By Toh Hsien Min

Early in 2015, I was wondering where to go in my annual quest to use up leave, and asked myself if it was finally time to get Tunisia off my list. I'm not sure when it began becoming habitual for an otherwise fairly laissez-faire traveller, but I scrolled through a clutch of websites providing advisories on safety and security (e.g. by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office), and came to the conclusion that there was just a little too much risk at the time. A friend who was contemplating a similar trip had no such concerns, while I chose the incredibly safe Prague as my eventual destination after a Paris stopover instead. A week before we were due to fly on our respective itineraries, the first Tunisia attack at the Bardo National Museum happened. My friend didn't cancel, but her trip came with the extra feature of an armed guard travelling in convoy with the tour group everywhere they went.

This year, my annual quest to use up leave was aided by some friends having managed to secure a reservation at El Celler de Can Roca, and while I was happy enough to join them for a good meal, Spain didn't strike me as a place in which I particularly wanted to spend time, so it was round to the usual question of where I could get to from Barcelona that I couldn't easily get to directly from Singapore. After contemplating a bunch of places starting with 'B', no doubt drawn by the alliteration, I chose Belgium over Bratislava and Budapest. Again I scanned the safety advisories and came to the conclusion this time that there was some degree of risk but it was containable. This felt a little less so when, the day I landed in Barcelona, the surviving member of the group responsible for the Paris attacks in November, Salah Abdeslam, was captured in Brussels.

I was in Bruges when it all happened; just before the commencement of a day tour to the World War I battlefields around Ypres, the guide announced that there had been a terrorist attack in Brussels. I returned later that week to a Brussels that had shed its understated, introverted character for a state of high anxiety. The museums were closed, restaurants were closed, and you couldn't walk on the streets without hearing a siren wailing its way in one direction or other. All the entrances to the labyrinthine Brussels Centraal station were closed except for one, where a security check was holding up a large crowd of people and creating an even more obvious soft target. Furthermore, Zaventem airport was to remain shuttered for the foreseeable future, so I had to patch together a plan B involving railing down to the comparative calm of Paris and rearranging a return flight from CDG. In the meantime, I made my way to the Place de la Bourse to join the memorial that had spontaneously sprouted up there. It was moving. There were lots of people of all stripes, flowers, candles, scribbled notes on pieces of cardboard, and chalked notes all over the pavements and walls of the Bourse, all united in defiance of all that the Brussels attackers stood for.

The experience did, however, set me thinking why Western Europe, with its left-of-centre instincts, should have become one of the centres of global terrorism risk. While its institutions are set up to promote ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, there remains a systematic gap to how European society brings these into practice. At around the same time, I was engaged in negotiations in the same part of the world, and what struck me was the lack of cross-cultural empathy among those who would profess liberal ideals; the inexplicable tendency to interpret behaviour that did not sit with one's own beliefs in the least charitable manner, rather than seeking engagement and allowing the benefit of the doubt, seemed incongruent with those ideals. In the areas of security, diplomacy and even commerce, this tendency is at best unhelpful and more likely to obstruct one's own objectives. It made me wonder if what we are living through is the closing of the European mind.

I don't suppose that it is always true that literature can encourage the development of empathy in readers, but only because I suppose that relatively few things are well described by absolutes such as "always". So I've found it intriguing that Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister had been sufficiently literary to have published poetry in his youth, which for me makes Theophilus Kwek's reassessment of the Young Writers' Circle in the 1970s, from both a literary and historical perspective as he is most qualified to do, the highlight of this issue (perhaps shading a more conventional review on the massive T.S. Eliot Collected released by Faber last year to replace the Collected Poems 1909-1962). If, as Walter Benjamin puts it, "to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was.' It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger", it will be fascinating to see under what paradigm we will eventually view this era with more occasion than ever before for cultures to meet - and to yield up moments of danger.

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