We are in Nieuwpoort and this afternoon, with the tide out, we walked along the broad beach towards Oostdunkirke. We walked back along the dyke and so inevitably stopped to admire Jan Fabre’s boy on a turtle. Together with Heaven of Delight it is one of my favourite Fabre pieces. The boy’s gaze out to the horizon invites the viewer to pensiveness and the mood the sculpture creates somehow reflects the weather about it. Today was cold, misty, austere; the horizon not entirely discernible. In its own way, it is as inscrutable as the sphinx and I like to think of the boy, thousands of years hence, gazing out at a desert or just piercing the surface of the sea. What would our distant descendants make of it? An object of worship or veneration? Was the boy a god? Was the turtle a sacred animal? Would turtles still exist by then? As I wrote, the sculpture invites the viewer to pensiveness.