Writer Henk Pröpper's slow heartbeat

Writer and publicist Henk Pröpper had only just moved to his beloved Paris when the city came to a standstill, and so did his heart almost. Once fitted with a pacemaker, he took to the city in the one hour a day Parisians were allowed. A new world opened up to him.

For Henk Pröpper (62), former director of the Dutch Foundation for Literature and publisher De Bezige Bij, a low heart rate in itself was nothing to worry about. He had been functioning at a pace of 40 beats per minute for years, and a few beats less would do. As an endurance runner, his heart beats slower than usual.

But after a stressful time and a hasty move from Amsterdam to Paris early last year, Pröpper was suddenly sick on the sofa. Lack an oxygen, lack of energy - this was not good. He went under the knife and received a pacemaker.

In the months that followed, Pröpper walked through a deserted city for his recovery, during the one hour a day that residents of Paris were allowed out during the lockdown. Heart rate 27 is the literary record of this eventful period of stasis; a philosophical, musing book with the author's pleasantly slow heartbeat, taking the reader through the city and European literature and history. Including to the Tuileries, where Pröpper recounts the past year on a sun-drenched day.

Life force

What was it like to see your heart rate on the monitor decrease more and more?

'The crazy thing was that I was no longer capable of anything, while at the same time my brain remained very clear and watched this whole process unfold. Because of Covid, I was all alone in the ICU, no one was allowed to visit and I felt abandoned. Unable to sleep, I lay watching my pulse on the screen. I was amazed that I could watch it so calmly and clearly as my heart rate dropped further by the hour. How far can this go, I wondered. Up to a heart rate of 27, that is.

I thought of my wife Myriam and our children: if I stayed in it, what was to happen to them? Yet I didn't really feel that I would die. An important theme in the book is the life force of man, which is the essence of life. Apparently, I trusted that it was there and would stay there.'

In the months that followed, you wandered through an empty Paris to recover.

'That was very unreal. One hour a day we were allowed out, no further than one and a half kilometres - and later only one kilometre - from home. Because there was no traffic, at one point I could even smell the manure on the fields twenty to twenty-five kilometres away.'

'While walking, I discovered that the absence of life on the streets did not mean that there was nothing to see, quite the contrary. That emptiness made my attention to everything I saw increase significantly. Not just for every living creature I encountered, but also for sculptures, buildings, streets. To how the city was actually built. Normally, you actually take all that for granted when you live somewhere.'

'My wife is French and when I was director of the Institut Néerlandais, we lived in Paris for years. But only now did I get an eye for the very places you would look at as a tourist. I started looking for plaques, statues, memorial sites for people who fell in the war or wrote an important book, and reread the writers who had meant a lot in my life. That way, at a time when I wasn't seeing anyone, I could still meet "friends".'

Did that alleviate your loneliness?

'Huge, yes. My wife works as a doctor in healthcare and drove around Paris in her little car during the day to make house calls on her patients. I was alone a lot, unable to visit anyone and still trying to unleash something out of the emptiness and stasis. Walking led to a daily stream of pursuits, such as reading and writing this book. To see how all kinds of individuals from other periods of history, which were perhaps even more intense than this lockdown, made a valuable gesture towards their fellow human beings gave me support.'

Art and literature

Elegant connects Pröpper in Heart rate 27 historical events, art and literature and personal memories with the present time. For instance, he rereads the novella The silence of the sea, about a friendly, France-loving German soldier who is billeted with a taciturn French family during World War II and tries in vain to make contact. And walks past the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame to the impressive memorial to the two hundred thousand deported French.

Also, the statues of hands in the Tuileries, The Welcoming Hands, created over 20 years ago by Louise Bourgeois, suddenly took on a different connotation at a time without touch. As did writer Albert Camus' letter of thanks to his former teacher, which he wrote when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. This letter was read at a memorial service for Samuel Paty, the teacher who was beheaded in the street last year.

'I liked talking about that letter because it says something about the importance of teachers - a topic that was often discussed during the lockdown. The story is not about dwelling on history because history is so fantastic, but thinking about what you have to gain from it now and how you can draw strength from those examples to live well. When Camus' letter was recited, it inspired me to think about which people have been important to me and how, thanks to them, I have become who I am today. Some of them I wrote a letter to. As a result, I recently saw an old friend for the first time in almost 40 years.'

Did you yourself have such a teacher in your life?

'Yes, although he was not literally a teacher. When I came to Amsterdam from the east of the country as a boy of 18 to study, that city was for me an improbable metropolis I was almost afraid of. Every day I took the same tram, line 17, which went past my home and faculty from Central Station. I didn't dare go any further; I just sat in my student room reading in bed.'

'Until at some point I got a friend, a photographer and Dutch student, who was already in his early thirties and took me around town in tow. With him, I bought my first leather jacket and we went to the pub. Through him, I slowly began to feel at home in a world so much bigger than myself.'

'At my 21^e I received as a present from him a photograph he had taken of exactly the same chair in the Tuileries as the one we are sitting on now, early in the morning, the dew still on it. A beautiful photo, which I have always kept. But the man himself, like many friends, disappeared from my life at some point without me knowing exactly why. Years ago, I found him in a macabre way. I was living in New York and my mother sent me an article from NRC on a subject I found interesting. On the back of that newspaper article was his obituary - an unimaginable coincidence.'

Has this period brought new insights?

'Certainly, recent times have made me a lot more humble. My relationship with time, discipline and ambition has changed. I always had to go as hard as I could, with everything. For example, my father once gave me a booklet with all the results of all the Olympic Games up to 1968 - I knew them all by heart not long after. I also always worked extremely hard. Looking back, I see that my life has been a succession of too much and too far. So as a result, I also literally and figuratively ran past a lot.'

Are you living with more focus now?

'Yes, because then there is more room for the small coincidences and encounters in life. In my book, I describe a small scene that struck me. One day I saw two women walking across the Seine. It was just spring, but they had dressed as if it was already high summer; very dainty and colourful. Getting closer, I saw that they were older ladies who had made themselves up beautifully. They both looked very deeply into my eyes, and there was a curiosity in their gaze, a greed for life, truly unimaginable. This pure joy for life made me feel very happy. You only notice things like that when you open up to them. It is with this attentiveness and amiability that I want to live and interact with others.