William Eddy is a master of distilling ideas

The Other Side of the World, by William Eddy. Published by the Stinehour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont. 240 pages. $27.

reviewed by Paul Lefebvre

Newspapermen or newspaperwomen, for that matter, take pride in writing clear, succinct, prose. No matter the story, they write keeping in mind the craft’s exhortation: Less is better.

There is no indication that author William Eddy was ever a newspaperman. But he is a master of distilling complex ideas down to their illuminating essence, while providing along the way a good story.

A traveler to exotic places like Nepal and Nairobi, where he helped develop national parks that showcase wildlife to both native tourists and those from afar, Eddy comes across as a first rate observer of the way human beings observe things. Or the way culture and language sets us up, primitive and modern alike, to see the external world.

"If there is any theme or concern that these essays share in common, it is, in various guises, this one — that the mind is, in reality, the other side of the world," he write in his introduction.

Science in Eddy’s hands is as playful as it is informative. Early in the book there is a delightful piece called, "Towers of Silence," that illustrates how tenuous a culture’s hold is on reality. The Parsees of Bombay practice a religion that goes back 600 years before Christ. They believe the world is divided between the forces of good and evil, with purest elements of good represented by earth, air, fire, and water.

Eddy tells us that because the Parsees were so reverent of these elements, they could neither be farmers nor even consider cremating their dead for fear of polluting what is good. So they became businessmen instead, and built 20-foot high towers where they placed their dead to be consumed by vultures.

The problem is that as modern times came to Bombay, their true and tried method of dealing with the dead started to unravel. Industrial pollution had such an adverse impact on the habitat of the vultures that they became displaced at the Towers of Silence by a species of hawk. Unlike the vultures, though, the hawks carry off the food and, sometimes to the horror of the people of Bombay, dropped a body part or two in flight.

"The irony is that the pollution that is destroying the vultures comes from factories owned by the Parsees — the very people for whom the contamination of earth, and air, and fire, and water is considered a contamination of God," writes Eddy.

The duality that gives rise to the religious forces of good and evil also gives people a context to view the world. At the office where I work there is a card on the wall that ask the question: "If a man speaks in the forest, and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?"

That joke might have a short shelf life. But under a section he calls, The Dance of Mind with Nature, Eddy offers us several essays that probe the relationship between mind of the observer and nature the subject.

"It is impossible to perceive any environment except from the context of another one," he says. To illustrate his point, he recalls a question from a young boy who is still struggling to figure out the context. "Daddy," the youngster asks, "Why is it that people always build their houses outdoors?"

The idea that discoveries, as well as art, are made not so much by thinking clearly, but by thinking differently, is taken up in the essay, "The Spirit of the Stone." Here, Eddy tells us why the marble statue, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, is the perfect medium for expressing flight.

The mind, he suggests, "is something of an altogether different nature than the matter through which it manifests itself." Otherwise, an artist wishing to convey flight might have used something light like chicken wire and papier-mâché. Instead the sculptor chose marble, and in the conflict between something heavy and the idea of flight, made his art.

Not all the essays here were written with radio in mind. Some were written as lectures while others stem from speeches or were drawn from other publications. Personally, I like the radio-length pieces the best because they seem to burst forth with so much gusto. By comparison, the longer pieces seem to drag.

But, who could not help going wholeheartedly for a piece with the title, "The Man with the Sun in His Hand." It is a story set in Kenya at an archeological site famous for its stone-axe finds. Eddy has gone there as one of the stopping-off places he has chosen to shoot a film he is making to depict "man’s relationship with his natural environment."

The film he is shooting here for a 1972 National Park Conference intends to show a Maasai discovering a stone axe buried in the sand and his coming to an understanding of what it is and where it came from. The filming takes an unexpected and unwanted historical turn, however, when the Maasai keeps on chewing a piece of gum Eddy had given him earlier.

Like any resourceful director, Eddy turns this cultural boondoggle into a plus for the film and leaves his readers with an image introduced earlier by a quote from the poet, T.S. Eliot:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.