Van de Schoonheid en de Troost — Season 1, Episode 11: When My Father Was Still Big: Rutger Kopland

Episode synopsis

Interview with Rutger Kopland, Dutch poet (pseudonym of Rudy van den Hoofdakker, psychiatrist) (in his garden house/study in Glimmen, located on the Assen - Groningen railway line). Kopland talks about his daughters, his youth, happiness, adulthood versus the youthful perspective, his grandparents, health, his heart problems/infarction, the emotional charge and intensity of memories, melancholy, glorification of childhood, homesickness, poetry, the experience of comfort and beauty, finiteness, (death) fear, his mother and father and their death, emotion and fascination. Kopland recites some of his poems during the interview.

About Van de Schoonheid en de Troost

To his guests – artists, scientists, writers, philosophers and musicians – Wim Kayzer in Of Beauty and Consolation asks the philosophical question: What makes this life worth living?

More episodes from Season 1

• E1Fathers Roses: Wole Soyinka
• E2Homecoming: Roger Scruton
• E3Alone on the mountain: Jane Goodall
• E4The Code of Pasternak: George Steiner
• E5The End of the Thirteenth: Vladimir Ashkenazy
• E6Thor, Newton, Einstein: Steven Weinberg
• E7Guilt: Martha Nussbaum
• E8You Are There and You Are Not: Karel Appel
• E9The Greatest Mystery Is Not the Universe: Edward Witten
• E10Dear Mother: Elizabeth Loftus
• E12What's Mary Doing in the Cave: Gary Lynch
• E13John the Myth: Stephen Jay Gould