These are short essays, reflections alternating with drawings, poems, dialogues, observations, letters, anecdotes, jokes and personal memories. With the help of two themes (her fascination for the sea and for pine trees), Mutsaers sets out her own trail, which she then proceeds to follow. She pursues small clues (a gift she once bought for her husband, a stretch of forest from a book by Ponge, a drawing of a Christmas tree she made as a girl) and each time she discovers a piece of the mosaic of her own universe, which enables her better to interpret it.

With great dexterity and by means of association she follows the thoughts recalled by objects and instances and the images which these conjure up: her first Christmas party, the expressive artists Ensor and Spilliaert, a holiday at the beach, the blast-furnaces, a display of shells, a festive bonfire of Christmas trees. Every one of these images sets Mutsaers’ joyful, agile mind working. For Mutsaers, imagination is a weapon against the disenchantment or the ‘depoetization’ of adulthood.

Knowledge, political correctness, the destruction of the environment, the spirit of the age, and, especially the realisation of impermanence, are all harsh disenchanters which Mutsaers has experienced at first-hand. All have their repercussions on human zest for life, making people melancholy. ‘What’s the point, I’m going to die anyway,’ she thought as a young girl, after her grandfather’s death. She writes a moving description about how the sea has enabled her to become reconciled to death - in so far as such reconciliation is possible. Mutsaers loves life and art. It fills her with enthusiasm and joy. In Zeepijn every page bursts with love for life.