He that sups with the devil must have a long spoon.

(Proverb)

Today, which is three days after the signatory EAOs met Dr Tin Myo Win, the State Counselor’s “contact person,” it seems quite clear there won’t be a meeting between her and them on 10 May, as stated earlier.

“The invitation for the 9 May meeting ‘among ourselves’ was issued since 2 May,” one informed friend explains. “It means if the planned meeting is to be on the 10^th, the invitation should be out already.”

(The meeting ‘among ourselves’—with perspective members of the new government’s negotiating team— ended with a decision to ensure “the best possible inclusiveness as can be obtained” in the preparation of the 21^st century Panglong Conference, according to a report which followed the meeting)

Another friend is worried whether “the Lady” is planning to go around the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), as she has done with the 2008 constitution. “No doubt she’s smart,” he says. “But doing it quite often may amount to courting confrontation.

“She has already done some damage to the fragile relationship between her and the military by bringing in people who are closely associated with ‘General’ Shwe Mann into the new government,” he adds. “Why, some have even started to call this administration Shwe Mann’s cabinet.”

Today I have nothing to do except to flock with birds of a feather to learn from them things which I can’t get anywhere else.

Naturally, I have learned more than that I have written and will be writing. But telling ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ doesn’t always help with peace and reconciliation. So I’ll just pretend I’ve ever heard them and the reader won’t ask me what they are.

I later return to my room to write and then to read.

The book I’ve brought this time is a historical novel, “The Walking Drum,” by the late Louis L’Amour, best known for his westerns. I have got almost every book he wrote at home, and this is one of them.

I like it because it’s the first one that tells me about the world in the 12^th century when Christian Europe was still in the Dark Age and the Islamic World was going through its Golden Age.

It was a time when books in Christian Europe were thrown out and burned on the theory that if they repeated what the Bible said, they were unnecessary, and if they said what wasn’t in the Bible, they were untrue.

Meanwhile, the world’s greatest libraries were being established in Muslim cities such as Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo and Cordoba.

Various Muslim states at the time were dynamic superpowers because of learning, tolerance and trade, wrote the Economist. “They need to cast their minds back to the values that once made the Arab world great. At its best, (the Arab world) was a haven for Jews, Christians and Muslims of many sects. They could do so again.”

Then my thoughts return to the country I’m in.

And a thought, unthought, comes to my mind:

Yes, we too could do it again.