Bau, Indonesia;
1957

This is such an insignificant village that for a moment as I approached, I considered sleeping along the trail. Drab pandanus houses, shaded by jungle, encircle a sun-baked clearing. In its center is a one-room school, a tiny cabin for the teacher & a palm sapling that may someday offer shade. The young teacher has one book only: Geological Strata of York County, Pennsylvania. But he understands what a book is, what it means to capture words & suspend time; what it means to organize all perceptions & experiences using the format of the book as model. This seemingly irrelevant book, donated thoughtlessly to some mission, couldn't be more appropriate, for it tells him that the true mapping, of the universe begins below the surface & that for scientists, truth lies in the underlying structures (laws) which govern appearances.

Dislodged from his own culture & unhoused in any single medium, my host is able to perceive literacy with a clarity denied those who live within its assumptions.

He unrolls a mat for me to sleep on but, just as we lie down, voices approach & soon the room is crowded, with other faces peering in from outside, the whole scene illuminated dimly by candles on the floor. Silence. Finally, in a low voice, an old man asks how their children can acquire knowledge unknown even to the elders.

It took only one Niels Bohr to turn Copenhagen into a world center for research in physics: a handful of these village teachers may pull off literacy's revolution here.