Le Grand Meulnes

Things are starting to move more quickly now, with the week pleasantly filling up with social engagements. Also, received two big packages from Columbia: one a mailing from the Columbia Urban Experience, which has allowed me to go to New York one week earlier, and the other the long-awaited copy of Homer's Iliad, to be read as homework (yes, even before school starts!). As August makes its inexorable progress onwards, the time has come to make the obligatory rounds of reunions and farewells; and it exhilarates me to think that this time round, the one who is departing is, finally, for better or worse, me.

Yesterday evening, went out with the undergrads again for a walk through the Southern Ridges, from Mount Faber Park, through Telok Blangah Hill Park and over the Henderson Waves, to end up at the Alexandra Arch. It is a route that has been well known to me since URA, because it is one of the highly touted components of the new Leisure Plan. However, after all this time, I had not made the trip myself to visit the place in person. In fact, the last time that I had been up Mount Faber was back in my preschool days, when the hillside was a place to have weekend picnics of spaghetti and Sarsi, when my whole family was so much younger.

So, it was with a bit of trepidation that I walked with the undergrads up to Mount Faber Park, as usual a bit leery of the prospect of the present reality being discordant with a fondly remembered past. And it was with pleasant surprise that I got my first glimpses of the newly refurbished park. Certainly, it looks nothing like the leafy, rough, quiet hillside that I remember; but that being said, the elegant plazas and sinuous pathways that line the ridge today are also charming, offering spectacular views on one side of the Southern Islands and the large port, and on the other side of the downtown skyline, blazing gold in the rays of the setting sun.

It is possible that sunset made the place more cloying than it would otherwise have been. The golden glow bathed everything in a clear, crisp light, and especially lit up the Henderson Waves and the Forest Walk dramatically. The Henderson Waves: Singapore's highest pedestrian bridge, constructed to look like a sine curve strung between the two ridges, solid and elegant and yet seeming to be taut with energy, ready to reverberate in the air. And the Forest Walk: several kilometres of metal grille carving out an airborne path through the canopy of the secondary forest near Alexandra Road, thrusting promenaders into the heady streams of the sea breezes, the stark swathes of metal now swooping into the midst of the leaf cover, now dramatically projecting over the trees and into the clear air. The trail is beautiful; there is no other word for it. And it is moving to think that such beauty has been wrought by locals in a local environment; that, in fact, it is within reach of us cynical and self-critical Singaporeans.

Anyway, throughout the stroll and afterwards, in the Food Republic at VivoCity, we talked about anything and everything that we could think of that was related to our iminent matriculation. And in the midst of comparing housing allotments, application experiences and anticipated majors, I begin to sense a certain distinct difference between how Singaporeans think and how Americans view life. Among our number was a girl from the Singapore American School, and one from Taiwan, from an experimental bilingual high school near the capital. It's not that it's harder to talk to them, or easier to click with Singaporeans; whatever differences in that respect exist necessarily due to the different experiential vocabularies that we share. But beyond that, one can detect a palpable difference in approaches to social situations. The Singapoeans are more tactful, and yet more sincere; our American-influenced counterparts strike me as clearly more direct, and yet also tending to be reluctant of real proximity. How to demonstrate this in real terms? In some ways, I guess, Americans may be more comfortable with socialising in large groups, whereas Singaporeans tend not to think too much of small-group, or even one-to-one event.

Of course, it would be folly to try $o extrapolate a viable theory out of two meetings with our two American-influenced counterparts. And yet, it would be careless to discount the possibility that a whole new approach to social situations may be required in Columbia. And, I think, this is unique among all my overseas trips, in that I can, for the first time, begin to anticipate the social challenges that I may face over there. In Frexprog, Texprog, Bangkok and even as recently as Saigon, there has always been a sort of inherent assumption that Singaporeans behave like people elsewhere, and the experiences in other places would just be an extrapolation of familiar patterns in unfamiliar contexts. But now, I find enough evidence to suggest that I should be prepared for the possibility of the social patterns themselves being different, being fundamentally based on different assumptions.

But that, after all, is part of the point of going overseas to study, isn't it? That is also part of the point of studying sociology. For, in a wahy, it would be rather sad if everyone behaved the same way in the same situations, even if that would mean for a more orderly and less perilous world.

*

Am taking the time before another dinner with C later to type this out. Just had lunch with YT, whom, due to busy schedules at school and the demands of a double-degree workload, I have not seen since coming out of the Army, even though she is studying here. It was high time for a meeting, since we were both on the brink of departure - for her, a year in Tokyo awaits. And so it was that we took our lunch in a noodle restaurant and found Japanese dessert close by, all the time talking about what is to come.

And it was with a sudden feeling of vertigo that I realised that I don't know when I will see this friend again. For others, it has always been a given that months, or at most a year, would pass before we would be physically close enough for a face-to-face meeting again. Whereas for her, due to scheduling issues, there is a real possibility that we would not be in the vicinity until one of us graduates. And that, for someone on the brink of matriculating, is a timeframe that is almost impossible to imagine, let alone face. It could be that our paths are on the brink of diverging so much that even the passive modes of keeping in contact, the emails and the online chats and the Facebook, will not be enough to stay the forces that erode a shared past. And so, for a moment, dizzyingly, I realised I could be facing a farewell for good - one tha I had not even thought could happen, let alone prepared properly for.

And yet, it is surely already a small miracle that we have kept in touch for so long since graduating from JC. This was one of those connections that develop spontaneously, that erupt out of the kernel of opportunity fully formed, surprising one with its intensity and proximity. This was a fast friendship, in that it sideswiped me unexpectedly, and even now as I think back on it, I realise I have never really been able to take it for granted and to get used to it. This is also a fast friendship, in that it is still solid after so long. And for being so solid, it is something that is rare and precious and worth protecting.

But people are not predictable, and circumstances even less so, and people move on, whether through no fault of their own or otherwise. People move on to bigger things, and I still feel that this is the way that it should be. There is nothing so presumptious and cruel as to demand that someone forsake the potential of his life just for the sake of preserving something that is in the past, for who can tell the future? The trick, as always, lies in the enjoyment of the precious shared thing while it lasts, and afterwards, having the generosity and the compassion to let it go when its time is up.

*

And indeed, there is a certain scariness in people who do devote their entire lives to pursuing something in the past, who do choose to forfeit the potentials of their lives because they think that a memory is worth it. Just finished reading Le Grand Meulnes by Alain Fournier (in translation, of course, but in a translation that does an admirable job of capturing some of the tone of French writing), a story about a boy who finds something wonderful while lost in the woods during his adolescence, and thereafter spends his life trying to find the path leading back to that magical place, or, barring that, the path leading back to the magical feeling that has become synonymous with the place.

Throughout the story, there is the tension of searching for something irretrievably lost, yearning for something completely out of reach - the sweet tragedy of a boy trying to cling to adolescence even as he feels himself growing up. The translator aptly writes in his introduction: this is not a coming-of-age story, but a refusal-to-age story. And because the yearning is for something irretrievable, and yet completely cloying due to its intense beauty (embellished, no doubt, by the fevered rememberance that is only possible in youth), it is also insatiable. We see Meulnes, the protagonist, finally rediscovering the mysterious estate that he had stumbled upon years ago, and finally marrying the girl that he had fallen in love with while there; but, finding that even the most concrete manifestations of what he remembers falls short of the captivating allure of what he remembers, perhaps also fearful that the reality would rob his memories of their wonder, he runs away, citing his dedication to a childish oath as an excuse. Here, then, is a dedication to a memory that is without compromise, an obsession concerning the purity of an idea that is willing to sacrifice even goodly approximations to preserve that purity. This is a fanatical, militant, fundamentalist devotion to the past.

And in the character of Meulnes, I realise with a start near the end of the novel, I find an echo of my old self, the self who had just come out of the incredible metamorphosis that was Frexprog, and trying to make the afterglow last as long as possible, convinced that nothing more wonderful could happen in life. And in the narrator, Meulnes' best friend, I find an echo of myself now, a self who is deeply concerned with the recording of things as they happen, convinced that the act of communicating a memory is the surest way to ensure its longevity, certain that any experience that is not shared is as intangible and ephemeral as a dream, sure that reality is fundamentally created out of consensus. As such, to make the wonder experienced due to a solitary experience real, one has to write down that experience, and share at least a sliver of that wonder, to confirm what would otherwise be a dream by sharing it.

It was a real surprise, then, that this read has turned out to be good. I had plowed through the book, not really enjoying the archaic descriptions of rural French life, nor the antiquated and seemingly childish preoccupations of the young characters, and then to my surprise discovering that actually, I could read something worthwhile out of the story. The novel had, in the end, something worthwhile to say to me.