Nobel Winds & Breezes

December 24, 2009 3:43 AM

Let’s talk about winds. Nobel winds. Nobel winds and breezes. Sometimes law even has something to say about the wind, for instance, when you consider building or buying a wind farm at a certain site.

A windstorm may have legal consequences too. There are legal aspects involved when you want to connect the output of your wind turbine to a utility grid. Implementing the Kyoto Protocol, which deals with wind energy and air pollution, has legal implications too, in addition to the fact that it in itself is an international legal agreement.

Alexander Mohr is a charismatic, multi-cultural professor. He is an emeritus professor of Corporate Law at the University of Amsterdam and former Deputy Judge in the Enterprise Chamber of the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He lives half the year in his house in Amsterdam and the other half in his house in Tanti, Argentina. He lectures and lectured in the Netherlands Antilles, Surinam, Indonesia, China and Russia: he went to those countries ‘on the wings of air’. Alexander is an adviser on company law legislation in Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine and Armenia as well as a member of the Governmental Commission on Book 2 of the Civil Code of the Netherlands Antilles. Finally, Alexander Mohr is a partner at Spigthoff Attorneys and Tax Advisers in Amsterdam and Curacao.

Alexander Mohr has a fascination for complex legal matters and also with wind. Wind as a natural phenomenon, which has, in his opinion, been overlooked in literature. He is interested not so much in the “kind of wind that sinks ships or brings down trees, or the wind that penetrates, or bites, or propels driving rain, hail or snow … but the common everyday natural phenomenon that is felt as a more or less cursory and seemingly arbitrary displacement of air.”

In his opinion, we read too little about the wind, the breeze described above. Alexander read and reread books written by 105 gifted winners of the Nobel prize for literature, many of whom were previously unknown to him. And thus created an anthology in which the wind is mentioned by all one hundred and five Nobel prize winners. As Alexander wrote in the preface: “Here are some nine dozen pearls of literature, strung together on a – well-nigh imperceptible – thread of wind: a wealth of drama, depravity, lyricism, imagination, romance, humor and other expressions of the spirit”.

Have we been waiting for this book? No. Is it a useful book? Not really… or maybe it is. Should one purchase a copy? Yes, without any doubt. It is the only book that describes exactly how this phenomenon is treated by the greatest contemporary writers of our times. We all experience the wind on a daily basis, but very few of us have ever tried to describe it. However, understanding the wind may help you to sail through life. It may add to the quality of your existence if you try to see and understand the invisible aspects of your journey.

The book: Nobel winds & breezes, edited by Alexander L. Mohr, published by A.L. Mohr Publishers, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2009, 638 pages; ISBN: 978-90-9024344-3.

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.
(David Whyte)

Karel Frielink
Attorney (Lawyer) / Partner

24 December, 2009