“A Shining City on a Hill” is an odyssey of discovery that takes readers into the breach, a remarkable fissure in America’s mighty carapace, which leads to inconvenient secrets, understood and acknowledged by relatively few privileged individuals. In the early 1980s, travelling from the Indian sub-continent to luxurious Aspen and the consciousness-mad reaches of Boulder, Colorado, Viscount Côme Carpentier de Gourdon, a French expatriate partly raised in India (and who lives there today), explores frontier consciousness with formidable intellectual dynamism.
I have an unusual reason for being interested in this challenging book. In the late 1950s, in Western Canada, just past eight o’clock on a still winter’s night, I saw what appeared to be a formation of nine lighted spheres passing low over a wooded field, outside Victoria. This grouping, altogether shaped like a V, moved deliberately, high above tall trees, and then swept eastward, away from my view. Standing beside me were two senior members of my family, conservative types not given to flighty thinking. I asked my great-uncle, a retired general who’d been around a bit, what he thought it was up there. He smiled thinly and quoted Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Côme Carpentier de Gourdon opens a chapter with that very quotation from Hamlet; this connected me, through many decades, with quite a strange childhood experience…. I enjoyed this inner space exploration–and though a good editor would have been useful to the book’s Indian publisher, I believe that the truths which Côme Carpentier de Gourdon seeks are both eternal and essential to human understanding.