Legacy & Remembrance Quote by John G. D. Clark

Prestige is doing the real work here, and John G. D. Clark knows it. The sentence is ostensibly a modest thank-you, but its deeper function is to inflate the prize by inflating the man it’s named after, then letting that reflected glow fall back onto the recipient. “Illustrious Dutchman” is deliberately old-world: it summons a canon, a lineage, a sense that culture is stewarded by exemplary figures rather than made messy by institutions and politics. The honoree doesn’t merely receive an award; he’s inducted into an imagined European republic of letters.

Clark’s most loaded move is the double identity: “a great citizen of Europe” and a national figure at once. That phrasing quietly advertises a particular postwar ideal of Europeanness: cosmopolitan, humanistic, and unified by culture rather than borders. It’s a rhetoric that smooths over Europe’s fractures by locating legitimacy in intellectual heritage. The prize becomes less a contemporary decision by a committee and more the latest chapter in a civilizational story.

Then there’s the phrase “open up our modern world of sensibility and thought.” It’s flattering, but also tactical. “Sensibility” suggests refinement and moral perception; “thought” signals seriousness and progress. Together they make the unnamed Dutchman an origin point for modernity itself, which is an audacious claim disguised as ceremonial prose. By calling the honor “most signal,” Clark isn’t just expressing gratitude; he’s signaling belonging - to a tradition, to Europe, to modern intellectual authority.