#underestimate #doesnt #affect #anymore
‘That it encourages you to dare, but that it also says something else. Namely: if you don’t do it, you lose yourself. Don’t dare, that seems safe, but that is ultimately the end. In Danish it is even stronger. Then it doesn’t say ‘dare’ but ‘dare’. To dare is even more: to risk things. I think it’s very true.
‘It is of course quite scary to dare to do something, to deviate from what others think. Often enough I haven’t done or said something because I actually wanted to be part of the group. I will never forget that I was a jury member on a VPRO TV program. In it they reenacted a court case that revolved around the question of whether or not a cigarette manufacturer was guilty of the health damage that people suffered from smoking. I was there among eleven very smart people on the jury. At the end we had to indicate by show of hands whether we considered the company guilty. I thought: I hate them, those people in that industry. I’m going to find them guilty. Then came the voting moment, and it turned out that everyone else thought it was the smokers’ own responsibility. For a moment I thought: then I have to go on my own… And then something happened to the hand I wanted to raise; it went down again. I just went along with the others. That has always bothered me. Because it wasn’t what I really thought at all. That’s in that quote from my father. He gave me another life lesson: follow your passion in life, discover where your heart lies and become very good at it. Then you’ll be fine. That’s not why I went to law school like many of my classmates, but I chose literature and philosophy.’
Her father Niels Eilskov Jensen worked as an engineer and found a job at the European Space Agency Estec Esa in Noordwijk. As a result, the family moved from Denmark to the Netherlands in the early 1970s. Stine and her twin sister Lotte were 1 year old at the time. Their father was a remarkably smart man, she says. But also a man who never talked about his feelings. ‘If there was something wrong with us, he would say: here you have 5 guilders, go and get an ice cream. That was his recipe for comfort. That worked pretty well too. I didn’t suffer very much from that.’ She remains silent, then says how complicated she finds it to describe her father. ‘I’ve only seen a small part of him. Because he moved away after my mother’s divorce and then returned to Denmark. I was 16 then. Actually, I mainly knew him from holidays and in the evenings when he came home from work. He was the one who brought joy. Eating out, vacations. And my father was also a man who could say: it has been raining all summer. Pack your bags. We’re going to Spain now.’
After the divorce she still saw him occasionally. Until he died four years ago, due to a brain haemorrhage. Was she ultimately able to discuss everything she wanted to discuss with him? She is silent for a long time again. Then she says: ‘I think it is a very personal question, and a difficult subject to talk about. There have been times in my life when I have tried to talk to my father. That actually didn’t work out. I have resigned myself to that. I came to cherish my father for who he was, with those ingrained nastiness. I was very angry with him once. Then I tried to talk to my sister about how he had dealt with the divorce. That made no sense at all. But you can also talk to someone once he is lying in state. I have done that. And that was good and nice. I know that a lot of value is placed on ‘speaking out’ and ‘sharing’. At the same time, it is sometimes good that the unsaid remains where it was.’
Lotte and she were mainly raised by their mother Kirsten. Although her job – she worked as a doctor at the academic hospital in Leiden – meant she was often away during the day. She has been suffering from dementia for a few years and lives in a nursing home.
Her parents had a bad marriage, with a lot of fighting. ‘Of course you get that as a child.’ She was lucky to have a twin sister. They were each other’s lifeline in a way. ‘You have each other. You know there is always someone who is completely loyal to you.’
