Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (23 page)

Although some of what I was learning might someday be of use, I was not studying for that purpose, but, again, simply because I wished to know. My father had a considerable knowledge of law and was himself an interested follower of several attorneys who were friends. Their cases were often discussed at home, so all of us developed an interest in the law.

After that first lecture, I spoke as often as possible, at schools, colleges, county libraries, and the Farmer's Union, simply because I wanted to get better at it and because I knew a time would come when it would be important to me to speak well. It was another aspect of my education, and one of the most important.

Again, as with writing, one never knows enough and one is never good enough.

I was never without a book, carrying one with me wherever I went and reading at every opportunity.

Often I would eat alone in restaurants, arriving after the rush period and spending a good bit of time over coffee, reading, taking notes on books I expected to write, or thinking about what I was reading.

We are fortunate that we have so many excellent books available, on almost any subject that can be imagined, including many fine books on our own times and what to make of them.

Yet there is also a tendency of late for some of our writers to become nit-pickers, looking not for ability in men and women, but for scandal. There is no great man in history who could have withstood the sort of journalism that focuses closely on issues of gossip.

What we really want to know is, does he have the ability? Does he have the knowledge? Have his past actions given us reason to believe he can lead?

Has he had executive experience?

Unthinking people often despise politicians, but if we do not have the best people in politics, it is our own fault.

Politics is the art of making civilization work.

Many young people despise compromise, but without it, the world would come to a standstill. If I cannot have my way and you cannot have yours, perhaps there is a middle ground we can both accept. It is as simple as that, and every day of our lives we are compromising in every possible way, adjusting and adapting to what needs to be done.

If one is not well informed on what is happening in our world today, an individual can only blame him or herself, for information is available everywhere. Bias can and does slip through, so one should not listen exclusively to one television news source or read the editorials of but one newspaper.

To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.

The old civilizations in the new world continued to fascinate me. Early on, I had written several articles on the subject which were published. I had also done a short piece on Simon Bol@ivar, one of the great liberators of Latin America, as well as a piece on Henri Christophe, "The Black King of Haiti," and had visited his Citadel, where he prepared to defend his island against the French in an attack that never came.

I continued to read, working my way through most of what Hemingway had written up to that time, and finding his short stories better than his novels. I had known people like those in The Sun Also Rises and had not found them interesting, just a bunch of self-involved people who were coming from nowhere and for the most part going nowhere.

His "Fifty Grand," based loosely on the long fistic feud between Jack Britton and Ted (kid) Lewis is, I think, one of the best fight stories ever written. Jack London's "The Mexican" is another.

Hemingway obviously knew something of the series of fights that Lewis, a Jew from Whitechapel, London, had with Britton, an Irish-American. Both were welterweight champions at times, and altogether they fought each other twenty-two times, with the decision going first one way and then the other but with Britton winning most of them. The two men came to hate each other, an uncommon thing among fighters, who rarely have any more feeling about the other fighter than do opposing basketball players or golfers.

I have never worked with anyone on a story and have never wanted to, nor has anyone ever done any research for me. The research is half the fun of writing, and delving into old books and records turns up so many unexpected treasures. The creation of a story is something I have never wished to share, and I am not even sure that I could function well working with someone else, as creativity to me is such an individual matter.

Writing can be fun, and so it has been for me. Once I was established to the point that editors were asking me for stories, I found I could explore in many directions just so far as I did not forget what people wished to read. Writing The Walking Drum was pure pleasure.

With that book I had the chance to move into another era and re-create what was happening then with a sense of real participation.

The Arab boy whose comments started me thinking about the settlement of Asia was mistaken. Or perhaps he was speaking of his family and no others, but when I began researching the subject, I discovered that Arab seafaring people had been in Indonesian waters not four hundred years earlier but fully one thousand years before that day off the coast of Borneo.

We do not know when the exploration of what is now Indonesia began, but we do know that at a small village called Muara Kaman, some hundred miles inland from the coast of Borneo on the Mahakam River, several inscriptions have been found that date from A. D. 400.

We know that a Hindu culture existed there for a time, and that a lively trade developed with both India and China. The Tamils of southern India, always great mariners, traded with the Indonesian peoples as well as those of Madagascar off the coast of Africa. At a time when, so far as we know, only Phoenicians had sailed the Atlantic coasts, Tamils were already making voyages across two thousand miles of open sea.

Our Western culture is unbelievably rich, yet without a doubt one of the great civilizing factors in the Far East was the diffusion of ideas between India and China, and eventually, Japan and Korea.

I-Tsing made a pilgrimage to India and the islands to study Buddhism between A. D.

671 and 692, surviving some dangerous days at sea in small ships. At the time there were at least two kingdoms in Sumatra; the largest, Shrivijaya, eventually triumphed over the other and became something of a naval power in the area. Its capital was at Palembang, still an interesting, attractive city. At about this time or a bit later that massive monument to Mahayana Buddhism, the Barabudur, was built on an inland plateau in Java which is visited each year by many travelers.

Atisa, a monk from Tibet, studied in Shrivijaya for some time, and wrote of it. It had become over the years something of a focal point for Buddhist learning, with pilgrims coming from India and China as well as many other areas where Buddhism had taken hold. Many scholars sought instruction there.

The first positive date for China's knowledge of Bali is 977, but sometime before that one of the kings of Sumatra established an institution at Nalanda, the greatest center of Buddhist learning in India, and undoubtedly one of the greatest educational institutions in the world's history, where scholars from all Asia gathered to study.

Living as we do in the present, we do not realize that there is no present, only a shifting scene that is not two days the same, and that all we know today may be and will be gone tomorrow.

On that day in Singapore where I began this book, Singapore was a faraway, remote place, to which few people traveled and which many could not locate on a globe. Now planes fly there constantly and your next-door neighbor has probably vacationed there.

This dramatic change began, of course, with World War II. On the U. S. S.

Boise returning from France, I sat entranced listening to a farm boy from Iowa telling of his experiences in Burma and India, while another talked of New Guinea and Australia. Not too many years before, I talked little about my travels because I simply was not believed. Now, in the space of a few years, all had changed.

In that space of time an entire generation of Americans had spread over the world to a degree previously impossible. Tourist and commercial travel have followed, but unfortunately too little is known by most travelers for them to understand what they are seeing, or that they are often looking upon a vanished greatness that is now rising again.

The world with which we are now familiar will have largely disappeared within twenty years, probably fewer. Business machines are changing the face of the world, and the work force demands greater skills than ever before. When I started my knockab years, there was much a man could do who was simply strong. That is no longer true. Those young people of whatever race or nationality who loiter along streets or gather in gangs are going nowhere without education and training, but education is there for them now, as it was for me. Fortunately, I was born into a family of readers and knew where to go. These other youths now must look, must find their own way, and it is never easy. The fact remains that it can be done, now as well as then. All that is needed is the will, and the idea.

And then the long days and nights of reading, thinking, learning. One has to remember the old Chinese adage, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." One just has to keep taking that step over and over again. There is no easy way; there are no shortcuts.

Yet I have taken those steps and am still taking them.

In my research I found that secondary sources were often interesting, but I preferred whenever possible to go to the originals, such as The Periplus of the Outer Sea by Marcian of Heracles, and later the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which is a guide to sailing and the market towns of the Indian Ocean and neighboring waters--a truly excellent book and one essential for much of what I was planning. The author is unknown but he was undoubtedly a merchant mariner or venturer in the years shortly after the time of Christ.

Parthian Stations by Isidore of Charax, and the Periplus of Hanno, I also read at about this time. I had long been fascinated by ancient seafaring, which was much more extensive than is generally believed. The Chau Ju-Kua, a book on seaports and markets of the Far East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (as translated by Hirth and Rockhill, both noted scholars in their field), is another valuable source.

Ancient Geography of India by Sir Alexander Cunningham is an excellent study in a field where not too much is available, as is The History of Central Asia by Rahula Sankrityayana. These were only a few of the many studies I discovered on areas in which I was interested, but all were valuable as well as exciting, interesting reading. Gradually, as I read, the world of ancient and medieval Asia began to take shape for me. From the beginning I had been fascinated by the peoples who migrated out of Central Asia into Europe or India. Many of our own ancestral roots lie deep in those vast steppes and grasslands, which seemed to produce an unlimited supply of fierce Scythian or related warriors.

It was interesting, too, that India, many times invaded, never invaded anyone. They had all they wanted and no need to leave their country for anything. Some of those who did invade, such as Alexander the Great and Mahmud of Ghazni, were simply seeking new worlds to conquer or to advance the Faith. Other peoples who moved into India did so to escape population pressures elsewhere, such as the Sakas, who settled in Nepal--and one of whose ancestors was Buddha.

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone.

Rely upon your own energies, and so not wait for, or depend on other people.

--Professor Thomas Davidson Studies have been done on the functioning of the brain, and scientists have somewhat nervously approached the question of mind. Up to now, too little attention has been given to the mind, how it functions or can be made to function.

There has been much discussion of creativity, often considered a rare gift, although by some a condition bordering on insanity. Certain people have enjoyed searching out those artists and writers with other problems and pointing to them as illustrations.

To do this they must turn away from many quietly normal human beings who create enormously and have no more than the usual collection of human follies and foibles.

Personally, I do not believe the human mind has any limits but those we impose ourselves.

I believe that creativity and inventiveness are there for anybody willing to apply himself. I do not believe that man has even begun to realize who he is or what he can become.

So far he has been playing it by ear, following paths of least resistance, getting by--because most others were just getting by too.

I believe that man has been living and is living in a Neanderthal state of mind.

Mentally, we are still flaking rocks for scraping stones or chipping them for arrowheads. The life that lies before us will no longer permit such wastefulness or neglect. We are moving into outer space, where the problems will be infinitely greater and will demand quicker, more accurate solutions. We cannot trust our destinies to machines alone. Man must make his own decisions.

We simply must free the mind from its fetters and permit it to function without restraint. Many of us have learned to supply ourselves with the raw materials and then allow the subconscious to take over. This is what creativity is. One must condition oneself for the process and then let it proceed.