After having spent so many years in remote and exotic parts of the world, it seems quite prosaic and counter-intuitive (been trying to use this word for some time ☺), and a whole lot of other adjectives to finish up living the last few of them in as pedestrian a place as "Riverbend".
On my drives home along Rangoon's U Wizara Road I used to encounter a tall, European-looking Buddhist monk. He was said to be an Italian who'd come to Burma as a tourist, converted to Buddhism, and never left. I never stopped to talk to him but now wished I had. In what was a sleepy Port Dickson in Malaysia I met a retired British civil servant in a deserted very 'pukka sahib' club. He had come out as a young man and never left.
And there were dozens more places and dozens more encounters but it never crossed my mind that perhaps one day I, too, would be old and would need to decide where to retire. In the end, that steamroller they call life simply made the decision for me and here I am at "Riverbend".
And yet I would probably have felt just as much at home in any of the other places I worked and lived in. Well, perhaps not any of them, not in Saudi Arabia or Iran or what's now Namibia, but in some small water-front town in the Maluku Islands or in some small place in Upper Burma.
And so I'm intrigued whenever I read about people, fictitious or not, who have boldly taken the course of their lives into their own hands as did a learned gentleman in Australia in the 1930s who clearly foresaw that a great war was about to break over the world. He had no desire to participate in this foolish war, but he had to conclude from his studies that Europe was going to explode and that the resulting fires would involve Africa and much of Asia. With extraordinary clairvoyance he deduced that Australia, left unprotected because the military men were preoccupied with Europe, would surely become a temptation to Asia and would probably be overrun.
Wishing to avoid such a debacle, he spent considerable time in determining what course a sensible man should follow if he wanted to escape the onrushing cataclysm. He considered flight into the dead heart of Australia, but concluded that although he could probably hide out in that forbidden region, life without adequate water would be intolerable. Next he contemplated removal to America, but dismissed this as impractical in view of the certainty that America would also be involved in the war.
Finally, by a process of the most careful logic, he decided that his only secure refuge from the world's insanity lay on some tropical island. He reasoned, "There I will find adequate water from the rains, food from the breadfruit and coconut trees, and fish from the lagoons. There will be safety from the airplanes which will be bombing important cities. And thanks to the missionaries, the natives will probably not eat me."
Fortified with such conclusions, he studied the Pacific and narrowed his choice of islands to the one that offered every advantage: remoteness, security, a good life, and a storm cellar until the universal hurricane had subsided.
Thereupon, in the late summer of 1939, one week before Germany invaded Poland, this wise Australian fled to his particular South Pacific refuge. He went to the almost unknown island of Guadalcanal --- which, as we now know, saw some of the bloodiest fighting in WWII.
And, if you're a Somerset Maugham reader, you would know of Wilson of whom he writes in his short story "The Lotus Eater":
"Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circum-stances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him."
Go on then, have a good look; read the full story here.
