There is no place in Malaya that
has more charm than Tanah Merah. It lies on the sea, and the sandy shore is
fringed with casuarinas. The government offices are still in the old Raad Huis
that the Dutch built when they owned the land, and on the hill stand the grey
ruins of the fort by aid of which the Portuguese maintained their hold over the
unruly natives. Tanah Merah has a history and in the vast labyrinthine houses
of the Chinese merchants, backing on the sea so that in the cool of the evening
they may sit in their loggias and enjoy the salt breeze, families dwell that
have been settled in the country for three centuries. Many have forgotten their
native language and hold intercourse with one another in Malay and pidgin
English. The imagination lingers here gracefully, for in the Federated Malay
States the only past is within the memory of the most part of the fathers of
living men. (Footprints in the Jungle,
W. Somerset Maugham)
タンジョン・カトン（タンジョンは崎、カトンは亀、亀ヶ崎とでも称ぶのだろう。）の風景は、シンガポール名所絵葉書のおさだまりだ。椰子の葉越しの月、水上家屋、刳木舟、誰しもすぐセンチメンタルになれる、恋愛舞台の書割のような風景である。
カトンは、シンガポールの東郊で、海沿いのしずかなバルコニーをなしている。シンガポールに立ち寄る客たちは、第一の夕の歓待を、日本庭園を模したアルカフ・ガーデンの料亭か、このカトンでうけるのである。（マレー蘭印紀行「シンガポール」、金子光晴）
From The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham
I wanted write without any frills of language, in as
bare and unaffected a manner as I could. I had so much to say that I could
afford to waste no words. I wanted merely to set down the facts. I began with
impossible aim of using no adjectives at all. I thought that if you could find
the exact term a qualifying epithet could be dispensed with. (p. 28)
There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in
writers. One is due to negligence and the other to willfulness. People often
write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write
clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, im
men of science, and even in literary critics. Here indeed strange. You would
have thought that men who passed their lives in the study of the great masters
of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write,
if not beautifully, at least with perspicuity. Yet you will find in their works
sentence after sentence that you must read twice in order to discover the
sense. Often you can only guess at it, for the writers have evidently not said
what they intended.
Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is
himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he
wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from laziness,
exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not
find a precise expression for a confused idea. This is due largely to the fact
that many writers think, not before, but as they write. The pen originates the
thought. The disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against which the
author must be always on the guard, is that there is a sort of magic in the
written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on a visible nature, and
then stands in the way of its own clarification. Nut this sort of obscurity
merges very easily into the willful. Some writers who do not think clearly are
inclined to suppose that their thoughts have a greater than at first sight
appears. It is flattering to believe that they are too profound to be expressed
so clearly that all who run may read, and very naturally it does not occur to
such writers that the fault is with their own mind. Here again the magic of the
written words obtains. It is very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that
one does not quite understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From
this there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting down
one’s impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found to
discover a hidden sense in them. There is another form of wilful obscurity that
masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in
mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret
garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of
perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only pretentious; it is
shortsighted. Fro time plays it an odd trick. If the sense is meagre time
reduces it to a meaningless verbiage that no one thinks of reading. (pp. 30-32)
Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by
considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and
good to listen to. (p. 39)
