Never in a million years would I have thought that I would climb to the top of a windmill one day.
Climbing up a series of ever narrowing ladders inside a dark, dusty, and still operating windmill is not exactly a popular addition to people's lists of things to do before they die. Seeing the Seven Wonders of the World, skydiving, and writing the great American novel are perennial favorites on such lists, but climbing a windmill rarely, if ever, makes it on - just as the country known to most of the world as Holland rarely makes it on to people's lists of countries to study abroad in, much less visit.
The Netherlands' relative obscurity - most people cannot even place it on a map or tell you what language they speak there - is attributed partly to its small size and partly to its history. In the preface to his collection of Dutch poetry, Landscape with Rowers, the South African author J.M. Coetzee writes, "Dutch is a minor language in the sense that it is spoken only by some fifteen million people, and its literature is a minor literature in the sense that it is not widely read. The impulses behind it are multifarious. Not since the seventeenth century has the Netherlands been able to assert itself as a power on the world, or indeed European, stage." Italy may have Ancient Rome and the Renaissance and France its revolution and famous philosophers; but the history of the Netherlands, although lesser known, is far from lacking. This is a country that - as its poet likes to point out - wrested its land from the sea; a country that served as a safe haven for the persecuted, from the French Huguenots to Spinoza; a country that during its Golden Age produced artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer, and during the same Golden Age claimed a position as one of the most powerful countries in Europe.
And yet it is here, at the end of the seventeenth century, Golden Age Coetzee makes reference to that the story of the Netherlands changes from one of a people who defied the great powers before them - from the sea to Spain, from whom they won their independence - to become a great power in their own right to one of a country left playing second fiddle to its neighbors.
Spring Break
