‘The more clearly I want to say it/the worse I get out of my words’, Remco Campert once wrote, and that was exactly the feeling that came over me when I tried to put his life and work for the front page in words on Monday afternoon. It was too big and overwhelming to reduce to a manageable summary, a single sentence or a single characterization.
With a word artist like Campert, words quickly fall short. We therefore decided to leave the closing words to Campert himself and to put part of a poem on the front page. To be Lamento is an indictment of the passing of time, an attempt to hold onto a moment of happiness forever. That seemed the most appropriate to us.
There are few columnists who have spent so long (between 1985 and 2019) and so much for de Volkskrant have written as Campert. He has been in many places in the newspaper. It once started on page 7, was featured on the front page and the back page, in the Saturday supplement Het Vervolg and in the Boekenkatern. His columns fit everywhere. Everywhere he stood he brought lightness and perspective, amid weighty news and serious reflections.
Campert (1929) and Jan Blokker (1927) are the patriarchs of the Volkskrantcolumnists. They have many descendants. Too much according to some, but for a newspaper like de Volkskrant, who wants to be pluriform, the bouquet of opinions and descriptions cannot be colorful and varied enough.
Loes Reijmer and Margriet Oostveen
One of them, Loes Reijmer, announces today that she has written her last column. As a reporter, she primarily wants to describe reality rather than have an opinion about it, at least for now. Attempts to change her mind proved in vain. After the summer, someone else will take her place in the Saturday section. We will miss her beautifully written, sharp and inspired columns.
Margriet Oostveen, who wrote reporter columns for us for many years, has also decided to become a reporter again, in her case on the science editorial board. After hundreds of beautiful and sharp columns about Dutch people who we sometimes forget in the bustle of the news, but who often interpret the nature of the Netherlands much better than the individuals who parade through current events, she thought it was time for something different.