Opinion | The Trouble With Paradise
One day in my 20s, several decades ago, I got on a plane in New York City and flew across the world. It was dark when I arrived in Bali, but when I awoke the next day, a young man with a beautiful smile brought me fresh mango and strong tea to enjoy on the terrace of my bungalow. All around, playing amid bright flowers, were little girls with the faces of angels. Within hours, midwinter gloom had been transformed, as if by magic, into tropical sunshine. I was paying two dollars a night for a cottage of my own with a golden beach 45 seconds away, down a fragrant, palm-shaded lane.
I was in Eden, I decided. When night fell, however, I began to hear the clangorous and dissonant sound of gamelan orchestras, eerie, on every side of me. I saw boys with beautiful smiles stabbing themselves with daggers in a ritual dance that re-enacts a legendary battle between black magic and white. The little girls with angel faces were performing their dances while in a trance. Eden, I began to recall, is the place where it’s death to know too much.
All along the dusty streets were masks on sale, in front of dusty shacks. Smiling gods, grinning demons, mythical birds that glared at me so intently I had to hurry past. Finally I came upon a mask of an owl, red and yellow and green, that looked like the perfect thing to take home, an innocuous memento of the enchanted island. As soon as I got back to my apartment on East 20th Street, I put the mask on the wall — and within seconds I had to tear it down and put it away where I’d never see it again. There was a power to the object that reminded me that I couldn’t begin to understand the charged forces all around me on the island. Even what looked to be a child’s plaything was effectively a “No Trespassing” sign.
As a constant traveler for 49 years now, I sometimes feel I’ve been zigzagging from one “paradise” to the next. From Tahiti to Tibet, from the Seychelles to Antarctica, I’ve found tourist posters conspiring with travelers’ hopes to present every place as a kind of Eden. Yet often it’s our very notions of paradise that intensify divisions. In Sri Lanka I’d realized that the island has so often been taken to be Arcadia — Arabs saw it as “contiguous with the Garden of Eden,” and an Italian papal legate announced that the waters of paradise could be there — that the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and millions of us tourists have all scrambled to grab a piece of it.
