Something for everyone

I have not met Mr Mathmaluwe, but reading his collection of interesting essays he gives me the impression of being a venerable old gentleman with lots of time on his hands to write leisurely in an age which can hardly be described as being leisurely. But the variety of subjects he writes on is so wide that it should catch the attention of any reader at any one point. The variety being such that it reminds me of what Lewis Carroll prompted one of his characters to say, “The time has come” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things, of shoes and strings and sealing wax and cabbages and kings.”

I must say, however, that the book is more about kings in various fields and less about cabbages. For what is more heroic than the rescue of Sigiriya from the state it was in when it was first described by the Englishman who saw it, Major Forbes. It was in such a decline that the access to it was impossible as described by Forbes around 1833, being also the haunts of leopards: “We crept along the narrow grooves from whence portions of the building had fallen...after clambering up the loose bricks which formed the termination, succeeded in entering the gallery, and proceeded along it for about hundred yards...I felt so giddy from the heat as to be unable to accompany my friends; and I was sincerely glad to see them descend in safety, for some portions of the crumbling building which they displaced might be heard crashing among the boughs of the trees at a great depth below.”

That has been stopped by one of the ‘kings,’ as I call them - H.C. P. Bell. Any other man would have despaired of ever going to the top of the rock - the heat, the scarcity of drinking water, the difficulty of getting labour and the absence of steps leading to the giant lion’s paws. He was lucky to find a local blacksmith, Salamanhamy (an honourable mention of his name is in Bell’s report), who showed his superhuman skill in building a strong iron bridge gaining access to the lion’s paws. This essay is useful in particular to those who are unaware of the many difficulties that visitors faced. The work Bell did paved the way for making Sigiriya today along with the restoration work done by the Cultural Triangle, a gem of a beauty.

From Sigiriya he shifts his vision to America. This is not to say that there is a confusion of interests. He is pretty orderly in the arrangement of his essays. They are put into different sections like Art and Literature, Religion, History and Archaeology, Personalities, Rural Scene and the Village and so on, so that you may satisfy your interests first and then go on to investigate the others. I chose to read about Robert Frost, another king, a king of poets, after reading about Bell. My own acquaintance with Frost has been a brief encounter, but that alone was sufficient to endorse what Mr Mathmaluwe says about Frost’s outstanding qualities as a poet.

Frost is so different from the poets who came before him in the States. He is more European or rather universal in his poetic vision. As this essayist points out, ‘He speaks for all humanity and for all time. It bears a more enduring significance and there is every possibility that his voice will be heard again and again for a long time.” He also points out that Frost seems to have understood his role in poetry. “Frost himself knew this and was speaking of this when, in that six-line poem ‘Questioning Faces’ appearing in his last collection he writes of the owl who has,

‘Caught colour from the last evening red
In a display of under-down and quill’

His observations on the rural scene and progress in this country are close to my heart. Where is progress leading us to? He asks, and points out to what even some of our Western thinkers like Rousseau and the more recent Fukuyama and Arnold Toynbee have been thinking and talking on. This essayist is speaking of his own experience, that of a man who has lived all his life in a village in Matale. To all those who are in the Gama Neguma programme what he says is very important if they are working towards the well-being and happiness of the gama and the goviya.

This is the village he lives in as told by him. “The Sinhala village was the last bastion of tradition and for a surprisingly longer time than its counterpart in the low country, it remained impervious to foreign influences that came from the West; but then how much longer could it have continued that unequal battle? The flood gates opened when the Radio and TV infiltrated this sacred grove: from time immemorial they had their traditional folk arts and modes of entertainment, their folk songs, ‘Kavis’ and folk drama: participating in these activities not only provided them with entertainment, but also they promoted friendship, close co-operation and close community life that was the very life breath of the village. At these periodic spectacles, their gods were worshipped and demons placated... This writer knew such a village which in fact could be taken as typical of those remote Kandyan villages. It was truly a Shangrila.”

There are very many informative essays of such a wide range that the book is in a way a kind of small encylopaedia for our times. The heroic struggle that Walisingha Harischandra made against our colonial rulers in trying to save Anuradhapura, our sacred city from falling into a market place, is scarcely remembered today. These are the struggles our Marxists should have commemorated had they but the word patriotism in their political vocabulary.

In his leisurely moments this essayist may have strayed into writing essays on subjects like ‘Incest - a Royal prerogative? to discuss whether it was a Royal prerogative or not and wondered whether there are supernormal persons who decided our destinies. And did at the same time sit back to enjoy a popular song, ‘oba apple malak waagey lassanai’ and go into raptures. I know many people respond to the music of this song just as I did. But the imagery, I must say, stumped me. Where have I seen an apple flower I asked myself and how does it look if there is one going around. These thoughts disturbed my enjoyment of the melody as the lyrics were not in place for me.

The song is not less beautiful though for that but slightly jarring because I cannot visualise an apple flower, never having seen one. Have I raised an aesthetic problem?

As for the title of this book, which associates Buddha’s thought with the meditations of Aurelius’ stoical thinking, it is being said that stoicism originated in India. This is not the place to go into it at any length. That nearly every thing that made Europe inventive or philosophical originated in India, is discussed in a book that was out recently with the title Zero Is Not The Only Story, authored by an Indian doctor, Priyadarshi.