Imaginasi

What's Romantic About Science?
When science became a source of sublime terror.

By Adam Kirsch
(Slate.com, July 20, 2009)

The last time a scientific breakthrough made the front page, it was because science threatened to kill us all. The launch of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland last September was greeted with headlines like Time's "Collider Triggers End-of-the-World Fears" as journalists tried to calculate the odds that the world's largest particle accelerator would accidentally tear apart the space-time continuum and annihilate the Earth. And it is not just such doomsday scenarios that make us suspicious of technological progress: On a philosophical level, too, scientific advances can look like human retreats. A century and a half after Darwin, there are millions of Christians who see evolution as an intolerable blow to human dignity, just as there are millions of environmentalists who see Western science as a scourge of the planet.

These 21st-century conundrums have been with us for a long time. In The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes explores an early-19th-century period of terrific—and often terrified—excitement about science, of marvelous discoveries that raised humble experimenters to the rank of national heroes. Holmes' subjects—including astronomer William Herschel, chemist Humphry Davy, and explorer Mungo Park—were household names in England, but their discoveries were by no means always welcome ones. Herschel's observation of the stars, for instance, showed that the Milky Way was just one of a vast number of galaxies that were constantly being born, aging, and dying. The Milky Way, Herschel warned, "cannot last forever." It followed, as Holmes writes, that "our solar system, our planet, and hence our whole civilization would have an ultimate and unavoidable end." For the first time, the apocalypse was not a matter of religious faith but of demonstrated scientific fact.

Herschel's discoveries represent one face of what Holmes calls, loosely but suggestively, Romantic science. The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, as Holmes acknowledges: "Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so."

Contemplating the immensity and strangeness of the universe could produce the same feeling of sublime terror that Coleridge strove for in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or that Wordsworth evokes in parts of his autobiographical epic "The Prelude." In Keats' sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," the poet compares his feeling of literary discovery with that of "some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken"; as Holmes explains, this was an allusion to Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781, one of the stories told at length in The Age of Wonder.

At the same time, the growing fame of individual scientists made them seem larger-than-life, almost superhuman, like the Romantic persona cultivated by Lord Byron. The glamour of exploration was unmistakable: Joseph Banks, who returned from Tahiti with tales of erotic adventure, and Mungo Park, who spent two years charting the course of the Niger River, were objects of fascination on their return to England. (Banks stayed home and spent a long career as president of the Royal Society; Park returned to Africa and disappeared.) Humphry Davy's glamour was of a different kind. Alone in his laboratory, he penetrated the deepest secrets of nature, isolating the elements of sodium, iodine, and chlorine for the first time. His discoveries, his useful inventions (including a safety lamp for coal miners), and his brilliant popular lectures made him a celebrity and a social lion—he won a knighthood and a rich wife, although, as Holmes shows, neither made him happy.

Davy was also an accomplished poet who insisted on the close relationship between scientific and artistic ways of seeing. "The perception of truth is almost always as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty," he wrote, "and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind." It is the kind of observation one might expect from the polymath Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Davy's close friend. In a letter to Davy in 1800, Coleridge speculated on the affinity between science and poetry: "[B]eing necessarily performed with the passion of Hope," the poet believed, science "was poetical."

The phrase appeals strongly to Holmes, and he expands on it: "Science, like poetry, was not merely 'progressive.' It directed a particular kind of moral energy and imaginative longing into the future. It enshrined the implicit belief that mankind could achieve a better, happier world." "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, and the revolution in science was just as heady.

Yet the Romantic poets also made the case against science in powerful terms that still influence our mistrust of science and technology. Science alienates us from nature and ourselves, Wordsworth wrote in "The Tables Turned": "Sweet is the lore which Nature brings/ Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:/ We murder to dissect." One of the best-known anecdotes about Keats, which Holmes duly recounts, has him complaining at a dinner party that Newton "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism" and drinking a toast for "confusion to Mathematics." And none other than Coleridge said that "the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton"—a view that, Holmes writes, "has a peculiar power to outrage men of science, even modern ones."

But the most potent Romantic warning against the peril of science was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to which Holmes devotes a chapter. Holmes shows that Shelley was alluding to Davy when she wrote, in Frankenstein, of how modern scientists "have acquired new and almost unlimited Powers: they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadow." But the lesson of her book is that these powers are too great for human wisdom—that once they are unleashed, they may return to destroy their masters as Dr. Victor Frankenstein's monster turns on him. Shelley's creation clearly touched a nerve in English society: "[I]t was made famous, if not notorious, in the 1820s by no less than five adaptations for the stage," Holmes writes.

Frankenstein was a parable for an age when every scientific advance seemed to mark a threat. Sometimes the threats were quite literal. No sooner had Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier made the first manned balloon flight in Paris in November 1783, than Benjamin Franklin, the American ambassador to France, was imagining the possibilities of balloon warfare: "Five thousand balloons capable of raising two men each" could carry a French army across the Channel to England, where "ten thousand Men descending from the Clouds might in many places do an infinite deal of mischief."

Even laughing gas, discovered by Davy in 1799, was unsettling in the very intensity of the pleasure it brought. "The pleasurable sensation was at first local, and perceived in the lips and the cheeks," Davy recorded. "It gradually, however, diffused itself over the whole body, and in the middle of the experiment was for a moment so intense and pure as to absorb existence. At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness." Was nitrous oxide, the world wondered, a boon to mankind, even a possible surgical anesthetic, or an excuse for moral decay and sexual license? It was rumored that Davy's laboratory witnessed uncanny scenes, as when a "young woman was overcome by hysterical excitement, ran out of the laboratory, and rushed screaming down the street …where she was somewhat bizarrely reported to have 'jumped over a large dog' before she could be restrained and brought back." It sounds like something Mary Shelley might have dreamed.

Finally, The Age of Wonder places more faith in science's "beauty" than in its "terror." "We need," Holmes writes in a heartfelt epilogue, "the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe." Yet it is only because of science and technology, of course, that the future of the globe is in question. Without nuclear weapons and global warming, not to mention the Large Hadron Collider, we wouldn't need to reinforce our "hope" and "belief" in the survival of the species, which, until the 20th century, was taken for granted. There is a reason that Herschel and Davy, heroes in their own time, have been overshadowed by the eminent contemporary whose name everyone still knows, Frankenstein.

Hemingway

Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast’
By A. E. HOTCHNER (New York Times, July 19, 2009)

BOOKSTORES are getting shipments of a significantly changed edition of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, “A Moveable Feast,” first published posthumously by Scribner in 1964. This new edition, also published by Scribner, has been extensively reworked by a grandson who doesn’t like what the original said about his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife.

The grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

It is his claim that Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife, cobbled the manuscript together from shards of an unfinished work and that she created the final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris.”

Scribner’s involvement with this bowdlerized version should be examined as it relates to the book’s actual genesis, and to the ethics of publishing.

In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Ritz in Paris with Charles Ritz, the hotel’s chairman, when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s Louis Vuitton had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it.

Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: “The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!”

There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life.

When Ernest returned to Cuba in 1957, he had Nita, his sometime secretary, type the stories on double-spaced pages to make them easy to edit. When I visited the Hemingways in Ketchum, Idaho, in the fall of 1958, Ernest was at work on what he called “my Paris book.” He gave me several chapters to read. In 1959, when we were in Spain following the great matadors Antonio Ordóñez and Dominguín, Ernest often worked on the Paris manuscript on the days when there wasn’t a bullfight.

Back in Cuba, he suspended work on it to write “The Dangerous Summer,” about those bullfights, for Life magazine. But instead of the contracted 40,000 words, he wrote 108,746 and asked me to go to Cuba to help him pare down his manuscript.

When I was leaving for New York to give the manuscript to the editor of Life, Ernest also gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr.

I recount this history of “A Moveable Feast” to demonstrate how involved Ernest was with it, and that the manuscript was not left in shards but was ready for publication. Ernest died before the publication of the book could go forward. When I visited him in the Mayo Clinic a few months before his dementia led to his suicide, he was very concerned about his Paris book, and worried that it needed a final sentence, which it did not.

After his death, Mary, as executor, decided that Scribner should proceed with the publication. Harry Brague was the editor. I met with him several times while the book was in galleys.

Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book. However, she did call me about its title. Scribner was going to call it “Paris Sketches,” but Mary hoped I could come up with something more compelling. I ran through a few possibilities, but none resonated until I recalled that Ernest had once referred to Paris as a moveable feast. Mary and Scribner were delighted with that, but they wanted attribution. I wrote down what Ernest had said to the best of my recollection, and this appears on the title page attributed to a “friend,” which is the way I wanted it.

These details are evidence that the book was a serious work that Ernest finished with his usual intensity, and that he certainly intended it for publication. What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.
As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.

All publishers, Scribner included, are guardians of the books that authors entrust to them. Someone who inherits an author’s copyright is not entitled to amend his work. There is always the possibility that the inheritor could write his own book offering his own corrections.

Ernest was very protective of the words he wrote, words that gave the literary world a new style of writing. Surely he has the right to have these words protected against frivolous incursion, like this reworked volume that should be called “A Moveable Book.” I hope the Authors Guild is paying attention.

A. E. Hotchner is the author of the memoirs “Papa Hemingway” and “King of the Hill.”

Negatif

Entah mengapa, dan kita perlu cari sebabnya, berita negatif tentang Rosmah Mansor cepat mendapat perhatian ramai - setidak-tidaknya beginilah ukuran enjin pengesan beberapa berita ngetop (istilah orang Indonesia) di Malaysiakini.

Terbaru berita tentang beliau bertajuk Lagi gema gugurkan Rosmah di Unisel. Ia dimuatkan petang Jumaat lalu (hari yang paling kurang pembaca, khususnya di sebelah petang) dan tiba-tiba melompat ke tangga keempat berita paling popular sebulan ini.

Ia melaporkan satu desakan popular - dan kelihatannya spontan, tanpa perancangan - untuk menyingkirkan isteri perdana menteri sebagai canselor universiti tersebut.

Dua berita teratas kategori paling popular bulanan juga mengenai Rosmah - Kempen video burukkan isteri PM (25 Jun) dan 'Rosmah-Najib kahwin di rumah saya' (26 Jun).

Berada di tangga kelapan sejak beberapa minggu lalu JKKK kecewa video cemar Rosmah (26 Jun).

Malaysiakini pernah memuatkan beberapa bahan berita tentang (atau berkaitan) Rosmah dalam tempoh dua minggu lalu tetapi tidak tersenarai dalam kategori paling popular peringkat bulanan.

Bagaimanapun bahan-bahan berita ini pernah popular peringkat mingguan - tetapi tidak cukup kuat untuk mendaki tangga bulanan: Video burukkan Rosmah makin hilang sambutan (9 Julai), Siswa anti-Rosmah belum serah diri (2 Julai), Video Rosmah: Polis siasat Badrul (30 Jun) dan 'Bini puaka' seret 2 siswa ke mahkamah (30 Jun).

Kita harus bertanya: kenapa berita-berita tertentu tentang Rosmah meraih populariti mendadak dan bertahan lama dalam carta berita popular; sementara berita-berita lain tentang personaliti yang sama boleh naik mendadak tetapi tidak kekal dalam carta popular?


[ii]

Jika kita tinjau lagi carta berita-berita ngetop bulanan di Malaysiakini, kita akan dapati berita banglo mewah Dr Khir Toyo berada di tangga ketiga - kenaikan perlahan-lahan sejak ia menjadi isu besar media awal minggu lalu (6 Julai).

Berita Nik Aziz Nik Mat menghentam Nasharuddin Mat Isa (kata orang, nama barunya "broker") masih bertahan di tangga kelima walaupun isunya sudah lama berlalu (17 Jun).

Berita yang naik mendadak tetapi masih di tangga bawah carta paling popular peringkat bulanan termasuklah ulasan Dr Mahathir Mohamad tentang 100 hari pertama "yang lebih banyak negatif daripada positif" pentadbiran Najib Razak, suami Rosmah.

Ia berada di tangga kesembilan, atas berita tentang Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan jawab bos lamanya Anwar Ibrahim - sudah lama, mula menurun dan mungkin akan terkeluar carta tidak lama lagi jika ada berita-berita yang lebih hangat.

Senarai berita dan perkembangan sekitar politik Perak dan wiranya yang paling tersohor Mohamad Nizar Jamaluddin - yang pernah menguasai carta bulanan sejak beberapa bulan dulu - kini berada di tangga ketujuh.

Kemungkinan tokoh ini akan terus merosot jika tiada lagi insiden seperti rampasan kuasa di Perak, kekecohan di DUN Perak, kes mahkamahnya yang luar biasa dan laungan "hidup rakyat" di Dewan Rakyat.


[iii]

Saya rasa mudah untuk menjawab kenapa tokoh-tokoh politik ini mendapat perhatian meluas. Antaranya, kerana isu itu bersifat nasional, dilaporkan meluas di media dan tokoh politik yang sudah bertapak kukuh.

Persoalan saya kenapa berita tentang Rosmah yang hanya dilaporkan di Malaysiakini boleh mencipta minat mendalam pembaca? Apakah hebatnya Rosmah ini?

Saya sokong ISA ...

(Khusus kepada pembaca Majalah I, Julai 2009)

Artikel saya yang asalnya bertujuan main-main akhirnya menjerat diri sendiri.

Malu ada, lucu pun ada - begitulah yang saya rasa sewaktu menyedari memang benar kata orang "pengarang telah mati" dan teks akhirnya bercakap bagi pihak dirinya sendiri - tiada lagi campur tangan pengarang!

Untuk bacaan lanjut teori ini, baca The Death of the Author (oleh Roland Barthes) dan ringkasan ideanya.

Kelmarin saya terperasan sebuah majalah Islam menerbitkan kembali artikel saya tentang "ISA, juga ada manfaatnya" yang diedarkan di Internet sejak April 2001 termasuk di Tranungkite.net.

Majalah bulanan terbitan Karangkraf itu dalam edisi Julai (terbaru) memuatkan isu kebebasan bersuara dengan memaparkan tokoh anti-ISA, Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh dan terselit juga satu halaman artikel saya tersebut.

Ya, walaupun saya berterima kasih atas kesudian pengarang dan penerbit memuatkan artikel tersebut demi melanjutkan perbahasan tentang pro dan kontra akta kontroversi tersebut tetapi tulisan saya itu tidak kena-mengena dengan sikap saya yang anti-ISA.

Tajuknya memang berbunyi positif tetapi kandungannya sarat dengan sindiran sinis yang halus, main-main dan benci kalau ... (ulang: kalau) pembaca memahami latar peristiwa politik yang mendorong saya menulis sebegitu rupa.

Yakni, penangkapan 10 aktivis Gerakan Reformasi dan pemimpin PKR (dulu PKN) menjelang dan selepas 14 April 2001 dan kenyataan ketua polis negara waktu itu yang bohong, palsu, mengada-ngada dan jahat.


[ii]

Bagaimanapun Majalah I bukanlah pihak pertama yang terkeliru dengan artikel saya yang mengelirukan itu.

Sahabat saya Astora Jabat juga pernah membangkitkan artikel tersebut dalam satu kolumnya di Utusan Malaysia (16 Feb 2003) yang memuji-muji saya sebagai seorang (daripada tiga) penulis Melayu kritikal "yang rasional". Saya telah jelaskan di sini "Belum mati" (16 Dis 2005).

Saya memohon maaf atas sifat main-main dan sinis lembut dalam artikel saya tentang ISA walaupun saya fikir saya tidak pernah bersalah apa-apa. Cuma, jika ada tanggapan umum bahawa saya pernah menyokong ISA, saya mohon maaf!

Kebetulan artikel ini tidak datang sendirian. Ada satu catatan pendek yang dikirim sehari atau dua sebelum saya menulis artikel ini.

Artikel itu bertajuk 'Cara nak buat Grenade Launcher, Molotov Koktel dan Bom' (lihat sikap saya yang anti-ISA dalam senarai artikel saya antara 2000 dan 2001 di laman web edisi lama Tranungkite.net).

Malah Astora bukan pihak yang pertama terkeliru.

Sewaktu artikel tentang ISA tersebut diedarkan dalam ruang diskusi senarai e-mel (mailing list) dan laman-laman web tersebut, ia telah menimbulkan kontroversi dan mengelirukan beberapa pembaca, termasuk teman-teman dekat saya sendiri.

Beberapa pembaca Malaysiakini, malah, menulis dan merungut waktu itu kepada ketua editor kami, Steven Gan. Saya telah jelaskan kepada Steven, rakan-rakan dan pembaca tetapi ... rupa-rupanya "pengarang telah mati" dan hantu karyanya terus berkeliaran mengejar mangsanya sendiri.


[iii]

Kepada rakan-rakan yang mengenali saya dan kepada pembaca setia yang mengikuti dengan dekat coretan-coretan saya, tentulah mereka tidak percaya saya mempunyai pendirian sedemikian dan tentulah mereka fikir saya bermain-main atau hanya melepaskan geram.

Saya boleh tunjukkan beberapa tempat yang menunjukkan artikel itu bukanlah mewakili pendirian saya.

(a) Sesuatu undang-undang diluluskan di Dewan Rakyat digubal untuk manfaat orang ramai dan negara, bukan semata-mata untuk menjaga Perdana Menteri atau Umno seperti didakwa oleh pembangkang.

Penjelasan: Saya sedar beberapa (kalau tidak banyak) akta digubal demi kepentingan perdana menteri dan kerajaan Umno semata-mata. Misalnya akta yang sering menjadi kecaman saya dalam konteks kempen kebebasan media, Akta Penerbitan dan Mesin Cetak (PPPA) dan Akta Rahsia Rasmi (OSA).

(b) Pembangkang memang akan memburuk-burukkan ISA kerana aktivis dan pengikut mereka yang sering menganjurkan keganasan, termasuk ketika berceramah, akan berasa terhalang dengan wujudnya akta ini.

Penjelasan: Saya tidak pernah percaya pembangkang menganjurkan keganasan sewaktu mereka berceramah yang saya ikuti sejak di bangku sekolah lagi. Saya ikuti dengan dekat kegiatan pembangkang - ceramah, seminar, forum, mesyuarat dan demonstrasi.

Hujah (b) saya ulang sebagai menyindir pemimpin politik BN, pegawai polis dan media arus perdana yang suka memburuk-burukkan pembangkang secara bombastik!

(c) Bukankah mereka juga berhak hidup dengan aman damai, sekurang-kurangnya dapat kais pagi makan pagi untuk menyara anak-anak ke sekolah.

Penjelasan: Ungkapan "berhak hidup dengan aman damai, sekurang-kurangnya dapat kais pagi makan pagi" juga bermaksud menyindir atau main-main.

(d) Dengan itu akan terselamatlah negara ini daripada gejala puak-puak pelampau ini, misalnya penyokong reformasi.

Penjelasan: Saya meletakkan diri saya sebagai penulis yang sebelah kakinya dalam Gerakan Reformasi (waktu itu) dan sebelah lagi dalam dunia kewartawanan, kepenulisan dan penerbitan alternatif. Semua "orang reformasi", aktivis NGO dan malah polis Cawangan Khas (SB) menyedari perkara ini.

(e) Setiap kali mereka mengadakan tunjuk perasaan besar-besaran di Kuala Lumpur, mereka mengganggu lalu lintas dan penjaja-penjaja di tepi jalan. Tidakkah kegiatan ini berbahaya kepada keselamatan nyawa pengguna jalan raya dan gedung perusahaan penjaja-penjaja ini?

Penjelasan: Lihat frasa ini "berbahaya kepada keselamatan nyawa pengguna jalan raya dan gedung perusahaan penjaja-penjaja ini." Cuba lihat perkataan "gedung perusahaan penjaja-penjaja", biar betul!

(f) Perenggan tersebut haruslah dibaca dengan perenggan selepasnya: Tentunya! Oleh itu langkah kerajaan untuk menggunakan ISA ke atas puak reformasi masih mempunyai kesan yang positif ke arah mengurangkan kemalangan di ibukota, misalnya akibat perlumbaan haram, dan meningkatkan taraf penjaja-penjaja Bumiputera di ibukota – yang semakin dihimpit ekonomi kaum asing.

Penjelasan: Saya ulang sejumlah perkataan tersebut dengan memberikan fokus kepada frasa yang digariskan seperti berikut: ... langkah kerajaan untuk menggunakan ISA ke atas puak reformasi masih mempunyai kesan yang positif ke arah mengurangkan kemalangan di ibukota, misalnya akibat perlumbaan haram.

Apakah begini sikap saya dan cara saya berfikir?

(g) Minggu lalu polis telah mendedahkan satu pakatan sulit puak reformasi untuk menggunakan pelancar bom, bahan letupan, bom petrol dan bebola penggalas bagi menyerang anggota-anggota polis.

Penjelasan: Saya tahu kenyataan ketua polis negara ini bohon semata-mata kerana saban malam saya bersama penggerak-penggerak demonstrasi ini dan pembohongan ini jelas sekali kerana kertas pertuduhan (sebenarnya alasan semata-mata) ke atas mereka sebelum diseret ke kem Kamunting di Taiping tiada kaitan langsung dengan kenyataan ketua polis ini!

(h) Walaupun polis tidak mengadakan sebarang sekatan jalan raya atau memeriksa kenderaan di tempat-tempat strategik di ibu kota, tetapi oleh kerana mereka sedar bahawa ISA sedang menunggu mereka, maka semua senjata berbahaya itu ditinggalkan sahaja di rumah-rumah mereka.

Penjelasan: Cuba lihat frasa "semua senjata berbahaya itu ditinggalkan sahaja di rumah-rumah mereka". Senjata berbahaya yang saya maksudkan ini (seperti perenggan-perenggan sebelumnya: pelancar bom, bahan letupan, bom petrol dan bebola penggalas) kerana nama-nama ini saya muntahkan kembali daripada kenyataan Tan Sri Norian Mai!


[iv]

Dengan sikap saya yang terpaksa menjelaskan kembali artikel yang lebih lapan tahun usianya itu, saya hari ini terpaksa mengangkat panji-panji baru "pengarang belum (ulang: belum) mati."

Pengarang yang belum mati akan terus mengejar, mencekik sehingga menggelupur dan menghanyutkan hantu artikelnya sendiri. Semoga tiada lagi mereka yang disampuk atau dirasuk oleh "ISA, juga ada manfaatnya".


(Meniru gaya Hishamuddin Rais di blognya Tukar Tiub) Kah, kah, kah, kah, kah, kah!