Over the top

Richard Boyle wonders if Southasia led the way in movie projects concerning alien AI rather than human AI.

On August 22, 2010, BBC News online featured an item headed ‘Alien hunters should “look for artificial intelligence”’. The reporter, Jason Palmer, states: ‘Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has until now sought radio signals from worlds like Earth.

‘But Seti astronomer Seth Shostak argues that the time between aliens developing radio and artificial intelligence (AI) would be short.

‘Writing in Acta Astronautica, he says the odds favour detecting such alien AI rather than “biological” life.

‘However, Seti searchers have mostly worked under the assumption that ETs would be “alive” in the sense that we know.

‘”If you look at the timescales for the development of technology, at some point you invent radio and then you go on the air and then we have a chance of finding you,”’ he told BBC News. (more…)

By Richard Boyle

One morning in February 1964, an employee of the General Post Office in Colombo arrived at work not knowing that this was to be an extraordinary day. In fact, he was forever to remain blissfully unaware of the essential difference of that day, as well as his role in the scheme of things. His job, in an era of primitive communications, was to deliver overseas cables by hand, and on that particular, fateful day, he was destined to deliver one to a house down Gregory’s Road in Colombo 7. (more…)

Marlon Brando, unlike other Hollywood heavyweights such as Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck, Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, never made a movie in Southasia. What a shame that Sri Lanka, for instance, wasn’t chosen as the location of Apocalypse Now instead of the Philippines! (more…)

Richard Boyle on travel, travellers, tourists, and everything in between.

One of my favourite travel writers, who happens to belong to the Indian diaspora, is Oxford-born Pico Iyer, the son of Brahmin Raghavan N Iyer, a philosopher and theosophist, and the religious scholar Nandini Nanak Meht. I have met Pico twice – in 2006, when he came to Sri Lanka to write a feature on the country’s political situation for Time magazine, and in 2008, when we both participated at the Galle Literary Festival.

Pico has written a number of travel books, many of them concerning Southasia, including The Lady and the Monk (1992), Falling Off the Map (1994), Cuba and the Night Quartet (1995), Tropical Classical (1998), Global Soul (2000) – ‘an astonishing and amusing view of the globalisation of East and West, as the author beholds how cultures fuse without completely losing their identities’ – Video Night in Kathmandu (2001) – ‘on the often bizarre effects of Western influences on the Far East’ – Sushi in Bombay, Jetlag in LA (2002), and The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (2008).

Of all his writings, what captured my attention most was a perceptive quotation from his Foreword to Wanderlust (2000), a collection of travel writings: ‘We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.’

Another quotation that caught my eye was a comment on the difference between tourist and traveller: ‘Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveller”, perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t. Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home”, while a traveller is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo” – or Cuzco or Kathmandu. It’s all very much the same.’

These quotations inspired me to search for other quotable views on travel down the centuries. For instance, an early commentator on the subject was philosopher Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC, whose ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step’ has become a classic, and has even resulted in a modern rendering – ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance’ – by an unknown wit. Lao Tzu was also responsible for other pithy quotes such as ‘The further one goes the less one knows’ and ‘A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving’.

The Roman poet Horace, writing in the last century BC, had doubts about the value of tourism: ‘They change their clime, not their frame of mind, who rush across the sea.’ On the other hand, St Augustine of Hippo opined four centuries later: ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.’

Moving forward to the 17th century, Francis Bacon in his Essays explains the difference between young and old travellers: ‘Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.’

The latter part of the 18th century was called the Age of Johnson, so it is not surprising that Samuel Johnson was responsible for several memorable travel quotes as reported by his biographer, James Boswell, in his Life of Johnson. One concerns the need for the traveller to be mentally well-prepared: ‘So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge’, and, ‘A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.’ However, my favourite Johnson quote – and the world’s it seems – is ‘Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see,’ which was written about the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

The 19th century was fertile. ‘It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar,’ declared Henry David Thoreau in 1854, not realising that 150 years later, that’s exactly what some people would find worthwhile. Francis Kilvert, Welsh vicar and diarist, derided his countrymen (and some countrywomen too I suppose) when he wrote in 1870: ‘Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists, the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’

Robert Louis Stevenson confessed in Travels with a Donkey (1879): ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ However, Stevenson’s best-known quote is ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is labour’ from Virginibus Puerisque (1881).

The 20th century began to produce references with meaning for the contemporary traveller. For example, Noel Coward’s ‘But why, oh why, do the wrong people travel, when the right people stay at home?’ is a sentiment well understood today.

Since the 1960s, there has existed a belief that personal growth should ideally be gained in travel, but as George Moore comments in The Brook Kerith (1916), ‘A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it’.

‘Travel broadens the mind’ is a proverb dating from the early 20th century. GK Chesterton’s 1921 comment on it is a significant travel quote, too: ‘They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind.’

Katherine Mansfield revealed her need for ultimate planning when she wrote in her diary in 1922: ‘Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.’

Antoine de St Exupery’s ‘He who would travel happily must travel light’ rubs shoulders well with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Let your memory be your travel bag’. Henry Miller’s ‘One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things’ harmonises with Marin Buber’s ‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’.

My penultimate reference, by Nancy Mitford from The Pursuit of Love (1945), is prejudiced and chauvinistic, so it must stand on its own: ‘Abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’

Which leaves me to reveal what I think is the most succinct travel reference of all time: ‘No matter where you go, there you are.’ Despite its currency, the origins of the phrase are uncertain. Possibly it was resurrected in modern times from Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (c.1440): ‘So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself. Wherever you go, there you are.’ Perhaps it was engendered by the spirit of the Sixties. Carl Franz’s People’s Guide to Mexico (1972) contains the phrase, for instance.

— Richard Boyle is a contributing editor for Himal Southasian.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to research some of the remarkable Western – mostly British – characters that have resided in and impacted on Sri Lanka in some manner, and then broadcast their knowledge of the enigmatic island to the outside world. I am regularly amazed at the way Occidental biographers often ignore or marginalize such characters when they happen to interact with their biographical subjects. Sri Lanka is, it seems, far removed from the Home Counties and West Country milieu of successful biographers.

The major disregarded character is Robert Knox. Sixteen-eighty-one saw the publication of the first book about Ceylon in the English language – in some ways it’s still the best. Titled An Historical Relation of Ceylon, it was written by Knox with the help of Dr Robert Hooke, then Secretary to the Royal Society, and had a commendation by Sir Christopher Wren.

Knox had been confined to the mountainous and autonomous Kandyan Kingdom in Dutch-held Ceylon from 1660 to 1680. The book was widely read and discussed in London’s coffee houses (where Knox spent much time with Hooke). It’s simply the finest jewel in Sri Lanka’s two centuries of English literature. Moreover, Knox has long thought to have been the primary source for the character of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

It is hypothesised by Donald Ferguson in Captain Robert Knox (1896-97), and James Ryan, editor, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1911), that Knox and Defoe at least met each other. John Masefield in A Mainsail Haul (1913) and Arthur Secord in “Studies in the Narrative Method of Defoe”, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, (1924), go further and assert they were acquaintances.

What is certain is that Defoe possessed a copy of Knox’s book. Its ownership may have proved useful, for Secord comments: “So similar in tone are the two works that many passages could be transferred bodily from one to the other without noticeable effect upon them.”

That Defoe seems indebted in part to Knox for the resourceful character of Crusoe is commented on by Secord, EFC Ludowyk in “Robert Knox and Robinson Crusoe”, University of Ceylon Review (1952), and SD Saparamadu, editor, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1958). Saparamadu notes: “If you peer into the features of Crusoe you will see something of the man who was not the lonely inhabitant of a desert island, but who has lived in an alien land among strangers, supported by the strength of his resolution to resist acceptance of his fate.”

Yet authors of the slew of Defoe biographies mostly disregard Knox, and in an instance when he is mentioned, astonishingly maligned: Paula R Backscheider in Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989) dismisses Knox as an “inferior writer”. Even a specific book on the subject, Tim Severin’s Seeking Robinson Crusoe (2002), ignores Knox. Severin believes the source was a surgeon, Henry Pitman, who wrote a short book, A Relation of the Great Suffering and the Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman, (1689) about his escape from a Caribbean penal colony and being shipwrecked and marooned on an uninhabited island off Venezuela.

Another possible source is examined by Diana Souhami – who like Severin overlooks Knox – in Selkirk’s Island (2001). Alexander Selkirk was the Sailing Master of the Cinque Ports, sent to plunder Spanish ships along the coast of South America in 1703. Selkirk had a difference of opinion with his captain and was put ashore on an uninhabited island off Chile, where, due to his lack of initiative, he barely survived before being rescued by Captain Woodes Rogers. Selkirk’s account was published by Rogers’ in his Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712).

The circumstances are similar enough to Crusoe’s and Defoe may have been influenced by them but moulded his hero’s character on Knox, the more adept survivor. Assuming this was the case Masefield laments: “It is sad that the comparatively colourless Selkirk should have robbed him (Knox) of much credit properly his.”

An example of related research is Linda Colley’s Captives (2002) that covers a assortment of prisoners in various parts of the British Empire from 1600 to 1850. It’s amazing that Colley, like Souhami, fails to mention Knox though she covers Defoe and Crusoe in her opening chapter.

An astonished American-born but England-based biographer remarked to me: “Is Knox really so forgotten?” Mysteriously, he is. Yet Ernest A Baker concludes in The History of the English Novel (1929): “Knox might well have been the author of the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe.”

The success of Robinson Crusoe encouraged Defoe to write The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720). In this instance Knox’s contribution is unquestionable, which reinforces the theory that Knox is likely to have been a source for Defoe. Captain Singleton includes an incident in which the eponymous hero’s pirate ship goes aground off the south-eastern coast of Ceylon. Military forces arrive to entrap the pirates but don’t succeed, partly because a similar situation faced by an earlier English sailor, as remembered by the ship’s surgeon, provides a forewarning.

The surgeon recalls the Englishman’s name “was Knox, Commander of an East India ship, who was driven on Shore, just as we were, upon the Island of Ceylon: That he was beguiled by the Barbarians, and inticed to come on Shore, just as we were invited to do at that time . . .”

The answer as to whether Defoe did borrow Knox’s character for Crusoe will become clearer in 2011, for the astonished biographer mentioned earlier, Katherine Frank – A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley (1986), A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë (1990), Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt (1994), and the contentious Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (2002) – has been stirred into writing the first complete biography of Knox.

Richard Boyle is the author of Knox’s Words: A study of the words of Sri Lankan origin or association first used in English literature by Robert Knox and recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (2004). Robert Knox also makes an appearance in Richard Boyle’s  ‘Dagger-clawed little people’ on the search of an early hominid on the island of Ceylon in Himal’s March issue.