After Many Years

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 477, 13 August 1948, Page 5

After Many Years

T is good for us when a New Zealander who knows other countries, who has . lived abroad and worked abroad without forgetting where he came from, comes back again and. criticises us; and it is especially good when he is a man of strong character and high intelligence. We must therefore welcome the sharp criticism of New Zealand attributed in a cable last week to Dr. L. J. Comrie, Superintendent of the Nautical. Almanac, Dr. Comrie is one of the most distinguished living New Zealanders in the calm ‘grey world of mathematics. If he does not know all the secrets of the heavens he knows enough of them to ‘edit the sailor’s bible and "say when" to thousands of anxious owners and navigators. And he does’ not like what has happened to us in his long absence, from Pukekohé. We don’t want to get on, he thinks, and we don’t want to serve; we don’t waht to be criticised, and we don’t want to pay for our leisure; our hotels are poor, we are not selling our scenery, and as for "the long: New Zealand week-end," its: ‘dreariness, he says, astounded him. Well that is a rather moving jeremiad from a prophet of 55, and it is clear that we had better pull up our socks. We had better do it before we get his really long-whiskered admonitions; but it is not irreverent to wonder while we are doing it how a tompiler._ of almanacs can. find time heavy. How can any man of science not know what to do with himself anywhere, especially if he has a photographic memory. like Dr. Comrie’s. If philosophy fails us when we have reduced all knowledge to symbols, have we not floated too long and too high in cold thin air? And if our bowels boil when we see "magnificent scenery" as nature made it, without hotels, tourists, and touts, hhave we not forgotten that there are other things to do with mountains than to "pluck the spoil out of their teeth?"