Writing from Leeuwarden, Friesland (Netherlands)
Turning 55 in my ancestral homeland
Today is my birthday. I turn fifty-five. And, I am spending it in the land of my ancestors.
As I write this post—looking out the top-floor window of a 100-year-old dutch home at the quaint brick-homed neighborhood around me—the fact that I’m here hasn’t completely landed for me.
Leeuwarden is the provincial capital (the capital of Friesland and seat of the Provincial Council) in the northern Netherlands. The city has a population of about 127k people, but it’s surprisingly small enough to lack the hustle and bustle one might assume comes with a city of this size. It’s a city of historic canals and old enough that you feel the weight of centuries in the cobblestone streets beneath your feet.
It was chartered as a city in 1435, became the capital of Friesland in 1504, and served as the residence of the Frisian stadtholders of the house of Orange-Nassau, which are the ancestors of the present Dutch royal family.1 Since 2019, UNESCO has recognized it as a City of Literature.2
Obviously, it’s difficult to get a full sense of the political climate of the city but given it is part of the Netherlands, one of the most progressive countries in Europe, it’s fairly easy to make an educated guess. Nevertheless, it feels like the kind of place that makes you aware that you are very small in the grand scheme of things, yet, at the same time, very grateful to be alive.
The canal systems here are extraordinary. According to the Netherlands Tourism website, Leeuwarden once had around 130 windmills within the city used to harness the power of the water. They’re all gone now but there is one complete structure nearby that nods to the past. It’s called the Froskepôlemolen. Even though the windmills are mostly gone, you can still recognize all around you the specific way in which this region of the continent has pursued the long, patient quest of man trying to conquer nature. For centuries, the Dutch have harnessed and diverted the water to make civilization out of what might otherwise have become something of a marshland.
An Interesting Discovery
Yesterday, we spent most of the day walking the beautiful city and visiting the cultural center searching ancestral records. One of the more surprising discoveries had to do with my own name. Before 1811, most Frisian families did not carry permanent surnames as we do today. Identity was local and practical. Everyone was known by their given name followed by their father’s name.
But when Napoleon formally annexed the Netherlands into the French Empire on July 9, 1810, his mandate required every family to choose a permanent name because a regime can’t efficiently draft soldiers or collect taxes if half the population is named “Jan, son of Lieuwke.” Surnames became mandatory in 1811 and our family (for reasons only speculated) chose Postma. After the French occupation ended, the Dutch government kept the obligatory surname and ours has been Postma ever since.
The funny thing is it might not have been. Based on the names of the heads of household at the time, we could just as easily have been named Hendricks, Wilhelm, or Herke. Those are some of the alternative patrilineal names that ran through our line in the generations just before Napoleon’s decree made the choice permanent. A different ancestor at the head of the household in 1811 may have given me a different last name.
I find it somewhat remarkable that the name I carry, and the name some of my progeny will potentially carry, exists in its present form in large part because a nineteenth-century emperor, Napoleon, wanted to count people, and a Frisian farmer in Barradeel had to comply.
There is a handwritten family history, written by my grandfather’s older sister, Rena, who was born in Amsterdam in 1902 as Rinska and renamed when she came to America, that traces the Postma line back through Leeuwarden, Minnertsga, Wynaldum, Barradeel, and Franeker. She wrote it a few days before her fifty-third birthday, noting how she was always striving to be something more, something better, something just out of reach. Reading her words today, at approximately the same age that she was, yet standing in the province she left as a child and never returned to, I feel something I might only describe as the weight of inheritance. I have received something that needs to be stewarded properly and passed down to those who will come after me.
What This Has to Do with a Book and a Course
As I write this, I’ve been thinking about why I felt compelled to stand on the land my ancestors left more than a century ago. I don’t want to veer into sentimentalism and romanticize a past that never was. But visiting Leeuwarden has been sobering in the sense that it reminds me that I am a single link in a long chain. The people who worked these canals, who bore these names, who took the name Postma aren’t just figures in a history book. They are, in some real and irreducible sense, part of me.
That is what the classical tradition has always understood about education, and what the modern world has largely forgotten. None of us begin from nothing. We are formed by our inheritance, by what we receive from our ancestors. We are formed by the languages, the stories, the cuisine, and the habits of thought—even what and how we’re taught to worship—that have been handed down to us before we are old enough to choose them for ourselves. We literally enter into a long story as a new character who will play a role in shaping that story for future characters.
Francis Bacon wrote that “reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.” I have been writing the essays in Becoming Classically Educated for more than a decade now, trying to discover what I can rightly say about humane learning, and what I keep discovering is that the fullness of our humanity is not self-generated, not in the existentialist way. Rather, it is to a large degree inherited.
Which is, in part, why I am teaching the course that is based on the book.
The Course and Why It’s Running Out of Seats
The Christian Humanist Reading Life: Recovering Wisdom in an Age of Noise begins July 7th. It runs six Tuesday evenings—July 7 through August 11—ninety minutes each, live with me at 5:00–6:30 pm PT. Every enrolled student receives a copy of Becoming Classically Educated as part of their $397 investment.
I opened thirteen seats. We are more than halfway filled.
As I noted in a previous post, I’m not going to manufacture urgency or pretend the seats are running out faster than they are. What I will say, however, is that I am ready to close enrollment and begin preparing the students who have joined. Soon, I’ll be sending the readings, establishing the community, and doing the work of getting ready together. That is the part of teaching I love most, and I am eager to start it.
In other words, the course will be better for everyone if we get the room settled sooner rather than later. If you have been sitting with this decision and something keeps drawing you back to it—if you have felt the restlessness Augustine describes, the hunger that information simply does not satisfy, the sense that you have been given a great deal of knowledge and somehow left the deepest questions unanswered —then this course is for you.
If you have a question before you decide, email me at me@scottpostma.net. I will respond personally. Even from Europe.
For wisdom, the great tradition, and the good life,
Scott Postma Writing to you from Leeuwarden, Friesland, Netherlands
Stadtholders (or Stadhouders) were regional governors or stewards in the Low Countries, whose power grew significantly during the Dutch Republic. During the 16th to 18th centuries, members of the House of Orange-Nassau served as stadtholders, acting as both military commanders and political leaders before the Netherlands officially became a monarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Orange-Nassau
https://unesco.nl/creative-cities/leeuwarden-city-of-literature