The Seriousness of Play
Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters’: so W.H. Auden writes of Bruegel's painting of the fall of Icarus in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts. The real suffering always happens in a remote corner of the image, of reality. Meanwhile life goes on, people do their thing. It's the same in this moving photo: a football match at the low level of some rural league, way out in the country. The invisible game continues. The goalkeeper watches and waits. The sheep just lie there indifferently, pensively. The local middle class plugs a brand of doors. A savings bank which disappeared long ago (having turned itself into a bank, then a big bank, an excessively big bank and finally a failed bank) blows its own trumpet. And outside the line, and thus no longer part of the game, non-existent as far as the other players are concerned - the felled player. What is he thinking about? What is wrong with him? Or is he shamming? Playing games? Taking a breather? How did the player come to be there? Is he a hit striker? A back? How long has he been lying there? Will he ever get up again?
It looks to be a winter morning. Sunday, probably. There are no spectators. Only us.
This is to tell you that the theme of this twentieth edition is sport and play. The national sports of the Netherlands (skating!) and Flanders (cycling!) are hymned in it. But also on parade are Belgium's racing pigeons, rated the best in the world, and the Dutch footballers who are constantly labelled as, if not the best, certainly the most attractive to watch. But we would also draw your attention to Huizinga's Homo Ludens, one of his most profound books, and to the Olympic Games which are to be held this summer in London.
As well as the themed pieces this volume offers the usual choice of essays on writers and artists past and present, on history that survives to the present day and society that has evolved from its past.
This yearbook marks a whole twenty years that we have been playing in the global competition of cultural areas that put themselves on the map and demand attention. The editors of this yearbook are concerned above all with information, presentation and opinion-forming. Because we believe that the Low Countries have a great deal to offer, to show and to say. Because we want to make contact with other people. Because we believe in exchanging ideas.
Hundreds of artists, thinkers, writers, social trends and phenomena of former times and today are represented in the columns of the twenty editions of this yearbook. Together, they provide an interesting sampler of that low-lying delta area in Western Europe which through its strategic situation, the density of its population, its economic strength and cultural brilliance has an unassailable place in the history and the present of European culture. In the past the Low Countries extended over an area that now forms part of four European states: Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Germany. Nowadays it is mainly taken to mean the area where Dutch is spoken: in other words the Netherlands and Flanders, part of the Belgian federation. This area's age-old relations with the rest of Europe and the world remains central to our thinking.
One final point: the editors have put together a selection of the finest and most idiosyncratic pieces from these twenty years, something like ‘the best of’, which you can find on our website www.onserfdeel.be / www.onserfdeel.nl. They speak for themselves.