans, the two developed a fervent love of volcanoes. In spectacular archive footage they balance on crater rims in science fiction suits. Far from society, they closed humanity in their hearts again. They made films to warn of volcanic eruptions, in the hope that governments would evacuate nearby residents in time. In vain. It wasn’t until the Kraffts themselves were killed in 1991 that they listened.
“Incredible”, seismologist Annemarie Muntendam-Bos called it this week in the parliamentary inquiry about Groningen, that there was not listened when the State Supervision of Mines advised to reduce gas production. But in a world of ostrich politics, there’s nothing incredible about that. Warnings fall on deaf ears (but an expert who doesn’t warn becomes the scapegoat: geologists who incorrectly predicted the earthquake near l’Aquila in Italy in 2009 were initially sentenced to six years in prison).
“Trust not the horse, Trojans,” said Laocoön rightly — and he was silenced for good.
Gemma Venhuizen is a biology editor and writes a column here every Wednesday.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 31, 2022