THE ENDLESS BEGINNING

 

During World War II my grandfather had been stationed as an officer in the then British colony of Ceylon. It would have made a great impression on him for he spoke about it for fifteen years when I was growing up. Great stories of holy mountains, rock fortresses, and ancient kingdoms with the most advanced irrigation systems in the world. For many years I thought he was making most of it up, but it intrigued me. So one day I finally decided to visit the Island to find out if he was telling the truth.

The Airport is about 30 Kilometers from the capital Colombo. Colombo borders the sea and its port is one of the busiest in Asia. In the lower central part of the country, there is a mountainous area where tea is grown so abundantly that it looks more like a picturesque painting than an actual mountain. There really is a holy mountain here called Sri Pada which is said to be the holiest mountain in the world. And the Sigiriya Rock fortress built in the 5th century is one of the marvels of the ancient world. And the great Tank Civilization of ancient Sri Lanka is still being used today to irrigate. I was amazed to find out everything my Grandfather said was true, this really is a great Island.

But the most interesting aspect of this island is the people. Although I do not have a degree in psychology I have a strange habit of analyzing the people in every country I go to, so I would do the same here. Sri Lankans in general are very friendly and very intelligent, but for an intelligent people they do not think deeply about some things that trouble at least a small minority in some other counties, like for example: how was the universe created? Are there things smaller than atoms? Are we related to monkeys? This kind of thinking is absent even among highly educated scientists who are qualified to answer these questions. But even here there is an extremely small minority of people who think of such things, but unfortunately, they are so rare that you could spend an entire lifetime without meeting one.

But I did meet such a person on the island and he was the clerk in the hotel. “Aren’t you Carl Saban the famous American astronomer, and the world authority on supernovas?” said he. “Yes,” said I a little surprised that someone here knew me. “I’ve been reading the articles you write, they are interesting and I have used your observations to verify my theories, theories that I think solve all the problems of the universe, including how it was created, and I have written it down in this book, it would only take a few minutes to read, can you tell me whether it is correct,” said he. He took out of his pocket a much-crumbled book that looked like it had been slept on. For a moment I could not decide whether he was just joking or completely mad, but he thrust the book at me so fervently that I reluctantly took it.

I present below just the first two pages of his book, exactly as he wrote it without any modification by me:

Everything is made up of atoms, but atoms themselves are made up of even smaller particles. Even though our senses fool us we and everything around us are energy fields. The movement of these tiny energy particles moves electrons, atoms, aero-planes, stars, galaxies and everything else in the universe. These tiny particles and their ability to move are the only reality in the universe and other things such as Time or Space are not real and are how the mind perceives the movement of these particles.

According to this theory, there is nothing called space, three-dimensional or otherwise, for when these particles move, as they always do it creates this illusion in our senses. There is nothing to fill, for there is nothing else. Similarly, there is no dimension called Time, this is what the mind perceives when these particles move, but it isn't real, for there isn't anything separate called Time. If there is nothing called Time then the universe could not have been created at a particular point in time in the past, this solves the mystery of creation. These particles would have always been and will always be.

So how does this explain Singularity, or what is popularly known as the Big Bang? If matter were to lose its ability to move, it would converge to a point infinitely small, but soon the deep tendency to move would lead it to expand outward, which would eventually form Stars, planets, Galaxies and everything else that is in the Universe. How does this explain Gravitation? It has been found that when a sub-atomic particle was moved another particle that was seven miles away moved in exactly the same way, and it has been estimated that however far these particles are separated they would move exactly in the same way. This is strange for nothing moves faster than the speed of Light. This twin movement could be used to explain Gravitation, for if a particle were to move, its twin particle would move towards it.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The rest of the book contains calculations to prove this theory, which I can’t fully understand, but which seem profound all the same. Can somebody tell me by reading this book whether this young man in Sri Lanka is, in fact a great scientist or a little wrong in the head?

Travel Story

 

So I will now tell the story of how I got the idea to travel around the island. Once I lived in a place called Peliyagoda, which is a suburb of the capital Colombo. The trouble with Peliyagoda was this – despite being the closest suburb of Colombo, it was not very developed. Many other suburbs like Wattala or Kiribathgoda had much better buildings and facilities. The biggest landmark there seemed to be the police station, which I think says a lot. And before the police station, its most famous landmark was an enormous rubbish dumb that could be seen from miles away, which I think says even more.

However, it was an exciting place for me because the great Kelani River flowed through it, and I wanted to paint it. I am only an amateur artist, but I have a great passion for painting and drawing. But unlike most artists who draw rivers, I wanted to draw it at night. And so, many years ago, I did one of the weirdest things I have ever done; I decided to stay in the garden at night and paint till morning. The night was infinitely dark and strange; it seemed that everyone had gone to bed and switched off all the lights. The road was deserted except for a lone cow which seemed half asleep. A blue-green firefly, very rare for this part of Sri Lanka, flew and disappeared behind a leaf. Flowers that bloom at night are usually white, and most have a fragrance.

In the foreground, I could see the great river flowing. It moved slowly in the night like destiny itself. It was silent, mysterious, and fatal. Above the river shone many strange stars. There was a particularly bright reddish star that didn't twinkle. Could it be Mars, the one they called the red planet? Unfortunately, I could not be certain. Then there was another bright star which, for some reason, I felt was Venus. Unfortunately, my knowledge of astronomy, like so much else, was incomplete. All these thoughts made me so tired that I sat down in the garden and couldn't remember anything after that except the ground felt hard on my head, an annoying cricket made an annoying noise, the smell of grass and marigold flowers and once I imagined that the cow was in the garden. The hoot of an alarm made me jump, and for a moment, I was horrified to find that I was not in bed but outside at night. I went to the gate to see what made that noise but could not locate it. Then I looked up, God how things had changed. Now it was around two in the morning, and the stars were brighter than ever. I couldn't see the Great Bear, the only constellation I knew apart from Orion, but I could see a group of prominent stars that curled down and formed what looked exactly like a tail. I wondered whether this was the Scorpio Constellation, and I still do. I looked down again, and the river was still flowing endlessly, and at that moment, I felt a great energy come over me, and I decided to explore my country even if it was the last thing I did.

Marooned in a Lonely Island

 

Marooned in a Lonely Island
Seeking a Friendly Ship,
Waters of Silver Ripples,
And Beaches of Branchless Trees.

A Sun that Burns the Skin
Clouds that Embrace,
Parrots that Speak Bloody French,
God ! Am I going Insane

Is that a Damn ship out there
Will it hit the Damn Reef
Will my Dum Dog greet me
Dammit, it’s the bloody Spanish

But behind this Coconut Jungle
And Creepers of Blue Lilies
And Past that thorny hell bush
Is a Jungle of Great Trees

Trees of Giant Timber
A Jungle of Tamarinds
With a Saw from the old Wreck
Could I Build a Two Mast Ship

RJX

Far far from the shore

Wrote this poem, here the word Dawn could mean a person's name or could mean new light or a new beginning, greed could mean the ships name or greediness for material wealth

Far far from the shore

In a place I don’t want to go

Lies a sunken ship

The ship they called greed

We once sailed to an Isle

Far beyond the Nile

On a ship that made

Thoughts that were vile

In this Isle

We stopped for a while

They sailed on

For I had seen Dawn

In greed they went

They were my friends

Their mighty needs

They could never reach

Their stars faded

The seas abated

They lost their way

For their souls I pray

I found me

In the Island of peace

This is all I need

They call it Serendip

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Sinclair Lewis was an American author. In 1930 Lewis was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. He had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for "Arrowsmith", but declined it because he believed the standard for Pulitzer novel awards was too restrictive. 

Lewis' novels often satirize stupidity, mediocrity, commercialism or bigotry in some phase of American life. "Main Street" (1920), his fourth novel but his first success, is about the intellectual and cultural poverty in a small midwestern town. The principle character in "Babbitt" (1922) is a businessman who is a typical "go-getter." The preacher in "Elmer Gantry" (1927) is more interested in building a successful career than in saving souls. Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of a country doctor. While at Yale University he edited the college literary magazine. He interrupted his studies to work as a janitor in Upton Sinclair's socialist colony in Englewood, New Jersey. Later Lewis made a trip to Panama to look for work on the canal then being dug. In 1907 he returned to Yale to be graduated with a A.B. degree. 

Lewis worked in a newspaper in Waterloo, Iowa, for a time. He spent six months in Carmel, California, with William Rose Bennet, trying free-lance writing but with little success. In 1910 he again went East. In Washington, he was editor of a magazine for teachers of the deaf, and in New York he became editor of a publishing house. He was married to Grace Hegger in 1914. While commuting to and from his Long Island home, Lewis wrote the greater part of "Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) and "The Trail of the Hawk (1915). Neither novel was successful, but in the meantime, Lewis was selling short stories to magazines. In 1916 he quit the publishing house to devote full time to writing. 

In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in the United States to receive the award. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us - not readers alone, but even writers  - are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of faults as well as virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today. He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

Lewis died in Rome from advanced alcoholism on January 10, 1951, aged 65. William Shirer, a friend and admirer of Lewis, disputes accounts that Lewis died of alcoholism. He reported that Lewis had a heart attack and that his doctors advised him to stop drinking if he wanted to live. Lewis did not stop, and perhaps could not; he died when his heart stopped.

In summarizing Lewis's career, Shirer concludes:

It has become rather commonplace for so-called literary critics to write off Sinclair Lewis as a novelist. Compared to...Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner...Lewis lacked style. Yet his impact on modern American life...was greater than all the other four writers together.

AN ASTRONAUT RETURNS: 2310

 

As I walked along a lonely beach

Heard the echo of a jungle tree

Or was it a parrot that tried to scream

Or the unknown shadows of a long dead beach

Was there a jungle left of me

Or just dead tree trunks that tried to flee

The Sun is duller than it used to be

When and where can I now be

Is this the Earth I left behind

Or some dying planet of an unknown kind

Is that dying star really the Sun

What hath man or god now done?

RJX

But then January first was here

On the dark days of September

And other days in November

I still thought of better days soon

That will come to me in June

But when old December came

I thought I’ll go insane

For dark dreary days

Had come for me to stay

But then January first was here

I lost all fear

For I just decided to be happy

Every day of every month

RJX