Ik Denk / I Think

There is a beautiful book that I would like to share with you. It is called 'Ik Denk' (meaning 'I Think') and it is a collaboration between Toon Tellegen, the well known Dutch writer of poems and (animal)stories, and Ingrid Godon, a successful artist/illustrator from Belgium. The fact of these two people working together sounds promising already. And then there is the subject: thinking. How do we think, why do we think, what does it mean to think? Philosophical reflections are in good hands with Toon Tellegen. For example, I have here roughly translated a piece: 

I think thinking is the strangest thing there is. When I think; let's think now, then I am already thinking. Or if I think; stop thinking now, then I still keep thinking. You can start and stop everything: eating, sleeping, reading, fighting, being in love... But you can't stop thinking. 

Texts like this are combined with marvellous drawings by Ingrid Godon. Drawings of people of all kinds and ages. Some are detailed, others are sketchy and rough. The people have stern looks, sad looks. They look as if they are reflecting, worrying, as if they are somewhere far away. As if they are thinking. 

Another fragment:

I think thinking is a sea, inside my head - always sloshing, swirling, tossing, sometimes with whitecaps and towering waves, sometimes smooth as a mirror, shimmering in the moonlight - always different, but always the same sea, the same horizon, behind which there might be land, or there might not be. And I? I am the wind that rises and dies down and rises to hurricane force and whips up my thinking and makes it seethe and rage and die down again. I think knowing is the water that is left behind on the beach at low tide. 

Some drawings are printed on bright red transparant paper. This adds a tactility to the book that makes it even stronger. In some cases the text can be seen through the drawings. A portrait of a thinking person with some thoughts shining through. You can move the portrait to the next page and then he/she will think some other thoughts perhaps. The thinking drawings and thinking words become one.