Being present in a sad but (despite everything) still beautiful world

I once sat next to Tilda Swinton in her dreamy white electrical car, floating through the Scottish hills saying absolutely nothing for half an hour, only answering stiffly when she would ask a question, which gradually she stopped doing. She must remember me as the angry Dutch icecube, if she remembers me at all.

With my literary hero Antjie Krog it was even worse. I had to give the introduction to her reading at a university, it was a grueling evening, probably for both of us. I remember every agonizing minute. Just before the program started I saw her standing in the large, empty university hall, I was wearing high heels, and just then the heel of one of my shoes broke off. When I approached her, the hall filled with the sound of one heel clicking loudly on the tiles, while with every step I became more sullen and cold, she must remember me – if at all – as a modern-day Timur Lenk, the great, cruel Mongolian warrior also known as Timur the Lame because of a dragging leg.

(So, if I don’t say much to you tonight, please take it personal) and everyone, please bare with me; this is like meeting Tilda Swinton and Antjie Krog in one. Still, I had to say yes to this evening, in honour of all the yesses Arundhati Roy’s writing evoked in me. The agreeing nods while reading her essays, the muffled hm’s of agreement in response to the dazzling language, characters, ideas, to the moral clarity in her work.

Besides, in a way this seemed the easiest task ever. An ode to Arundhati Roy is practically a no-brainer. We are talking about one of the greatest literary voices of our time. Her writing puts a spell on life – shows you truth in chaos and love in confusion. It’s pure alchemy; Roy purifies our messy existence into this shining material, in which you see the world so sharply reflected that sometimes you gasp for breath — No matter how remote you are from the world she writes about, it’s always, also about you. Her language seems to melt your skull, directly connecting your bare brain to the vast morphic field that stores all human experience.

Emily Dickinson once wrote: If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, then I know it is poetry. In this sense, I could argue that Arundhati Roy is—despite all the essays and novels—in fact a poet.

But I want to argue something else, namely that she is a glowworm. To proof it, I need to bring in the old Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1941, Europe plagued by fascism and war, Pasolini and some friends made a nightwalk through the forest and saw fireflies among the trees. Fireflies are the same insects as glowworms. And they are not worms, nor flies, but bioluminescent beetles, some dance elegantly in the air, others glow in the earth, like tiny muddy constellations. As you might have guessed, we have the muddy version here.

Pasolini was deeply moved by those shining beetle-worm-flies. When he and his friends reached the top of a hill a little later, they saw in the distance the merciless spotlights of Mussolini’s troops and Pasolini compared that small beetle-glow to the blinding lamps of fascism. The soft radiance, capturing nothing, to the scorching ideology – for him this glowworm light was the symbol of resistance. Tiny flashing signs in the night that tell us never to be blinded by the glare of the Big Truth. The dance of the fireflies, he wrote, is the moment of grace, originality and joy that offers resistance to the terror of totalitarian ideology.

At the end of his life, Pasolini declared the fireflies dead. Crushed by the floodlights of the spectacle society. He was wrong, as the French philosopher Didier Hubermann argued years later in a magnificent book entitled The Survival of the Fireflies. Hubermann writes they are still among us, in the form of beetles and people, flashing a language of hope. And he is right. I know one when I see one – I am one of the guardians of a rare glowworm population in Amsterdam, that year after year stubbornly survives light pollution, draught and drunken tourists in a small urban forest not far from here, which, in my opinion, is the best attraction our city has to offer. But please don’t spread the word.

I know when I see one and I see one. Sending out her sparks into a worn off, overexposed world. A smouldering glow that reminds us not to settle for the blinding bullshit of controlling powers, reminding us that truth comes to us in obscure sparkles in the mud.

One of the qualities of the glowworm light is that it leads you nowhere. It’s a light that lures you away from the path, into the bushes, it makes you dwell in the night until you suddenly realize you are lost and exactly where you should be, that this is it: being present in your step in a sad but despite everything still beautiful world. Free – at least for a moment – from the terror of visibility.

Last week I read “Mother Mary Comes to Me.” I was struck by many things, but by one short sentence especially. When asked where she is from, a young Arundhati Roy answers hesitantly: “Now I am here.” And that is the greatest proof for my argument. For this is exactly what the glowworm says: don’t chase far horizons, blazing utopias. Find whatever flickers now and here; or even better: be what flickers now and here. It’s presence we need and proximity.

Thank you for your hereness and your nowness, for your glowworm words opposing floodlight words – for leading us away from illuminating floodlights, into the darkness, with all our senses alert, receptive to the smallest glimmer.

Marjolijn van Heemstra read this text by during ‘An Evening with Arundhati Roy‘, which took place on November 1, 2025 at the Old Lutheran Church in Amsterdam.