Just one trigger alert, dear readers. You are currently entering an essay. Or rather, you get into a van, a Mercedes diesel van that heats over the narrow winding dikes of the island of Goeree-Overflakkee. We have no idea where we’re going, we don’t wear seatbelts. All this does not have to be in an essay. It’s the most unfettered genre, which is why I love it so much.
I’m just saying it. Because I had hardly gotten in myself when I read on my phone that people are terrified of essays these days. When young people think of ‘essay’, they think of a boring school assignment. The very word itself “evokes traumatic feelings,” according to a report on one book industry website. That is why the Collective Propaganda Foundation of the Dutch Book is considering renaming the Book Week Essay from now on. There must be another ‘label’.
Anyway, all essayists angry. Which new label, that is not yet known. Personally, I would suggest Boekenweekpamflet. A pamphlet is a simple piece of prose that tells the story so that the reader can stop thinking. Pamphlets are currently in high demand.
An essay, on the other hand, is a road trip on winding roads where you have to help read a map while almost going off the rails. So I get the fear. As an essayist, I’m always afraid of ‘essay’: put the word on the cover of a book and no one will buy it. So I’ll just leave the word out. A shame, because the essay deserves plenty of propaganda.
Essay means: anything goes. From the graceful anger of James Baldwin to the pleasure of getting lost by Rebecca Solnit to the sublime Ikjes written by Michel de Montaigne, which were just as easily about war, cats or sex.
So indeed: something is very wrong if the youth associates the genre with the perfunctory verbiage that you might as well outsource to ChatGPT. Something wrong with modern factory education, I mean, with the cultural climate. Not with the word.
An essay is precisely that which escapes robot writing. Essay is French for trial or test, chemists also use the word, spelled as assay; a biochemical test. Essaying is making new chemical or non-chemical connections.
An essay is something curious that can explode in your face.
Like our bus ride over Goeree-Overflakkee can fail. Behind the windscreen is an A4 with ‘neighborhood bus line 735’. The driver is from Ooltgensplaat, has long blond hair, wears a navy jacket with gold cuffs. With his chelsea boots he presses the accelerator.
We hum past bare winter fields where the onions, beets and sprouts have not yet been sown. Just the American heartland: many Christians, many villages without a neighborhood supermarket, many young people on amphetamines. Plenty of swearing flags.
I know the driver as Frank/Janine, the dress-wearing singer and guitarist of Irregular, a Rotterdam country band that makes cheerful songs about outcasts. Frank/Janine has transcended all boxes. No computer can replicate our trip.
That’s how we drive here. At the end of the 1990s, market forces were seen as the solution to all the problems we did not yet have. Like state bus companies. They had to go, people would be shocked by the word ‘bus’. From now on buses were given new labels: Qbuzz, Arriva, Connexxion, et cetera.
Connexxion means connection, but that connection is increasingly lost, hence the two crosses. This year, Connexxion put some x’s through scheduled services on the island to save costs.
Then Frank/Janine and a bunch of other volunteers started their own bus service between the villages. Behind us are two MBO students, glad they don’t have to cycle 19 kilometers to school.
Frank/Janine used to drive around here as a meal delivery driver: delivering food to lonely elderly people every day, having a chat. Until the ‘care juggernaut’ found it too expensive. Meal delivery disappeared at the same time as the bus. Now a commercial company dumps a batch of microwave meals at the door of lonely people once a week. Ping, done.
We drive past a languishing swimming paradise and an endangered hospital. Rotterdam is half an hour away. Also in the big shiny city, people are furiously scrapping in bus and metro. The whole of Holland is shrinking in the same way.
The marginalized essayist and the aggrieved farmer and all those people who eat their microwave meals in loneliness, they share a fate: the land of loose screws. And I dream of a society where writers are as angry about the disappearance of a bus line as they are about the word essay.
Meanwhile, the bus driver is the best essayist here: in an impoverished country, he makes connections that were not there before.
Arjen van Veelen replaces Floor Rusman as columnist.
A version of this article also appeared in the February 4, 2023 newspaper