Circe sits in front of a mirror and holds a cup to Odysseus. It’s a painting by J.W. Waterhouse, and also the background of a classical music playlist on YouTube. I clicked on it because I saw Circe on the thumbnail — about who I had just finished reading the book by Madeline Miller. When I was young I wouldn’t listen to classical music, nor voluntarily read a book of 400 pages, let alone enjoy it — but I’m finally starting to understand a line I read years ago, on how at different stages in life we want different things.
Aging is a fascinating journey. At thirty-five, I’m still learning new emotions. Recently, our company has had a wave of new recruits for the Chinese marketing team. They’re all young and full of ideas but inexperienced. I’ve been giving them some guidance and they’re actually taking it and making process. They treat me amicably — not as one of them, but as a senior colleague. And that’s fine. With it comes a special kind of satisfaction.
I’m fine being this age. But there’s a place on Reddit where people in their 30s discuss being ‘over 30s‘ — and most posts contain nostalgia, the bitter kind. Maybe I have gave up on some dreams as well, but I have realized some others. I liked being a young student in design school, and later art academy. But my main gripe with being a student is that all the work was done for our teachers. Now I get huge satisfaction from making work that is for the real world.
When I was a kid, we’d go to France for three weeks for our summer holiday, and my dad would read Robert Ludlum’s books. The way kids see their dad as a hero meant I judged those thick novels as impossible to read, far beyond my level. That feeling still rises now when I see the name Ludlum on a cover. But this time back home, I picked one from my dad’s bookshelf and discovered in five hundred pages that Ludlum writes thrilling stories — but does not make complicated literature. This too is a joy that being thirty-five brings; that of finishing a Ludlum.
When turning those pages I’d wonder about my dad, who did the same — just some thirty years ago. You don’t read a book in a vacuum; you see the story in the context of your own. The Berlin Wall hadn’t come down. Telephones were made from landlines. Cars didn’t come with navigation devices. What did my dad feel reading this?
My dad doesn’t tell, but maybe he shows me. We ride our motorbikes and stop by the former train station of Hulshorst. He says he learned about the poem when he was young, and he’d visit this place when he had just bought a new car: “I needed a place to drive to, any place.” The station was closed in 1987, two years before I was born. The poem talks about the forgotten iron of the tracks.
The Belgian author Ulrich Libbrecht once said that philosophy is useless. When you’re young you lack the life experience to see the value in such wisdom. You may when you are old — but alas, you lack a future. Philosophy is therefore something that you do not have when you need it, and that you no longer need when you have it.
Perhaps though, being thirty-five is the ideal age, in the middle of these. I’m content with it. The blogs I write aren’t like I wrote fifteen years ago. My brain and notebook are filled with experiences, and I can value friendships more because some dear friends have passed away. When you’re young you don’t see the value of photography. Why record something if you cannot lose it? Buildings of my youth no longer exist, companies that looked eternal went bankrupt. In my lifetime, we changed currency in the Netherlands. Our language is slowly changing. When you’re young you see life as an all-of-nothing state. But now I think I understand my place in history. It’s a timely one.
We visit Radio Kootwijk and my dad tells me about how hundred years ago, the Netherlands needed a way to communicate with the colony that is now Indonesia, and they built a huge radio transmitter for that. He’s hugely interested in radio technology; longwave, shortwave — tubes, and alternators. And Radio Kootwijk was the pinnacle of it. But then the Second World War broke out, satellite technology came, and Indonesia became independent. It’s truly something from a forlorn era. But the Art Deco building is timeless and still stands.
I visit Zwolle alone, the city where I went to high school and design school. And each time back here, I get the strongest memories — those of a teenager finding his way through the temptations of this world. I buy something I haven’t eaten for years; lahmacun — or as we’d call it; Turkish pizza. Turkish people are the largest minority ethnic group in the Netherlands. But I’ve always had many classmates from a Turkish background. They’d talk about their summer holidays when they’d travel to Turkey, a one-week drive — another week back. I got introduced to their food and their way of expressing yourself exuberantly, something Dutch people don’t do. And the music. It’s only now that I live in China that I realize that this is also a small part of me.
In Circe, Madeline Miller writes about the themes and lessons of Greek mythology and their gods. Icarus who flies too close to the sun; Odysseus who has to resist temptations; the gift of fire from Prometheus; the Minotaur and the betrayal it signifies. Most of all, the book is about mortality and what to do you the time you’re given. Perhaps it’s even more about finding yourself, even if it takes a thousand years — or in my case, a thousand miles. Although we’re never done.
