The Snake and the Ladder

It is interesting to observe what happened since my last post, the one about the Point of No Return. How the hope has been, for a brief moment, rekindled by the new document on victims of paedophiliac priests, and then it was overwhelmed by darkness, when the government used the opportunity to introduce new, draconian laws that will soon help spreading terror across the country. 
It had been seen before; this is the very well known game of the Snake and the Ladder, of the competence of Ministry of Love in 1984, by George Orwell. One gets attached to it; the game guides human emotions into a very well known vicious circle: hope, pain, love. There is nothing, not even a novel discovery, to search in it. Only the all-pervading sensation of déjà vu, and a sort of feeling of being old, very old, and very tired, that comes with it. 
I had already seen it all before I turned fifteen. I hoped, and I felt pain, and I was afraid. I only never managed to love. Or I loved, but managed to forget it.
Perhaps I never loved, because I never had enough hope. I was always ready to dismiss, to let go, even as a child. 
It is time to let go. 

Certainly, it is my private Point of No Return. Especially since I've posted on this website the photos of my library filtered in black and white, as if they corresponded to some source reality, done and gone long ago. And what does it mean, when half a van of old books is someone's last attachment to a homeland?
My new attachments are forged. Attachment to English as my new language. New little vriendjes at the university. New research project that I see more and more clearly. Even a new discipline, although in fact it is my old one, my dreamed one. Taste for local food, especially for the wijting and the rode poon that comes directly from Katwijk on Saturday mornings. And the image of that big white swan in the Rijks Museum that won't let go. Not by patriotism or anything taught or imposed upon me. By sheer instinct of possession, the very firm grip that sometimes characterises individuals like me, who had already lost everything before their story truly had time to begin. This piece of land in the middle of the swamp is what I chose to have.