The Singapore Writer’s Festival in November 2014 was an interesting experience because one of my favourite travel writers, Paul Theroux was featured in a few of the programs. Here, at the National Museum, the panel forum was (nominally) on Humanitarian Missions and the Third World, and I was reintroduced to the work of Charles Dickens by Mr Theroux, who cited Dicken’s term ‘telescopic philanthropy’, a chapter title, in Bleak House (1852). Here Mrs Jellyby, lived a charmed existence of being totally absorbed in helping the poor in Africa, while (seemingly) oblivious to the squalor, desperation, and neglect of her own home, children, and Mr Jellyby, in Victorian London.
Elsewhere, Theroux shared about his writing and travels at SOTA (‘The Roads I Travelled”). Of interest was a retrospect on his experiences in Singapore as a young English lecturer at the then University of Singapore in 1968. Certainly we are familiar with the notoriety of Saint Jack (which by the way had a sell-out movie screening at the SWF). He described his own unformed individuation process back then (after Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development); being deeply influenced by the rebellious culture that was constantly questioning authority that was the 1968 of America; and coming to a realization of his writing style by the early 1970s (“to describe things as they were – and not as one would wish they were”). He also spoke about the refreshing experience of traveling in your own country as though you were a foreigner, and his forthcoming book about traveling in the American South – how similar the conditions in Arkansas or Alabama were compared to for example Zambia; how similar poor USA was to the third world countries, and what a humbling experience travel there was (think of The Clinton Initiative and telescopic philanthropy). It was not unusual for airports to be named after Presidents – but in Little Rock Arkansas, the airport was named in honour of both Bill and Hillary Clinton – what did that say about the Clinton presidency, he asked?
In many ways, Theroux came full circle when he shared that Singapore was perhaps the single city that he has travelled, that never failed to amaze him each time he returned as to what will happen next. And it was a city that he thought now remembers its past for what it was and not what it could have been. The stifling city of his nascent career had become the modern day Chameleon with a Memory. Has Saint Jack retired permanently?