The Lotus Eater

Robert Duncanson's 'Land of the Lotus Eaters' (1861)

 

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.

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The Summing Up

 

Autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing his private self, "The Summing Up", published in 1938 when W. Somerset Maugham was sixty-four, is a wonderful piece of writing about style, literature, art, drama and philosophy:

 

"THIS IS NOT an autobiography nor is it a book of recollections. In one way and another I have used in my writings whatever has happened to me in the course of my life. Sometimes an experience I have had has served as a theme and I have invented a series of incidents to illustrate it; more often I have taken persons with whom I have been slightly or intimately acquainted and used them as the foundation for characters of my invention. Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other. It would not interest me to record the facts, even if I could remember them, of which I have already made a better use. They would seem, moreover, very tame. I have had a varied, and often an interesting, life, but not an adventurous one. I have a poor memory. I can never remember a good story till I hear it again and then I forget it before I have had a chance to tell it to somebody else. I have never been able to remember even my own jokes, so that I have been forced to go on making new ones. This disability, I am aware, has made my company less agreeable than it might otherwise have been. [continue here]

 

from page 12 of "The Gentleman in the Parlour"

 

I wished I could've summed up my own life as elegantly as he has his, although the above quotation comes pretty close.

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Flamme empor ...

 

 

Our minds are cobwebbed attics, crowded with sad souvenirs, mildewed mementoes, rusty recollection and silverfish'd scrap books. Yet they're our most precious possessions, linking us to our lives. We do not live after death, but, thanks to memory, can live our past life as often as we like. Like re-runs on the telly.

Old marriages, old friendships are bound by memories. They enable us to talk in shorthand to bring up old experiences. Which is why death, divorce, and dementia are so devastating. You lose an old friend and you lose a part of yourself. Pity the middle-aged man who gets divorced and marries a twenty-year-old - whatever else they share, they cannot share memories. With dementia everything seems gone except breathing.

My mind seems to recall less and less of the here and now but it is choc-full of memories going back sixty-five years when I spent all my spare time with the boy scouts, not the dyb-dyb Baden-Powell ones but the homegrown German "Wandervogel" variety with tough long marches, living off the land, and long nights with comrades around a roaring fire.

As it was this weekend when we did some burning-off at "Riverbend".

 

 

As I said, my mind recalls less and less of the here and now. But there's one thing I do remember: if I want to forget something immediately, I simply say "I must remember this". Then, whatever it was I wanted to remember, not even the Gestapo could get it out of me under torture.

And there was something else I wanted to tell you. It was something terribly important about ... something. I seem to have forgotten it ...

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The Colossus of Maroussi

Read the book online at www.archive.org

 

What does one do on a cold and wintry day when all one wants is to be somewhere else? One reads Henry Miller's "The Colossus of Maroussi", which is unlike anything else ever written about Greece and about life itself.

"I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To be silent the whole day, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself." [page 40]

"In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky. You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap and vault into the blue. You want to float in the air like an angel or lie in the grass rigid and enjoy the cataleptic trance. Stone and sky, they marry here. It is the perpetual dawn of man's awakening." [page 153]

"At that moment I rejoiced that I was free of possessions, free of all·ties, free of fear and envy and malice. I could have passed quietly from one dream to another, owning nothing, regretting nothing, wishing nothing. I was never more certain that life and death are one and that neither can be enjoyed or embraced if the other be absent." [page 22]

"It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of what concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it. And that's how I was --- except that I didn't have the power or the courage to kill myself then and there. It was good, too, that I didn't do myself in because there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even, something which if anyone had tried to describe to me I would probably not have believed." [page 13]

It's a paean to the joys of Greece and to the joys of life which helps to cheer me up as I sit here on this cold and wintry day. As Leonard Cohen, who had a long and abiding love for everything that was Greek but especially for the island of Hydra, wrote, "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be".

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P.S. See also Armchair-travelling on a cold day.

 

From Late Night Live to Mid-Afternoon Podcast

"Sleep wonderfully warm with Linda"

 

There's only one thing that's better than reading a book and that is to have it read to you in bed, especially if it is read to you by the author himself. Last night I was wonderfully warm in bed, not sleeping with Linda but listening to my audiobook of Douglas Murray's "The War on the West".

 

Read a preview here
Click here for a sample of the audiobook

 

I was so enthralled by his incisive takedown of foolish anti-Western arguments that I totally forgot to switch over to my usual nightcap, Phillip Adams' Late Night Live on ABC Radio which, as it so happened, was about another of my many favourite writers, Simon Winchester, perhaps best-known for his book "The Surgeon of Crowthorne", a non-fiction history book about the beginnings of another of my favourite books, the Oxford English Dictionary. As well, Simon Winchester wrote "The Man Who Loved China", "The Map that Changed the World", "Krakatoa - The Day the World Exploded", and thirty other non-fiction books, right down to his latest masterpiece, "Knowing What We Know - The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic".

Luckily, Late Night Live comes alive again the next afternoon at three o'clock, which allowed me to slip back under the covers - with Linda switched on high! - to listen to The adventures of Simon Winchester.

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