Prologue
On Inle Lake…
The long boat was narrow, and it moved fast.
There was a large single-cylinder diesel engine at the back, and a man I had not yet met was steering it. On a seat in front of me sat a charming Swiss gentleman, Boris Granges, whom I had known for only a matter of weeks. The wind was tossing his hair about as we sped across the water. We were up in the Shan hills of Myanmar, heading out to a shallow section of the lake my new friend had made his own.
I had been coming to this country for many years by then — a fortnight in most months, for the vineyards up on the slopes. It was the first time I had ever been out to The Sobhana Project, which sits somewhere between the floating villages of Nwadama and Myani Gone.
There was no mobile signal. There was no laptop. Nobody expected to hear from me for as long as the crossing took, and there was nothing I could have done about anything if they had.
A brown-headed gull came out and hovered over the nose of the boat. It held there, riding the air patterns, with no concern in the world beyond where the next fish was coming up to the surface.
Then the boat slowed, turned in towards a secluded cove, and the hour was over.
⁂
What I did with that hour is the part worth admitting.
I thought about a novel. A German one, read a long time ago, about a man inside a community of scholars who gives up the life of the mind in order to go and teach one boy. I turned it over. I found connections in it I had not found before. I was, by any ordinary description, thinking well — on what was essentially a porch chair, stacked into a boat, over water, in a country not my own.
It was a long time before it occurred to me that the remarkable thing was not the quality of the thinking.
It was that the conditions for it had to be arranged by a lake.
⁂
Nobody built those conditions. There was no retreat, no discipline and no decision of mine anywhere in it. An engine, a stretch of water wide enough to take the best part of an hour to cross, and a part of the world the signal does not reach. The interval was a property of geography. I had not chosen it, and I could not have refused it.
And that is what this book is about. Not what I thought out on that lake — that was only Hesse, and I had thought it before. It is that it took a longboat in another country, with no service, to hand me an hour I was unable to fill.
There was a time when life had those hours in it by default, and nobody had to cross a lake to find one.
I want to know where they went.
Darren Gall
