Esther Gerritsen over gaan en staan op de Dappermarkt

De column van Esther Gerritsen uit de VPRO gids van 7 juli 2017 gaat op haar poëtisch- verhelderende manier weer eens over 'gaan en staan'.

Zij verwijst daarbij naar een voor haar weer inzichtgevend fragment uit de autobiografie van C.S. Lewis uit 1955. Die tekst nemen we hier meteen even mee.

Hier is de column van Esther Gerritsen

Dit is het fragment van C.S. Lewis over 'the value of distance' waarnaar zij verwijst:

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1955, p.150

“I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while

yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive.

This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just

enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible

desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as

the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I

pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the

standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the

standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been

allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I

possessed “infinite riches” in what would have been to

motorists “a little room”. The truest and most horrible claim

made for modern transport is that it “annihilates space”. It does.

It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given.

It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a

modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of

liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got

from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it

to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his

coffin at once? There is little enough space there.”