Midas Dekkers’ dark world

Originally posted on March 20, 2009 – by Andre Piet

On March 19, 2009 the KRO broadcast a biography about the writer/biologist Midas Dekkers, who this year wrote the Book Week essay ‘PEEP’. The broadcast shows the sad story of someone who grew up in an environment of much drink and little love. The saddest thing of all is that this sharp observer has an utterly nihilistic view of life. He once said about this:

… the official biological doctrine as biologists now adhere to (and I as well) is an extraordinarily nihilistic doctrine. The biology of today, perhaps it will change again, you never know, but now all leading biologists teach that life has arisen entirely by sheer chance, that it has entirely by sheer chance assumed its form… and that it is going nowhere and that in the course of time it will be completely over again and that there really is no one who will shed a tear about it.

Whoever watches yesterday’s broadcast notices that Midas Dekkers can hardly live with this pessimistic view of life. Only the bottle is able to numb the pain. The despondency drips from it on all sides. There is also much resentment behind it. Dekkers is not so much an atheist, he is rather angry at God. Very characteristically the broadcast ends with this indictment:

You know that you are doomed to die and it is, if you think about it carefully, an unbearable thought. I mean, that people can even live with the awareness that they are going to die! If you are even just a little sound of mind, just put an end to it immediately, for how can one live with such a thought?! What I get worked up about is the bastard who invented death. Somewhere there is someone who invented life. And whether that someone is someone with a beard, or evolution or God-knows-what, but something or someone has given me life and for that he is heartily thanked. But I think it is a filthy, vile dirty trick to, after a number of years, take that life back again. Then don’t give it, you jerk!

A biography as broadcast yesterday shows how dark it becomes inside when there the light of the awareness of GOD does not shine. That we are conceived and intended and that this world is by design perishable. That there is Someone with Whom nothing goes wrong and Who will bring everything to a good end…

Delen: