and then, 25 years later, one finds a book ...

25 years ago, I didn’t take pictures yet, nor did I write down any impressions.  But it was a project of the imagination all the same: travelling across Europe by train, visiting harbour cities. I had never sailed, never been aboard a ship (except the ferry to Dover, in pre-Eurostar days) but somehow I’d picked up a longing for seafaring cities.  Of course, the trip mainly taught me that European harbours are busy industrial-commercial places with little romance attached. 

Nowhere more so than in Brest, with its huge industrial and military harbour complexes. Its sheer vastness, with a certain emptiness, a certain whiteness, a certain in-hospitability … I remember walking for miles & miles along broad winding & climbing roads – seeing the dock yards below, with no-entry signs everywhere.   

And yet – such is the mystery of places & souls -  “Brest”, for me, to this day, encapsulates all the breezy allure of  “le grand large” combined with the urban trappings of transit, a certain seediness so indulgent of aimless wanderers. 

            

But frankly, I hardly ever think about Brest anymore, and these days my main escape route to le grand large, is boarding a train for Antwerp, to go and greet the river Scheldt.

On one such Antwerp escapade, entering a local second hand bookshop, I was startled and intrigued to see there on display a little booklet titled  “Un amour de Brest”. 

Leafing through it, I almost gasped   - ah, those pictures – catching both the breezy whiteness of the docks and the colourful bustle of a harbour city.   

The book’s previous owner-reader had visibly been moved, too, leaving a loving trail of sentences underlined in blue ink.  I could have cried with recognition, reading one such marked phrase:  “et puis, un jour,  tu débarques à Brest” – “and one day one alights at Brest”.    Ach,  25 years after my own debarking at Brest, to find this little book, as an unexpected gift with words & pictures sanctioning my intuitions of so many years ago.

At the counter, the shop assistant looked appreciatively at the little book. “Are you happy with your find? I didn’t know them at all, neither the writer, nor the illustrator.  The pictures are beautiful, aren’t they?” 

At a certain age, one grows weary of one’s own inarticulate longings and illusions. Knowing that the world is just what it is, one has tired of looking & longing for something that simply isn’t there.  One wisely discounts the imagination, mindful not to overreach reality.

But then, all the more, what a relief, what a gift – when a melody, a picture, a happy phrase in a book captures such a longing, creates beauty with it, turns a figment of the imagination into a tangible reality which can be shared with others. 

One is less alone with one’s idiosyncratic longings than one has been trained to think. 

Somewhere out there, there’s a sympathetic companion-book, even if it takes 25 years to find it.

Bibliographic  Note:

"Un amour de Brest – Qu’est-ce qu’elle a, ma ville?"  Par Hervé Hamon (Récit) et Anne Smith (Dessins et peintures)  (dialogues éditeur – 2008)

Room for Hope in a Pell-Mell (1)

Let me be frank:  I have gotten quite fed up with my anxious chronicling of the demise of high culture, the closure of bookshops and the alleged end of Europe.

Henceforth my thoughts (and blogposts) will be positive or be nothing worth!  

The people at Brussels’ most swinging second hand bookshop  "Pêle-Mêle"  (2) don’t seem to need such stern self-admonitions – they effortlessly look happy & lively.  It’s a particularly bracing mix of people there at the Pêle-Mêle: young parents with kids relaxing in the bar/playground/tearoom in the basement, teenagers intently browsing the book shelves and passionately discussing their finds , elderly couples cosily settled for the afternoon in the bookshop’s vintage salon chairs – with piles of books, cookies and a thermos of coffee.  The place buzzes with positive energy,  and with talk in an array of European languages.

Bracing people are attracted by bracing books of course.  Over the years Pêle-Mêle has astutely branched out from its core French franchise into English, Dutch, German, Italian ….  books.  And though its offer at first may look like a jumble, there’s always some order to it.   An order reflecting the evolving tastes of both European expats and Belgian-French intello’s.  

 The French section, to my delight, is regularly restocked with pre-post-modern art history books (like those thoroughly researched and documented “l’Univers des Formes” volumes  from the 60s-70s!).   

In the English section one can sense the origins and interests of various Brussels-based diplomats (selling their books before moving on to another post, or retiring, or, soon, brexiting?).   

Leafing through the books, one can find,  here a colourful “National Galleries of Scotland“ bookmark, there a carefully folded 1993 clipping with a lengthy book review from the New York Times.  And one month a collection of  ”Roman empire” books may arrive,   then a batch of last years’ current affairs bestsellers arrives, or suddenly a whole shelf fills up with Judaica.  

Ever since I’ve lost the reassuring certainty to be living in a period beyond history (& beyond its struggles) I‘ve been forced to “reconceptualise the past” (3) (in order to better understand the perplexing present) and have therefore had to do quite some catch-up reading of history books. 

So I’m particularly grateful to Pêle-Mêle to have furnished me over the  past years with books covering, amongst others,  Rome’s age of anxiety &  transition,  religious conflict in early modern Europe , Balkan ghosts , the end of the Habsburg empire,  and Roman mosaics in Tunesia (4).

Readers  will be largely acquainted with the subject matter of the formerly mentioned books – but may be less familiar with the lighthearted (5) (and yet surprisingly resilient) Roman art of mosaics in North Africa, as illustrated in the latter book.   

Wholly in keeping with my announced positive mind set, let me offer this quote as a conclusion: 

“[…] It is debatable whether […] the inhabitants of this little province of Africa were richer or more carefree than we are today […]  Each and every mosaic, right up to the 6^th century reverberates with happiness, with a joy which has nothing ephemeral about it.[…] They were neither more nor less vulnerable than we are and so they liked to surround themselves with beneficial representations which proclaimed an ordered way of life in which joy and love have their appointed place, beauty is sacred and there is room for hope. […] “    

and because there’s always room for one more note:

1.       How lovely, really :  the English translation of  “pêle-mêle” turns out to be “pell-mell” !

2.       the Pêle-Mêle  at the Chaussée de Waterloo/ Steenweg op Waterloo is not to be confused with the Pêle-Mêle of the Boulevard Maurice Lemonnier

3.       a phrase borrowed from Benjamin J. Kaplan

4.       Mosaïques romaines de Tunisie – Georges Fradier, André Martin, O. Ben Osman, E. Beschaouch et al.

5.       mosaics as frivolous fragments?