Story # 9 The Third and Final Continent
Story # 9 The Third and Final Continent
What is an Oceanography Dean doing here on your summer reading blog? As an undergraduate I never met a dean and had no idea or interest in what they did. Provost DeHayes thought it would be helpful for the deans of all the colleges to participate in this effort as a way to connect better with first year students. The blog was an opportunity for helping you get to know us. We were each given a chapter of An Interpreter of Maladies to comment upon, but I think the plan is as much an opportunity for us to talk a bit about ourselves, to show a little of the person who lives beneath the title! The book serves as a framework for that discussion.
The Graduate School of Oceanography is a bit different from the other colleges and is also on a separate campus in Narragansett; we give degrees to graduate students rather than undergraduate students, but undergraduates take some of our courses and we are working hard to deepen the links between undergraduates and our Bay Campus activities. In any event, Dean Ray Wright from Engineering and I were both away when chapter selections were made. We were both allocated Chapter Nine; between us you should get a useful diversity of views!
Have you noticed how our tastes in literature and music are highly personal and distinctive? Before the age of iPods and digital downloading, recorded music was a significant investment and playing a record somehow involved the whole household – often a source of discord between generations! Even now we cannot escape music in public places. Reading is a different matter of course, and our reading choices can change without affecting others as our taste develops along its own very personal route. No one should doubt the validity of their own tastes; this is intrinsic to ourselves, a direct reflection of our own experience, education and personal development. Jhumpa Lahiri is an interesting author. Her book The Namesake was a fine work and justifiably successful.
The Third and Final Continent was not an ideal story for me to comment upon, as it did not seem entirely convincing. I won’t attempt a carefully crafted criticism of this story any more than I would try to offer a critique of my own musical tastes (personally I like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, etc.) which others, with an ear accustomed to a different cultural environment, might find hard to take. We are who we are, and diversity of taste is something we can all celebrate. This story is written from a man’s perspective. Perhaps it is difficult for a woman to see things the way a man sees them and vice versa. Would this have been a better story (for me) had it been written from a woman’s perspective? I think I might have preferred that. I don’t read much fiction but I have appreciated the writings of Jane Austen and George Elliot (a woman, despite the name).
Let me move on to something else, and use a literary artifice borrowed from a favorite author of mine, Charles Lamb. His delightful essays start with a relatively short discussion related to the title and then wander off into an entirely different world, only returning towards the end with the briefest reference to the subject matter of the title. The connection was there all along, but only in a subtle way. I am no Charles Lamb, but bear with me if you will. Before I leave Charles Lamb, let me suggest, if you are interested, that you read his essay on Old China; no guarantee you will like it, but his style has a captivating quality.
The topics of The Third and Final Continent are not without interest. They cover first, the peculiar emotions and experiences encountered by an immigrant arriving in an unfamiliar country; second, there is the interaction of the protagonist with Mrs. Croft, a Bostonian woman born in 1866 who is over a hundred years old at the time of this account, and third there is the matter of an arranged marriage. I’m not sure I can say much about arranged marriages beyond the fact that some people are not very good at choosing a spouse and one has to admit to the possibility that parents just might do a better job – a great topic for speculation, but not easy to test by experiment! On the other hand the immigrant’s experience is central for many United States citizens (or ‘United Stations’ as author Vladimir Nabakov called them) and I have some comments about that, as I also have about the enormous changes encountered over a human lifespan.
There is so much hope, opportunity and heartache in the history of migration to this country, and that doesn’t even touch on the impact of immigration on the aboriginal peoples of this land, or that long, sad chapter of man’s inhumanity to man in the history of the slave trade. Many of us are recent immigrants or can at least trace our ancestry back to immigrants, and this is the topic the author describes. Notwithstanding the gender issue, the protagonist’s move from Calcutta to London to Boston makes it sound like a personal experience. I think I understand this, as I also followed the immigrant’s path, leaving my family at the age of 19 to seek an entirely different life in Canada, and then again, much later, emigrating from Canada to the United States. I recall in particular the extraordinary emotions I experienced when sailing up the St Lawrence estuary on a Cunard passenger vessel. You could think of it as a first chapter in the adventure we call Life. The desolation of some of the landscape both intrigued me and left me with a feeling of uncertainty about this new land I would call home. We stopped in Québec beneath the cliffs known as the Heights of Abraham. I had read my history and recalled in particular how General Wolfe recited the eighteenth century poet Thomas Gray 's ‘Elegy In A Country Churchyard’ to his men as they dragged two cannon up the cliffs at night before going into battle against the Marquis de Montcalm’s forces the next day.
General Wolfe leads his men
up the Heights of Abraham.
When I graduated from high school the Headmaster gave me a book of Gray’s poems, a tradition going back to my grandfather. Think of that for a moment – no graduation ceremony, no graduation celebrations or parties, no diploma, just that book of poetry and the Headmaster’s solemn handshake. The cultural jump for me arriving in Québec may have been less than it was for Jhumpa Lahiri when she arrived in Boston, but for a 19 year old it was there nonetheless, as it probably is for all immigrants. The connection between my high school experience and my first step into a new life left me with poignant recollections. Over the years I have from time to time taken Thomas Gray off the shelf and perused the poems I learned so many years ago. One poem describes the many misfortunes awaiting school students later in their lives, ending with the famous lines “Yet, ah! Why should they know their fate, since sorrow never comes too late, and happiness too swiftly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise. No more: - where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.”
These lines stay with me, but of course there can be no escaping the future, and that brings me to the next thought this reading assignment evokes. The protagonist describes Mrs. Croft with whom he lives as a boarder. There are cultural differences here, and allusions to the ways of older people, especially the Bostonian rigidity and arrogance that masks genuine warmth, but it is the woman’s great age that catches my attention. She is moved by the splendid accomplishment of the Apollo crew landing on the moon , and this moment identifies an important turning point. A woman born in 1866 at the time of the Apollo landing (1969) was 19 years old when Karl Benz invented the first automobile.
Karl Benz’s automobile
I suspect that we evolved to think in terms of linear change, the concept that change
of anything in life tends to be steady.
If the river rises by a hand-width today, it will likely rise by about a
hand-width tomorrow. This kind of
thinking may have been useful when real change was usually slow, but that is
not the way the world works today and many of these changed circumstances are
the direct consequence of human activity – our evolving technology, our rising
standard of living and its
This chasm was nicely described by science fiction author and inventor Arthur C Clarke in his third law of prediction: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Think of Mrs. Croft in the 1880s at about your age, suddenly transported to the University of Rhode Island today. You are responsible for introducing her to your life, your connectivity to the internet world, your technology. How would she adjust to automobiles, to passenger aircraft that cross the continent and oceans in a matter of hours and frequently pass overhead, to cell phones that can link you to anyone almost instantly, to television broadcasting, to instruments that can map the thoughts in your mind as you are thinking them, to satellites that orbit the earth recording the shape of our planet to the finest resolution, imaging glaciers and ocean waves, rainfall and even people on the street, to the exploration of the solar system’s outer planets and the mapping of ancient microwave remnants of the universe’s explosive origin some 14 billion years ago, to the ability to ‘see’ atoms, to the science that explains the molecular structure of life itself? It would all be magic, totally unfathomable, explainable only by being unexplainable, describable only with words like ‘miracle’ – and all this happened in a single lifetime. This is the consequence of accelerating change, accelerating knowledge. We lose our powers of prediction as the technological advance accelerates. Ray Kurzweil, a penetrating thinker and author describes the concept of artificial intelligence and its transcendence over human intelligence (what he calls the singularity) in his remarkably optimistic book The Singularity is Near. How would Mrs. Croft view artificial intelligence? What kind of world do you anticipate a century from now? How good do you think your prediction is?
I was thinking about population increase when I gave a talk recently celebrating an anniversary of our national wildlife refuges. For some reason, perhaps related to religious views, or possibly connected to a deep belief in the economic benefits of an ever increasing number of consumers, population issues seem to have had a bad press in the US. But we live on a finite planet and we need to face reality. When my father was born there were about 1.7 billion people on the planet, or about 6 individuals for every square mile of potentially useable space. By ‘useable’ I exclude the oceans, high mountain ranges, deserts, and so forth, but I include the land on which we can grow crops and build cities – the number changes a bit depending on your definition. Today there are 6.8 billion of us on the planet, or about 23 people for every square mile of useable land; we have increased our average population density by almost four over the course of a single lifetime. How many people, on average, would there be per square mile at the end of your lifetime?
We can increase the productivity of our crops, but the green revolution experience tells us that there are huge environmental consequences to that. As our population grows along with our appetite for resources, we are taking more and more from the same land area, the same atmosphere, the same ocean, but the planet is not growing to match our increasing needs! Kurzweil takes the view that the exponential increase in human knowledge and technology, in particular the development of artificial intelligence, will transcend our limitations allowing us to override our problems. I see it rather as a race between two exponential changes: accelerating technical powers, including artificial intelligence, racing against accelerating human impact on the environment, with the added complication of human frailties such as greed and stupidity. I’m not certain of the outcome, but I do know that your generation has arrived at a pivotal point in the development and has a crucial part to play.
When I was a graduate student, the impact of human induced climate change was talked about as a possibility of purely academic interest occurring over many centuries. The more we understand the climate system, the faster these changes seem to be occurring. Recent studies of the ancient arctic climate, carried out at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, involved drilling deep into the sea floor. The drill cores revealed that the Arctic Ocean has not been ice-free for at least 14 million years. Now we face the prospect of an ice-free Arctic in our own lifetime! This is big news from many points of view. Polar bears will have a hard time of it, but the Arctic will also become a major shipping route and ice-free summers will bring in those seeking to exploit the Arctic’s vast mineral reserves, pitting nations with a claim to Arctic sovereignty against each other. The Arctic is being transformed even now, with a vigorous diplomatic chess game underway and the ever present risk of conflict.
These satellite images show the difference in
sea ice cover between 1980 and 2003 and the sharp decrease in the Arctic’s ice
cover over this time period.
(NASA)
An ice-free Arctic is but one way we see the planet changing. Ice is a great reflector of sunlight and the dark Arctic waters are starting to warm as it thins and breaks up. The ecology of the ocean will change in ways we can only guess and the surrounding lands will change also. Land that has been frozen for millennia is thawing, releasing the greenhouse gas methane to the atmosphere, thus adding to the global heating effect. The great ice mass of Greenland is melting at an accelerating pace and will contribute, along with the direct effects of a warming ocean, to sea level rise. Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produced by human activities not only heat the planet by trapping incoming radiation, but also dissolve in the ocean to make it more acidic, undermining the very structure of ocean life. These changes are only a sign of what lies ahead. Computer models involve significant uncertainties, but they do point to pretty drastic shifts in temperature and precipitation across the globe. Desert areas seem likely to expand and massive flooding coupled with rising sea levels will make many coastal environments hazardous places in which to live. Already, water shortages are crippling economies, threatening public health and potentially destabilizing society. Talk to those who live in Southern California about water shortages, or for a more drastic example, consider the crises in Darfur and parts of the Middle East, interpretable in just these terms. These are real problems today and they are spreading.
We can anticipate such changes spurring mass migration on a scale not seen before. The cultural adjustment Jhumpa Lahiri describes in her gentle story pales in comparison with the shocks humanity will have to absorb as we face the consequences of environmental degradation, rising consumption and rising population and we start to run out of planet for our burgeoning population.
The opportunities for solving these problems diminish if we fool ourselves into thinking they are minimal and we put off difficult decisions. Understanding them scientifically, politically and in terms of human behavior is of great importance for your generation. These are the questions in my mind as I ponder Thomas Gray’s words: “where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.” Perhaps a certain level of ignorance protects our childhood, but we cannot afford ignorance at your level. The better we understand the truly important issues of our time, the greater the chance we have of managing our future.
You are coming to URI as first year students. Seize the opportunity to learn about your environment, to look at the big picture, to understand where we are headed. Check out the opportunities for taking courses that will teach you about our changing planet. Ultimately, the future is in your hands. Preceding generations have not done a good job of preparing this world for you. The next step is yours and your education is the first important move you can make that will help you navigate the rapid change you will encounter. You have come to a great place of learning. I wish you well and hope you find your time here a fascinating and life changing experience!
David Farmer
Graduate School of Oceanography
