Opperdozer musings on transience – NRC

One bite from the opperdoezers and there I heard his voice again, that of the friend who came from West Friesland, just like those potatoes, and who could ask so nicely in the lilting accent of the region: „Bejj’al an de Rondes west?” (or how exactly you should write that). When they were there, he liked to serve them festively, with fried elderflowers. So I was a little late, because the elderflowers are already gone, but I didn’t see them on the market before. Besides, they were still expensive enough. A greengrocer in Amsterdam once said that he had wanted to buy parsley at the auction and when he heard the price asked: “Is there a golden edge?”

But now you can ask yourself that about almost everything.

Those opperdoezers were by no means a lowland version of that eternal madeleine. Proust describes such sensations with all kinds of things, by the way, with a spoon tapping against a cup, two uneven tiles in a courtyard, he was not at all concerned with that madeleine, who was also initially a biscuit. It’s about how sometimes a sensory sensation takes you directly into another, earlier moment. And it wasn’t like that with those overdoers. You associate your friends with so much, including various foods.

We ate the opperdoezers, although without elderflower, still very festive, by the way, with stewed fennel and baked turbot, topped with very divine salt butter (who loves his fish, don’t spare the butter), squeeze of lemon, dash of Noilly Prat after it – you really think that nobody in the province eats so well, while it all requires little cooking skills and is mainly based on the strength of the ingredients. They had a lot of power.

In the meantime we tried to determine what a great poet Remco Campert actually was like and I started to say all kinds of things – like you do when you eat such potatoes and drink a glass of Grauburgunder. For example, I said that Esther Naomi Perquin, who wrote such a beautiful poem about the deceased writer, is a much greater talent (“Since when do we find Campert a great poet?”), and that Campert’s strength lay in those small columns and not in his poetry and even I was equally ugly about that Lamento poem that everyone likes so much (“must find so beautiful if necessary”), so I was very swept away by the turbot to choppy waters.

I was very carried away by the turbot to turbulent waters

My waters, where, I knew for sure, my friend would have been found if he had still been there, but where now hardly anyone seems to be swimming around anymore, because you read everywhere that we have lost an important poet with Campert. And that was reminiscent of Proust, who masterfully describes how all people are convinced that the ranking in the outgoing world, but you might as well apply that to the literary world, is as it is at the moment. that they are in it, that those are the true relationships.

When they have grown old, one is surprised at the ignorance of the people who now make up that world, ‘they don’t understand what it is at all!’ – but ‘how it is’ that is something from your own time. You yourself were one of those people who, at a certain moment, stuck your nose into the world and then believed that everything was as you and yours saw it. But now it’s different.

It’s dizzyingly relatable to think like that. Tè, if you’re in the rounds.