There was that Time article ("Singapore's New Look" 24th May) that ruby sent out.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1624897-1,00.html
I was reading it closely again today, thinking maybe I could make copies for my sec 4 class (am teaching globalisation), and the one line pounding in my head was 'Singapore you are not my country' (courtesy of Alfian). They say you are 'a world-class playground for the wealthy'. World-class playground indeed. I've always thought that there's something tragically frivolous about the moneyed masses who flit around buying up prime seafront estate drinking expensive wine driving flashy cars in search of The Good Life. It's like the great gatsby or something. I don't know, maybe there is another breed wholly unlike myself out there which does succeed in buying the good life. Maybe I just haven't owned a Lamborghini, tis all.
But of course I would say you can't buy goodness or happiness. Some days I wished I could, because in some ways it's so much easier. But most days I feel like even if I had all these things - your fancy house and yacht by the marina whatever - I already know exactly how I would feel - in Anne Lamont's words, like "a greyhound finally catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing all her life -- metal, wrapped up in cloth." (And then I'd probably stab myself in the throat for having wasted all that time I can't redeem.)
There is no place that's going to be some magical reincarnation in grass and sunlight of your worldly success and affluence, fashioned in the image of what your brainwashed mind tells you is goodness and happiness. I'm reminded of this quote.. 'We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.' (Livingstone, I think) So if you spent your whole life running after a mechanical rabbit that is fake and has no spirit, and does nothing for your spirit and leaves you entirely hollow.. then, well, there is absolutely nowhere you can run to hide from that (not even Sentosa Cove).
It's like what Larkin writes - 'In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love'. That's what we ultimately want, I think - a sense of life lived according to love. It's not the clearest definition, but I think it strikes something deep inside all of us, and we instinctively know what it means. And that it has nothing to do with how fat our wallets are, at all.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1624897-1,00.html
I was reading it closely again today, thinking maybe I could make copies for my sec 4 class (am teaching globalisation), and the one line pounding in my head was 'Singapore you are not my country' (courtesy of Alfian). They say you are 'a world-class playground for the wealthy'. World-class playground indeed. I've always thought that there's something tragically frivolous about the moneyed masses who flit around buying up prime seafront estate drinking expensive wine driving flashy cars in search of The Good Life. It's like the great gatsby or something. I don't know, maybe there is another breed wholly unlike myself out there which does succeed in buying the good life. Maybe I just haven't owned a Lamborghini, tis all.
But of course I would say you can't buy goodness or happiness. Some days I wished I could, because in some ways it's so much easier. But most days I feel like even if I had all these things - your fancy house and yacht by the marina whatever - I already know exactly how I would feel - in Anne Lamont's words, like "a greyhound finally catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing all her life -- metal, wrapped up in cloth." (And then I'd probably stab myself in the throat for having wasted all that time I can't redeem.)
There is no place that's going to be some magical reincarnation in grass and sunlight of your worldly success and affluence, fashioned in the image of what your brainwashed mind tells you is goodness and happiness. I'm reminded of this quote.. 'We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.' (Livingstone, I think) So if you spent your whole life running after a mechanical rabbit that is fake and has no spirit, and does nothing for your spirit and leaves you entirely hollow.. then, well, there is absolutely nowhere you can run to hide from that (not even Sentosa Cove).
It's like what Larkin writes - 'In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love'. That's what we ultimately want, I think - a sense of life lived according to love. It's not the clearest definition, but I think it strikes something deep inside all of us, and we instinctively know what it means. And that it has nothing to do with how fat our wallets are, at all.
posted by leah | 11:11 PM
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