Panic City

Lately literature has been allotted some prominent space on the Saturday Opinion Page here—Rhyme And Reason, poem and prose double—today a "nature" theme featuring a local young woman who has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and selected for other honours (the Writing Program at the University of Iowa). "The sounds of nature" is a reflective essay recalling a camping trip to Johor, which prompts further thought on nature and its threats in Singapore. In the first and longest paragraph the author was "enarmoured" by something and later "sanguine" about something else….

         Upon reflection over lunch a couple of hours later the decision was made to return to the piece and read it through. In the second paragraph one found further terms that might be ringed by parents here keen to promote vocabulary acquisition and hone spelling skills for their children: ineffable, enraptured and ersatz. In the third paragraph our present era (the Anthropecene) is described as having wrought upon the planet "audacious, irrevocable and often harmful changes...(from) our airconditioners, our errant eating and social habits”, which have "left our mark in the layers of the Earth's crust, the chemical composition of our air and oceans, and the evolutionary history of life itself." In conclusion in the final paragraph we Homo sapiens are encouraged to "stop, listen, think and admit..." the limits of scientific progress. 
         Yesterday up at Reference on the eighth floor of the National Library another Paul Virilio volume was begun, titled Ville Panique, “City of Panic” (2004). Virilio had abandoned Paris, no doubt a disastrous urban agglomeration of its own kind, some years earlier. But surely these equatorial mega-cities are the most outstanding examples of reckless ecological and social devastation on the planet, Singapore pre-eminent above all.