After a long hot summer, with long light days starting early, suddenly it is still dark when I get out of bed at 6.00 o’clock! It is just light when I leave the building at 7.40 to go swimming and still warm but it is also a gentle reminder of the approaching Autumn with its shorter days. But Autumn brings promises of cosy afternoons and winter treats; and mulled wine and Christmas markets; lighted shops and cafes luring in cold customers. Always something to look forward to in seasonal changes!

Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry c1917

I recently met a girl who had just graduated in French and English Language and Literature. I was thrilled to learn that her dissertation had been on Virginia Woolf. Inspired by this, I scoured my bookshelves to find stuff on Virginia, Vita Sackville-West et al. Cannot believe the immense satisfaction I obtained from looking over my shelves; so many books I had forgotten about; so many to be re-read! I now have a small pile of Virginia books to pass on to my young acquaintance and several other, newly-remembered books stacked up to read again. TWO new copies of The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach, more familiar, I think, as Le Carillonneur, one partially read; each from different German friends at different times together in Bruges before I lived here. Shame has caused me to immediately begin reading Georges again but admiration is driving me eagerly on!

I had not remembered how wonderfully complex the writing of Rodenbach is; how incredibly well he portrayed the mystical aspect of the town, and how inspirationally he writes about Brugge but always with the melancholy and mystical phrasing I half remember from Bruges La Morte. The story of Le Carillonneur is told through, and overladen with, a haunted, atmospheric dreamlike melancholia which imbues his narrative with a lingering and indefinable sadness. Recurrent images of empty provincial Sundays, of solitude,
of autumnal, often wintry, bleakness, crowd his narrative. The sun never shines on Le Carillonneur.





Interestingly, Alan Hollinghurst writes:

“Rather like A.E.Housman laying claim to an imagined Shropshire while walking on Hampstead Heath, Rodenbach evoked the dead city where he had never lived from his Paris apartment. "One only truly loves what one no longer has", he wrote. "Truly to love one's little homeland, it is best to go away, to exile oneself for ever, to surrender oneself to the vast absorption of Paris, and for the homeland to grow so distant it seems to die.” 

Rodenbach would certainly not have recognised the joyful tourist-thronged town evident for the last several months, full of free events like the Song of Freedom in tribute to the 100^th anniversary of the ending of WW1 over the last two evenings in the Burg where a free film had been screened a few days before. Nor the big Local Heroes celebration in Astrid Park tonight. A week ago Benenwerk, the dance celebration at various venues in the Egg entertained many thousands while Moods, a virtual month-long pop concert at free points around the centre, drew happy crowds in July and August. There is so much happening in Brugge all summer which invites thousands to love it for its life while Rodenbach loved Brugge for its melancholy dying.

Frank Deleu, Carillonneur of Brugge until Sept. 2017