A Letter to Europe from Peter Vermeersch

“What would it be like to really long for you?”

What does it mean to be European? What do we take for granted here, and what could we do without? Through the Shahrazad Letters to Europe project students have been joining in with writers from around the world in thinking about these kinds of questions and writing their own letters to Europe.

 

See below for a letter from writer Peter Vermeersch.

 

Dear Europe,

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes I see you from the window in the plane. Far below you lie, stretched out and quiet, as though you were my slumbering beloved. I see a web of fields and oval towns, with hair-fine roads, mountains like white fists, long rivers glinting in the morning sun. And then I wonder - what would it be like to really long for you? How would it be if I couldn't just take you for granted?

 

I try to look through the eyes of an outsider. Perhaps the mist and rarefied air up here make me dream: that you're still young and smooth and naive so that you can still become whatever you like. That your inhabitants in their ant-sized cars and houses like pebbles cherish you like a newborn child. Shall I hide away in this machine so that I can be with you? Freeze myself permanently to the wheels?

Later, when the plane has landed, I walk towards you through long, clean halls, between businessmen with laptops and tourists in shorts and loose shirts. I see the others there, too: large families with children, with all their possessions, men with crumpled documents. These are the ones I have to leave behind because even if your reception is somewhat cool and the man behind the counter doesn't return my smile, he nods at me and just lets me through.

 

Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to realize fully what cruel privilege lies concealed in the nod of that official.

 

From Peter Vermeersch