Letter from Pulau NTU

I should be worried. I want to go back to being a hermit. Pulau NTU is not pulau enough. I want to start my own personal Edo Period, kick out the foreigners in my head, shut down the ports, mull over and reconfigure everything I’ve learned. I want to be like Michel de Montaigne, who gave up on business and politics, took 1,500 of his favorite books out to a folly in the back yard (la tour du chateau) and started his ten-year exploration of the self – that undiscovered country – that would result in his essais, his “attempts” at achieving a fuller self-knowledge. But surely it isn’t responsible to just switch off. Surely it isn’t responsible to break the connection, switch off the screen, turn off the WiFi. Surely it isn’t okay to be blur…

As a Canadian, I’m tempted to just take the Canadian view. A lot of Canadians look down on the United States from their northern vantage point, cherry-picking what’s best and ignoring or deriding the rest. Canadians – and perhaps Singaporeans too – could just sit back if they wanted to and, as someone on a recent BBC Radio interview put it, “watch the season finale of America”. But I refuse to take the Canadian view. I haven’t been to the States in fourteen years and I have no plans to go, but I still feel as if Trump is my problem. Like Ebola. Or avian flu. Distant and even exotic… until it comes snaking across the globe. And I know from family experience that the view from afar is an easily shattered picture window: my father spent the first thirty years of his life serenely unaware that in his thirty-first he’d fly forty missions in a Lancaster through the booming night skies above Europe. That sign at the bus stops that reads “Not if but when” and depicts a hero dragging a victim of some terrorist act to safety – it’s a good reminder, though the medium undercuts it. I believe precisely nothing that I see advertised at bus stops, and my guess is that most people don’t either. Books do a much better – which is to say subtler – job of this sort of thing. If your fear of war isn’t reignited by Dispatches, The Red Badge of Courage, The Things They Carried, Generals Die in Bed, or War and Peace, you’ve been playing way too much Call of Duty.

One lesson of the 20th century was surely that complacency and indolence are great complements of evil. I know this. But somehow, I also know that if I pick up the newspaper tomorrow as if it’s a lifeline to what matters in the world, Donald will have won. Because the Donald Trumps of the world achieve their aims by pulling everyone into their dichotomies of choice – they force you to acknowledge their simplistic view of the world and take a side.

This phase will end. The roiling waters of History will recede, or I’ll wake up from my sleepwalk before I’m completely submerged. To be honest, I can see the end already. Today, I didn’t finish My Paper. I was right in the middle of an article about Daesh and, without thinking, skipped ahead to the next article. This one was about Erdogan. Couldn’t hold my attention either. I turned to Kim Jong Un and thought, meh. And before I knew it, I’d folded the paper up and was wondering what to read next. A book that I’d taken out from the library came to mind: A Gourmet’s Guide to London, by Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, published in 1914. It’s a book of reviews of restaurants in London that no longer exist. There can hardly be a book of less utility in the whole library. What’s more, I’ve never liked London and I don’t like eating in restaurants. A Gourmet’s Guide to London is the most useless book on my shelf – a book with no real-world, practical, common-sense utility at all. I can’t wait to begin. I’ll take it to the bench outside and when I’ve had enough of restaurant reviews I’ll just listen to the koels in the palms and Kopi the cat purring beside me, and keep watch for the sea eagle coming back to nest from his reconnaissance above the Kranji countryside. I’ll check the pomegranate tree to see if that branch, laden with fruit, has drooped any further. And sooner or later my thoughts will turn inward, to the landscape of the self, that undiscovered country where no dictator will ever come to power.