A Thousand Ships, A Thousand Stars

I remember I was still a small boy when I found myself a copy of Marlowe's Faustus in the corner of my literary aunt's house. It was a tattered old Penguin book, with a simple brown cover. The worms had been at it.

And then I found these lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

(Skipped some soppy stuff here)

O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter...

For a small boy brought up on classical myths and astronomy, the imagery was astounding. I could not imagine what kind of beauty the woman possessed, but I could imagine it was something I could not quite imagine, an intensity equivalent to that of a supernova, a nebula, a galaxy of stars.

As the years went by, I met many women, even some Greek ones. I found myself wondering whether these were faces that could launch a thousand ships or not. Of course, I was not the first in this endeavour; I wonder who it was who first considered the implications of the verse and deduced that if a Helen could launch a thousand ships, a millihelen was sufficient to launch one.

But then I did high school math, physics and chemistry. It became clear to me that Marlowe was describing an energy-related phenomenon; Helen's beauty was related to the impulse sufficient to launch a thousand ships, the energy transfer rate sufficient to consume the towers of Troy, the luminous intensity of a thousand stars and a brightness greater than that of Jupiter.

And in my final pre-university year, it finally clicked. Wow, I said to myself, she must have been one HOT chick! :D

Things Not Done

There is something to be feared about old memories; there is something even more fearsome about the memories of things not done. If you had the gift (by no means only a French talent) of writing reams of narrative about lost time, you would still not be able to capture the essence of that fear.

The distinction between a) gaining that which was done (or obtaining that which was gained) by someone else, and b) gaining that which was never done (or finding out what never happened), is thus the difference between the Faustian bargain and the Proustian bargain. The former finds you with plenty of time and mighty things done but all wasted, and results in brief but poignant narratives; the latter finds you wondering what could have been done and thinking that everything is art, and results in long and seemingly pointless narratives.

[If you're wondering what on earth I'm writing about, take some time to browse this site, which is dedicated to Marcel Proust's amazing(ly long) book, À la recherche du temps perdu, conveniently translated as 'In Search of Lost Time' or mistranslated as 'Remembrance of Things Past'. I've heard someone say it actually means 'Research is a Waste of Time', but that's a bad mistranslation, I think.]

In the end, it's all about the idea of perdition. Our physical memories are such that if we are the sum of our memories, we are the equivalent of modern Singaporean urban landscape: torn down and reconstructed ceaselessly and interminably. After a while, the narrative we think we are about is actually a story invented to keep us sane and simple-minded. In Singapore, it is far easier to say that history began with the ending of chaos in 1965 and is all about the establishment of order and discipline and continuous progress from 1965 onwards, than to say that the whole story begins in the long lost depths of time with Atlantis (or Temasek) and has no discernible increase in structural integrity as it unfolds.

This is exactly the reason why you can produce something like a thousand pages of Five-Year Plans in (for example) an independent school, make of it a Twenty-Year Narrative, and yet realise (if you actually get through all those pages) that none of those Five-Year Plans was ever completed; we always rolled over some parts, left some parts undone, invented parts that never happened, created parts to fit the empty spaces, and forged a narrative of unending and progressive excellence. We are reluctant to look at the evidence with a cold, hard, fish-eyed stare and say, "It did not quite happen this way." We prefer to take the Proustian bargain and say, "Some day we will write a big book about how clever we were to make it happen the way we say it did."

In some sense, the Faustian bargain seems preferable: at least the things of the narrative actually happened. What you wished for, you got – even though you did sell your soul to get them. Your final writings, in the form of the Twenty-Year Narrative, would be an account of things done, not things imaginarily done or speculated upon or done in a sense other than done.

Frequently, we attempt to do both. I suspect both bargains lead to perdition, and even if these seem like two different kinds of perdition, the outcome is the same. Perhaps research is not so much a waste of time at all, if we can light the way for future generations not to succumb. Then again, as the Preacher said, "Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."

It also leaves many things which are more important undone.