Welcome
by Neil Caudle
The limestone promontories of southern Thailand are known as tower karsts. Long ago, sea creatures left their secretions in strata that buckled and jutted far into the sky. For ages, the tropical rainfall has eaten away at the limestone, slowly dissolving its calcium, seeping through crevices, opening gorges and caves.
One day last February, I sat under the canopy of a long-tail boat, admiring a powerful series of stark, toothy karsts in a placid blue sea. In movies, the towers are backdrops for violent action, exotic enough for James Bond. But in person, you sense their great lithic repose, and their slow dissolution in tropical rain. Even when your boat blows an engine, and sets you adrift a far distance from shore, the karsts will be soothing, imparting humility, patience, and calm.
Eight days before, I had stood on an observation deck in Singapore, looking out at the sparkling new campus of Biopolis, a research park in hyperdrive. Singapore is where you go to observe the warp-speed tectonics of global economics. It’s where you measure the tempo in minutes, not millennia. In twenty short months, the developers of Biopolis built seven huge towers of glass.
The pulse of Singapore is electric; everything is wired. School buses carry global positioning systems so that parents can pinpoint the coordinates of their children anywhere along the route. In the elevator lobby in Biopolis, a digital monitor displays an animation of earnest, high-tech workers living and working in the futuristic wonderland of Fusionopolis (coming soon!). So the towers of Singapore impart a different state of mind: ambition, impatience, and buzz.
Wherever we go to learn something new, we take up the form of a place as we take up its knowledge. If I were advising a student, I would say this: Go to Singapore and visit the towers of glass. Tune yourself to their electric hum. Learn how to think in the now and the next of this digital age. But then go to Thailand, where the towers are timeless, and the agent of change is the trickle of water on stone. Understand both kinds of landscape, and both kinds of mind.
—The Editor
