what essay all about sulliman in the seventies: A personal journey by athony l tan
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By Anthony L. Tan
I remember the words of Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy”: Maybe we’re here only to say: house,/bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window — / at most, pillar, tower…but to say them, remember,/ oh to say them in a way that the things themselves/never dreamed of existing so intensely. Albert Faurot, the music teacher, gave me a bilingual edition of Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. His dedication “To another poet and friend “gave me one of the high moments of my life in Silliman. His End House was a favorite haunt for Butch Macasantos, Armando, my younger brother, and me; yet when he passed away I was not even around to pay him my last respects.When for the first time I came to Silliman, I was trying to escape from the limitations of my island home in the Sulu sea. I was in search of another island, disdaining a humdrum destiny that was mine at birth, the destiny my ancestors, even from their graves, seemed to have foisted on me. I had thought then that I was urged on, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, by hunger for new knowledge. Even before this hunger had been appeased, a deeper kind of hunger was growing inside of me. It masked itself as the hunger to move about, but in reality it was not wanderlust but, my enemies would think, the other kind of wandering and lusting. I must be kind and just to myself and think simply that this new kind of hunger grew out of the demise of an old love, unfortunately because of my immaturity. I wanted to make up for that loss, and I thought a new island would be the right place to start anew because in a manner of speaking, my old island home had been washed away by the waves of time and misfortune.