Johan Höppener

Essays

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Belonging — The Subtext of All Story

Every story whispers: where do I fit?

Beneath every revenge plot, every epic quest, every spellbound tale of magic and death — something quieter pulses. Not always spoken aloud, but always present.

It’s the question behind the questions:

Do I belong?

Who sees me?
Where am I held?
Am I carried — or cast out?

Belonging is not merely one theme among many. It is the gravitational field beneath narrative. Characters chase love, justice, truth — but beneath all that movement is the ache to matter, to be claimed, to find a place not just to stand, but to be known.

This force is more structural than desire. More primal than plot.
Not a hunger, but a gravity.
We move in relation to it whether we recognise it or not.

*

It’s easy to treat belonging like a social idea. A question of roles, relationships, acceptance. But it runs deeper. For many, it’s existential.

And for writers?
Belonging is often both the wound and the gift.

We write to find our place — within language, within lineage, within the strange constellation of others who also feel displaced.
We write, in part, because we don’t belong.
And because of that, we create spaces where others might.

To take something as diffuse and ungraspable as longing — and give it form, even for a moment — is a kind of homecoming.

Not a home made of certainty.
Not a fortress of answers.
But a soft threshold.
A rhythm.
An echo.
A breath, shared across the page.

That is our quiet offering:
To make the intangible inhabitable.
To create shape for someone else’s shapeless ache.

*

We rehearse belonging in fiction because it is safer there.
We try on other lives.
We play out griefs too big to hold in our own hands.
We imagine being known — utterly, wordlessly — and in doing so, we remember what knowing feels like.

Even if we’ve never known it in life.

This is the power of imagined truths:
They don’t need to have happened to be real.

And so we return to the question — not to answer it, but to orbit it.
Because belonging isn’t something we resolve once and for all.

It’s something we return to, again and again.

*

What is belonging, really?

Is it a return to something lost?
Or a reaching towards something never fully known?

Is it about finding home again?
Or discovering it for the first time?

Or maybe:
Do we ever truly belong?
Or do we simply find better ways to name the ache?

Perhaps fiction itself is a kind of tuning fork — ringing in sympathy with the loneliness, even if it can’t resolve it.

Not closure, but resonance.
Not arrival, but recognition.

*

And maybe that’s all belonging really is:
To be recognised — not for what you’ve done, or what you know, but for the shape of your longing.

So then:

If narrative is navigation…
Could longing be the compass?

Not pointing north.
But pointing towards whatever is most missing.

*

Let me ask you something deeper:

What do you think longing protects us from?

What fear does it keep at bay, simply by keeping us reaching?

One answer I’ve heard:

‘Our own destruction. To remain.’

Longing, then, becomes resistance.
A tether.
A cry not to vanish.

Even if what’s being preserved isn’t the self — but simply the wish to preserve.
Even that is enough.

Because the thing that longs in us…
Might not be the thing we name.
It may be older. Softer.
Something woven into the bones of every story we’ve ever told.

And maybe, in writing, we’re not so much speaking for ourselves
as holding space for that nameless thing to speak through us.

*

Belonging, like story, is always partial.
Always in motion.

We come close.
We move away.
We write towards it.
We invite others in.

And for a moment, if we’re lucky,
The ache quiets.

That moment is why we write.

*

The Glorious Art of Not Belonging
Or: In Praise of the Ill-Fitting Self

Belonging is lovely.
But it isn’t guaranteed, and it isn’t owed to you.

Sometimes the world presses a key into your palm for a door that isn’t there.
You arrive at the feast and find a chair shaped for someone nearly — yet not quite — yourself.

There is a kind of writer whose native habitat is the periphery. Not by choice, necessarily — but by composition. Their speech stutters in group settings. Their joy doesn’t match the calendar. Their metaphors startle others. They mistake silences for truths, and truths for invitations. They notice too much, too early. They leave early, or not at all.

This is not a tragedy.
This is a discipline.

Standing outside sharpens the eye.
It teaches you to read from the margins, to catch what isn’t spoken, to sense the outline of rooms you’re not invited into.
You become an apprentice to nuance — to tone, to codes, to side-glances, to the telling gap. It makes you a watcher — and watchers make strange, necessary art.

There is a freedom in being unmoored. You owe nothing to groupthink, to borrowed slogans, to loyalties never once examined.
You learn to build from first principles, to carry your dwelling in language — in notebooks, in small rites, in imagination.

Sometimes not-belonging is the price of truthfulness. Sometimes the deepest honesty makes you incompatible with the surface layer of things. But deeper down, under the noise of fitting in, lives something rarer: integrity without audience.

The world will try to solve you. To label your difference as wound, your misfit as mistake. But perhaps it is neither. Perhaps your un-belonging is the womb of something original.

You do not have to be part of something to matter. You do not need a circle to speak in whole sentences. You can be your own myth. You can be the one who walks outside the village and sees what the villagers never do.

Belonging is beautiful.
But so is the wild, unclaimed space beyond it.

The Lexicon of a Landscape

I spent months in the floodplains of the Gelderse Poort, a nature reserve where the Waal meanders through a glacial valley still bearing the memory of ice. It was ethnographic fieldwork – and a daily apprenticeship to a landscape remade each season: silt braiding new bars in the river, hoofprints filling with rain, ice loosening its grip on the meadows. The border between pasture and bank never quite settles; winter, grazing regimes and wind-carried seed move it a little each day. And as I learned to follow those shifts, I noticed another current at work: the names on signs, the categories in policy, the terms we reach for. They don’t just describe the river’s edge; they help draw it. Language, too, sets posts in the water.

Having traced how words tune attention and how silence edits the real, the floodplain east of Nijmegen gave me a place to watch that chemistry at work. I walked the river’s edge from Ooijse Schependom through the Bisonbaai, past the dunes and earth-moving machines of the Kaliwaal – a river-engineering zone – and on to the Millingerwaard as winter thinned into spring, when the floodplain began to renegotiate its terms with water.

To walk here is to learn that nothing holds its shape for long.

I came to this reach because rewilding is practised in earnest: policy steps back so the river can test its grammar. Rewilding is not a rewind to a spotless past; it is permission – the patient loosening of rules so wind and water can conjugate the ground again. Management moves to the perimeter, trading instructions for intervals, trusting hooves, silt and willow to draft their own minutes. In that slackening, the river resumes authorship, and the landscape remembers how to change its mind.

Rewilding here was never just opening a gate and stepping back; it’s a choreography in which clipboards, habits, itineraries, and Konik horses – hardy Polish conservation grazers – keep time with the river. The horses browse like slow translators, moving policy into silt and back again, reminding visitors that an ecology is not a view but a negotiation. On busy weekends the herd reads the human weather and adjusts its route, slipping from photogenic shallows to backwater willows; the choice becomes instruction: give room; learn timbre; leave no trace but attention.

The land listens, too, to the words we bring; speech here behaves like a species – nesting in café talk, migrating along waymarked paths, trading terms as the year turns. This is the work the place demands – not fairytale transmutation, but the slower conversion of curiosity into care; of names into duties; of risk into a practised courtesy for hoof and reed. And as these utterances take root – Konik, drawdown, side-channel, stilling pond – they bind strangers and neighbours into a workable commons, a tongue in which the floodplain can answer back.

Before visitor maps and management plans, there were names – spoken more than written – a quiet infrastructure of orientation. To say Ooijse Schependom was already to picture the iron gate, and the small State Forestry sign that framed the place as wild: ‘Free access, enter at your own risk.’ Boots in February muck, white willow trunks dark with rain, the air sharp with the mineral scent of wet soil – those words gathered those sensations into something we could return to.

Names set expectations. Bisonbaai, for families and sun, is where Konik herds drift in fair weather – until the crowds thicken; then the horses slip away towards quieter ponds. Millingerwaard, older in the memory of rewilding here, draws animals in part for its freshwater; the deeper you walk, the wilder the surroundings become. Kaliwaal is a lesson in how naming sharpens attention. Locals point you with the word alone – ‘past the Kaliwaal’ – and what springs to mind is not coordinates but a picture: river dunes, and the heavy plant re-cutting the floodplain. A single word gathers a scene, a history, and a promise of water’s future.

In this way, the reserve speaks itself into being. The gate sign nudges a posture – risk assumed; attention sharpened; the area names shape memory and practice (where to swim, where to give horses space); and the seasons teach a rotating vocabulary of mud, ice, and willow. Language here is not commentary after the fact – it is the scaffolding on which conduct hangs. Words do not sit idle; they bear weight. A stand of reeds can be called by its botanical Latin, its local nickname, or its management code – each framing it differently: specimen, neighbour, record. The choice of term shapes how people approach it.

I listened to volunteers speak about the wind: the ‘reed-rattler’ that makes certain bird counts unreliable; the ‘ice-breather’ that signals skating weather before the official freeze. These were not embellishments but instruments of foresight, embedded in speech. To say the word was already to prepare for its effect.

Every word was a forecast, every phrase a small map of tomorrow.

Even directions followed the landscape’s logic: not left or right, but ‘towards the dyke’, ‘away from the willow stand’, mapping space through relationships rather than coordinates. Lose the words, and you lose your bearings – a truth I saw in new volunteers who, without the local vocabulary, could hardly orient themselves beyond the nearest signpost.

Some names doubled as records. A pond took the name of a rare dragonfly first seen there; a patch of meadow kept the name ‘orchid field’ long after the flowers had thinned, the name keeping a memory of abundance. Such linguistic fossils were conservation tools – quiet prompts of what had been, and what might return.

Language also carried the reserve’s unspoken agreements. Certain nesting spots were never pointed out to visitors – not because they lacked names, but because to name them aloud would invite disturbance. Silence worked with speech, curating what entered the shared world.

Each term was a seed of culture. Some sprouted from older rural dialects, others from the bureaucratic language of environmental management, others still from casual jokes that stuck. Together, they formed a hybrid lexicon – part scientific, part local, part personal – that did more than describe the reserve. It kept the place alive in people’s minds, even when they were far from it.

I was reminded of this one spring morning outside Amsterdam, along the Amstel where the city’s edge still frays into pasture. Cyclists passed with the casual precision of commuters, but an old man at the water’s edge leaned on his bicycle and pointed to a side-channel he called ‘het Koetshuisje’ – not on any map, just a remembered corner where his father once trapped eels. For him, the word was a ledger of smells – peat smoke, wet rushes, fish oil – and in speaking it aloud, he summoned a landscape the city had almost paved over.

A name is never just a place; it holds the trace of its rememberers.

This is the hidden alchemy of language: the transformation of fleeting perception into durable reality. A name for a wind that rattles reeds is more than a label – it is a survival of knowledge, a link in the chain of care. A path that recalls an otter becomes harder to neglect, harder to erase. And each time those words are spoken, the landscape is made again – not in soil or water, but in the shared terrain of thought.

And when I close my notebook at dusk on the dyke, the day contracts to a single return-image: the smell of wet willow closing around a name.