MItchell Zuckoff - Lost in Shangri-La - Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story

Often read as an adventure tale, Hilton’s book is really a meditation on finding peace and preserving humanity in a world spiralling towards self-destruction. Hilton saw ‘civilization’ trapped in a ruinous cycle, careening from one war to the next, each more deadly and destructive than the last. In a long exchange between two main characters, Lost Horizon anticipated a global war of unimaginable proportions. More than a decade before the first atom bomb, Hilton feared a future in which ‘a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army’.

Describing one especially wise character, Hilton wrote: ‘He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless – all would be lost.’

Hilton’s frightening prediction didn’t escape notice. President Roosevelt quoted that passage from Lost Horizon in a 1937 speech in Chicago. Four years before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt used Hilton’s horrifying vision to warn that, in defence of civilization, America might find itself forced to quarantine aggressive nations bent on unleashing a global storm. Roosevelt’s warning had proved prescient.

It’s no wonder, then, that a pair of veteran war correspondents looked wistfully on a fertile valley, sealed from the outside world, its natives ignorant of war, Nazis and kamikazes , and thought of the name that Hilton had given his fictional paradise. Never mind the reports of headhunters and cannibals, of spears and arrows, of watchtowers and sentries and battles among neighbours. Never mind the possibility that the native world glimpsed by Colonel Elsmore and Major Grimes wasn’t peaceful at all, but a window into a shared human inheritance, one that suggested that the very nature of man was to make war.

Those questions could wait for another day, perhaps until someone from outside entered the valley and met the natives. In the meantime, George Lait and Harry Patterson bestowed a new name on New Guinea’s Hidden Valley: they called it Shangri-La.

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