A failed courtship
IT was love at first sight. The moment I spotted it at Amazon.com, I wanted it. The title was intriguing and the premise seemed groundbreaking to me: using geography to explain upcoming conflicts. And when it arrived ... it had me at hello. Its first sentence pealed in my ears, electrifying and wooing: “A good place to understand the present, and to ask question about the future, is on the ground, travelling as slowly as possible.” I knew at once I was talking to someone intellectually stimulating.
The conversation went on for a few more pages and though we were still at the ice-breaking preface, already I was smitten. First, we went to the mountainous Kurdish regions in Iraq. Then, without warning, we shifted to the Carpathian Mountains in Central Europe. I began to feel dizzy, though, moving so quickly. The Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea all came into view – yet it had only been three minutes since we met.
A book like this would not be short of suitors, so it should not be in a hurry to impress. But hurry it did, so I decided to show it the door 10 minutes into our second conversation. “I’ll call again for another visit,” I said meekly, my hand slowly but firmly closing the cover. Out it went from my nook and onto my bookshelf. I promised myself that I would call. But I didn’t, not for a while.
A few other more interesting books later, while spring turned into summer followed by autumn and now winter, I called on it again. It had grown older. It had sat on a shelf where the morning sun shines the longest, so it was a little grey. Still, its exquisite prose still chimed loudly in the first sentence. Thereafter, though, the excessive stammering (due to the abusive use of commas) made it overtly flippant. The ice-breaking preface was more bearable now that, as I recalled, this, to my amazement, in fact, was my third trial. (Oh no! Its disease is catching!)
Pretending to listen as it talked with zeal about Bosnia and Baghdad, I wished it had not introduced another subject of which I am enamoured: History. “It was not altogether an accident, or completely the work of evil individuals, that violence broke out in the ethnic melange of Yugoslavia rather than, say, in the unethnic Central European states of Hungary and Poland,” it crooned. “History and geography also had something to do it.”
Oh great! I read on for a few more days, amazed by my own perseverance and my belief that my partner comes from a learned authorship. There had to be gold somewhere if it had been raised by such a promi- nent author (no, I will not say who it is). It did tell me casually (in its contents page) that there would be more to our conversation, but I was terribly bored already by the host of thinkers it had already brought out to impress me.
“Excuse me,” I said softly, quickly glancing over its contents page again. China, India, America and Europe were waiting up its sleeve, but it would take another 133 pages to get to these superpowers, which I was more interested in than historic thinkers and philosophers.
That upon which our lives and security hinge are the true loves of my heart, the places into which I want to delve. I exhorted and cajoled the book to get there ... but when we did, I was appalled.
It was then that I realised that geography is tangential in explaining conflicts. While it is true that geography matters, the world has entered into a stage of virtual civilisation today. With information technology so prevalent, mountains can be scaled, seas can be tamed (or completely disregarded) and distance is no longer an issue. History as well as geography, relevant though they may seem, have been rendered dated in any future forecasts.
At that realisation, I showed my partner, whom I had now courted for a week, the door again. But this time, instead of going back to my bookshelf, I guided it to a pedestal next to my bed where it will remain as a reminder of a failed courtship.
Abby Wong has failed this time, but that does not render the book incomprehensible or irrelevant (hence her desire to keep the title a secret lest she influence a potential reader). And she is wiser about judging a book by its title.