War and Turpentine

by Stefan Hertmans

I wonder, time and again, what it is that connects us to our grandparents in this ambivalent way. Is it the absence of the generational conflict between parents and children? In the yawning gap between our grandparents and ourselves, the battle for our imagined individuality is waged, and the separation in time permits us to cherish the illusion that a greater truth lies concealed there than in what we know of our own parents. It is a great and powerful naïveté that makes us thirst for knowledge.

Her wealthy merchant family had unwittingly reproduced the dynamic seen over and over throughout history: when the farmer grows rich, he gives his children a middle-class education and exposes them to culture, and as a result they reject his material obsessions and turn to higher things.

Younger generations do not even feel the loss; normality is a by-product of forgetting.

Places are not just space, they are also time.

Their dark forms are larger than life, because memories like that grow along with your body, so that adults from our childhood always resemble an extinct race of old gods, still towering over us.

the cozy intimacy of Old Europe had been destroyed forever. The war had shot humanism full of holes, and what came rushing in was the infernal heat of a barren moral wasteland that could hardly be sown with new ideals, since it was abundantly clear how far astray the old ones had led us. The new politics that would now flare up was fueled by wrath, resentment, rancor, and vengefulness, and showed even greater potential for destruction.

The truth in life often lies buried in places we do not associate with authenticity. Life is more subtle, in this respect, than linear human morality. It goes to work like a painter-copyist, using illusion to depict the truth.

This paradox was the constant in his life, as he was tossed back and forth between the soldier he had to be and the artist he’d wished to become. War and turpentine.