New Zealand

"The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say."

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The penning of this post had been a frightfully difficult task. I find that my talent for writing (or my woeful lack of it) is highly inadequate in forcing some of the more frivolous flights of fancy fluttering about in my cranium into words.

My sincere apologies if this entry sucks.

On Tuesday morning, right before the Pathology Lab period, I had a short quarter hour conversation with the comel Kak Yana¹. In that brief 15 minutes, I was at my most animated and alive in the entirety of this crappy, joyless year thus far. My eyes were bright, my mouth simply just won’t stop yakking (I’m actually pretty reserved in real life – surprise!), and my whole body was trembling visibly from my systemic enthusiasm – very much evident if you happened to look at the big cup of hazelnut-cream-laced-cappuccino I had in my right hand. The froth was doing a Michael J. Fox.

But wait! Before you snatch that very-erroneous impression out of my words and run away with it, I must tell you that my enthusiasm did not come from the conversationalist, but from the conversation itself. Her comel-ness really had nothing to do with it. Scout’s Honour, suh!

I was talking about New Zealand².

Until the age of 15, New Zealand meant nothing more to me than the land where Fernleaf products grows on trees, and brown, flightless, pussy cissy birds called Kiwis roam.

Until the age of 15 - then along came Middle-earth.

I wasn’t much of a movie guy back then. The only reason I was even anywhere near theatres at all was so I can hang out with the girls in the convent next to my school on Fridays afternoons. Also noteworthy was that then I was only a casual reader of books, and wasn’t at all the humongous fantasy novel freak I am right now. Somehow, someway – in that deceptively short 3 hours (non-extended) I spent in Malacca’s tiny, 4-halled GSC watching The Fellowship of the Ring – I turned into a completely different person. I went straight to MPH after that and bought a movie tie-in version of Mr. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I finished reading in just four days.

Then, I proceeded to read the massive tome all over again in the next seven days.

That was the very sudden beginning of my obsessive and oft-fund-exhausting love affair with the triple dope of Reading, Movies and Fantasy - and with New Zealand.

In my mind, New Zealand is Middle-earth.

New Zealand is also Narnia, the Earthsea archipelago, Faerie, Lyra Belacqua’s parallel world, Tiffany Aching’s Chalk, Abarat, Lilliput, Neverland³ and all the other assorted, wondrous, vast fantasy worlds ever described in literature melded into one.

I see New Zealand as a magical place of impossible beauty, comparable to anything my imaginings could care to cook up. There, I’ve laid an image (or illusion?) of a better life. I’ve architected with my mind a quaint farmhouse to call my own in a Shire-like countryside an hour’s drive away from the nearest town. In that town, I will run a bookshop. I will give discounts to some of the local kids I like, and send freebies to them on their birthdays.

I will build a library in my home – a circular room on the second floor⁴ with a high ceiling surrounded by shelves filled with all the books I’ve collected and read in my lifetime. The floors would be laid with wood - warm-looking, semi-polished planks (none of that pussy-fied passé parquetry crap, please). In the middle of that room, I will place a sofa set so plush you can practically swim in them and a small coffee table in their midst. Nearby sits a heavy-set, antique desk made of hardwood with a matching chair – and behind them, I’ll have a tall, French window leading to a balcony from which I can see the green, rolling countryside for miles around on a particularly good day. And I’m going to have a beanbag too. No self-respecting private library should ever go without a beanbag, in my opinion.

In the evenings and late into the nights, I will hole up in that room and work on my fantasy novel. I won’t know if it’s ever going to be good enough for publication – but that will not matter because the experience of writing it will be more than rewarding enough for me (*snort* yeah, right). On days when I managed to finish an exceptionally good chapter in my book, I’ll read it to my wife and two dogs, an English Cocker Spaniel and a Golden Retriever. If I’m not married by then, I’ll get a cat.

Are you feeling me?

New Zealand is a symbol. It represents, for me, a place where dreams and hopes and fantasies come true. I know I’m not going to see any Hobbits, Wee Free Men or armoured polar bears there. I know Mount Cook isn’t Caradhras. I know Aslan doesn’t stalk the plains killing evil witch queens and Gandalf isn’t likely to be found in the middle of bridges waving his pussy kinky stick at motorists and hollering "You cannot pass!" – but that doesn’t mean that all these things aren’t there.

Reality is merely perception.

That was what Peter Jackson taught me when he first superimposed Middle-earth onto New Zealand six years ago.



Have I completely lost you yet?

Being a doctor was never my dream.

My dream is New Zealand, and everything I imagined to be waiting there for me. My only wish is that I can make it come true one day, even if it meant that I must work most of my life away to get it. Therein lies my heart and soul, and all the possible joy I can ever own the right to, precipitated into a single pinprick of light. I’ve objectified Happiness into something real – something tangible – so I can at least know I am always, always heading to someplace better.

'Meaning' is the word. I’ve put 'meaning' into my existence in this pointless, random, nonsensical cosmos. Some finds it in rock music. Some finds it in yoga. And some finds it in God and faith and heaven.

Mine, I found, is in New Zealand.



P.S. I have never shared with my family about this dream of mine. If I should ever die suddenly, please help me to tell them to have me cremated, and scatter whatever is left of me across that country. I must get there, one way or another.

On my way,
k0k s3n w4i

¹ She’s younger than me, by the way. See pinksterz? It’s not only you, okay?
² Either that or it’s the caffeine. I don’t tolerate coffee that well - they give me rather serious tremors (yea, the trembling when I talked to Kak Yana had nothing to do with my excitement). I needed the coffee buzz that day because I pulled an all-nighter again.
³ Respectively of C. S. Lewis’ chronicles of Narnia, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Terry Prachett’s Wee Free Men books, Clive Barker’s Abarat novels, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
³ My house is going to have three floors, with the library being in the highest, reachable only by means of a winding staircase that starts from the ground floor. Sounds like a sorcerer’s tower isn’t it? That appeals to me immensely.

All pictures courtesy of deviantART.com. The photographers' user names in deviantART can be found under 'Alternative text' if you right click on any one of them and open their 'Properties' window.