There's nothing like the pitter patter of rain drops on a corruagted iron roof to send me off to sleep, so after my lunch of what Padma calls her "home-made pizza" - slices of salami and shredded cheese on a piece of Lebanese bread lightly toasted - I doubled down on my retirement by retiring to "Melbourne" for an afternoon snooze.
Woken up after an hour or so by the rustling of leaves and something else rustling somewhere under the floorboards, I was reluctant to return to the "real" world and grabbed the nearest book within reach which transported me once again to another and even more exotic location.
W. Somerset Maugham's novel "The Narrow Corner" is set "a good many years ago" in the Dutch East Indies, where a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy. A quote from "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius, "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells", gives it its title.
In addition to drifting away from the here-and-now, the story allowed me to fantasize to the many possible "what might have beens?" had I stayed longer in New Guinea, settled on Thursday Island, retired - as I once thought I might - at Port Dickson in Malaysia, or never left Greece. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living", which Adam Phillips, the Freudian existentialist, countered with "The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?"
Playing the "what ifs?" is not a gratifying way to live. And it is definitely not the way in which to have a positive attitude toward the life we now have and have lived. It is the exact opposite of a life of gratitude for simply being alive. And yet it is, I am sure, what we all do late in life.
The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened." There go about half the things I used to feel bad about. As for the rest, I take consolation from the fact that so many of the extraordinary characters I encounters in my life seem to have finished up just like me: holed up in deepest domesticity and with no more "what next?" ahead of them - well, except for the most obvious one (which some reached already).
The human mind - at least mine - tends to work from the concrete to the abstract, from personal experiences to principles suggested by these experiences. I am sure that if I sat in the lotus position for days on end on some remote mountaintop and tried to come up with a meaning of life, my mind would soon turn toward something concrete, like the rumbling in my stomach. I would probably then declare that life is another slice of "homemade pizza" washed down with a cold beer.
I leave you with a YouTube clip of the radio play, adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Segal, and broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre on 1 April 1989, with Garard Green as Dr Saunders and Douglas Blackwell as Captain Nichols, as well as a copy of Maugham's book to read here.
Postscript: Sometimes I buy the same book again for no other reason than that it has a better cover than the one I already own. Padma keeps chiding me, "But you already have this one!" Well, I've just found the perfect excuse for next time she tells me this because when I came to chapter twenty-one in "The Narrow Corner", I found that pages 117/118 were missing from the cheap paperback. Luckily, I have a beautifully bound hardcover edition with all its pages intact in my other library.
