Word: shangri
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With its sparkling air, snow-capped mountains and countless whitewashed Buddhist temples, the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan is probably the world's closest real-life equivalent to James Hilton's Shangri-La. The 1,100,000 Bhutanese, most of whom are illiterate peasants, sense that they live in a uniquely calm and contented country, which they call "the end of the rainbow land of desires." Last week Bhutan gave itself another distinction by publicly crowning the world's youngest monarch, 18-year-old King Jigme Singye Wangchuk. He will henceforth be known as "the dragon king...
...been so charmed by and had blindly pursued in the name of fame and love of God as but the echo of an echo. The culture I aspired to see clearly would always by drowned by initial perceptions. Sunk beneath the latest translation and the re-re-echo. The Shangri-La Motel but the third version of an ersat movie. Of course the power of the original story remains and a core of great value transmitted, but this perception is not reality...
SUCH IDEAS LODGE entangled and warped in the eager boy and a diet of such Shangri-Las only feeds on itself. No lifeline is such romanticism, cut off from the very possibility of consistent and linear thought. Yes, lies in boxes stacked one by one along the ocean in a strip twenty miles long. Neon-emblemed inns and palaces, similar as a strip of concrete dolls notched with the original names of romance glowing from pastel tubes. Aku-Tiki, Capri, Ritz, Rivera, Bali Hai, Lodi. Still the ever more poignant essence remained, barely visible to this feeble romantic shell...
...what truth could the eager boy see through the window of an azure tinted windshield? Cruising through the neon-tinted streets as boy, his life blurred imperceptibly so the '57 Chevy he started out in became that same black Cadillac and he was indeed on the way to Shangri...
Jonathan Livingston Seagull is the warmest, most goodhearted, most tuneful (score by Neil Diamond) piece of moral uplift since the musical version of Lost Horizon. Years hence, scholars may debate the significance of the fact that the wise elder in Shangri-La and the wise bird here are both called Chiang. Surely it is no mere coincidence. A homage, perhaps. Or maybe a moment of mystic communion, a stroke of magic enlightenment of the sort that Jonathan is always shoving his beak into...