167. The sighing of trees

I.

For anyone looking for a beautiful book of fewer than 150 pages, I can recommend Het zuchten van bomen by Roanne van Voorst. It is about a girl who grows up on the edge of a forest with her father (a fanatical forester) and mother (a fanatical biologist). The lonely girl develops a bond with a beech tree nearby.

In this slim novel you follow decades in the lives of the daughter, her family, and the tree. Parts of the book are experienced from the beech tree’s perspective. The tree is not anthropomorphised, but described as a consciousness that simply is. Van Voorst handles this beautifully. Her narrative style may seem detached, but it is secretly very lovely. As a reader you find yourself floating above both humanity and nature.

By stepping back and observing humankind from the tree’s perspective, she arrives at beautiful observations.

“The human desire to search for oneself in unfamiliar places seemed to him in keeping with those other curious human characteristics: the desire to investigate what is not yet known, to form an individual consciousness, and the tendency to formulate opinions and wishes that came with that. Trees did none of that. They are reactive, they live in what is, not in what could be otherwise.”

Het zuchten van bomen is full of passages like this. Van Voorst describes moss as “resistance and patience already made entirely material.” When the girl grows up and moves to the city, Van Voorst needs only a few words to sketch the absence of the forest: “She paused at the bird feeder, hesitated over whether to buy one, but instead placed a fat ball in her basket — easier to hang from the railings of the French balcony.”

Both the girl and the tree undergo great changes in their lives, yet remain connected to each other. In a remarkably beautiful way, Van Voorst writes about lives making room for one another, while the essence of life on earth always continues. A moving, small book.

II.

“Always make a soundtrack,” says main character Stacey Rockford in the game Mixtape. “Because pretty soon you won’t be listening to music, you’ll be listening to who you were.”

When I think of the times I gave my life a soundtrack, I think of Chet Baker in my ears in press rooms at tech fairs. I think of MGMT while blogging late at night. Or cycling through the rain with The National. Completely ordinary things in life suddenly take on something epic.

In Mixtape you follow three friends on their last night together. Stacey is heading to New York after high school graduation to pursue her dream of becoming a music curator. For that she has to skip a final trip with her friends Van and Cassandra. So they prepare for one last night of letting loose.

Music plays a major role in the game. Stacey has made a mixtape, and the songs on it form the backdrop of the memories through which you get to know the group of friends. The story takes place in the early nineties. I knew it was something special when Just Like Honey by Jesus and the Mary Chain came on. That is one of those songs from my own formative years, when I discovered my love for music and film. Just Like Honey plays at the end of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.

Mixtape leans heavily on the player’s sense of nostalgia. The game consists of short vignettes in which you recall memories. Like that time a friend got drunk at a party, for instance. Or the first time you kissed someone. Everything in those carefree years seemed like the most important thing ever. As if everything depended on it. In the end you learn that nothing lasts forever.

PS.

This website is an extensive ode to the Walkman. A treasure chest for anyone who loves retro tech. And who doesn’t?

Lovely — a video from eight years ago that is still pretty spot-on.

You may have noticed it too, but the quality of smartphone photos is getting worse. That is because manufacturers are meddling so much with post-processing. Marques Brownlee shows how that works.

Studio Laika is coming with a new film, which is good news, since they previously made Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. Like those titles, the new film Wildwood will also be stop-motion animation. The trailer already looks stunning.

You read blog №167, written in the week of 18 to 24 May 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it every Sunday, free in your inbox.