Why I Live in Tahiti

I

IT may be well to say at the outset that I have no desire to add another chapter to the already voluminous ‘Literature of Escape,’ and I do not for a moment believe that why I live in Tahiti or why I live at all is a matter of any great concern except to myself. But in these days, more than ever, it would seem, if a man steps out of the ranks of those who keep office hours and country-club lockers he is looked upon — well, as odd. Perhaps he is, but it can do no harm to investigate that point of view, or at least to explain one’s own.

Fortunately for those who do step out, — an insignificant number, — there will always be hosts of others to keep the office hours, to march shoulder to shoulder, getting things done in the world or trying to get them done. But these dogged plodders and doers have the defects of their qualities, and one of them is that they resent having disinterested spectators along their line of march. We applaud them wholeheartedly, but they do not want applause; they want emulation, and they seem to resent not getting it. During a recent brief visit to America I found that attitude toward me unmistakable in a small circle of relatives, friends, and acquaintances — but perhaps I am wrong. It may have been mere friendly curiosity as to my reasons for choosing a small tropical island in the mid-Pacific as a place in which to live.

In one case at least it was more than curiosity. It was an undisguised, loving concern for my moral and spiritual welfare, for in my Aunt Harriet’s picture of the South Seas there is always a white beach-comber in the middle foreground; and like a shadow behind him, reproaching him, stands the man he once was and will never be again. On the evening of my arrival at her house she followed me upstairs to the guestroom; and, having closed the door behind her, she sat down on a sofa to wait until I had unpacked my bag. When that small task was done, ‘Now, dear,’ she said, ‘we must have a long talk. I want you to tell me why you live on that wretched little island. You must tell me what keeps you there’ — and implicit in her voice and manner was an assurance of sympathy, of a desire to understand all and to forgive all.

Her question startled me a little, for I had never before thought of myself as actually living in Tahiti. I had always regarded America as home, and Tahiti and various other islands in the eastern Pacific as places where I made long and happy visits. But a moment’s reflection convinced me that she was right. I had spent four out of the last five years in Tahiti or thereabout. One hardly retains the status of visitor after so long a period. Yes, assuredly, ‘that wretched little island’ was my home if I might be said to have one.

We talked through dinner, after dinner, and until far into the night — I warming to my theme, becoming all but eloquent regarding the advantages of solitude and a simple, fairly primitive way of living; my aunt listening with evident interest, asking from time to time very pertinent questions. At length she brought the discussion round to the question of one’s duties, rights, and privileges as an American citizen. I said that I would always recognize my duty to go to the aid of the country in time of war; as for the rights and privileges, — although there were many, undoubtedly, — I was willing to forgo them in order that I might live according to my own ideas of what constitutes living. My aunt was surprised that I had no deep feeling of patriotism toward America as a whole, but this seems to me natural, inevitable. Patriotism is based upon community of blood, language, tradition, ideals; and, needless to say, there is no longer such community in the United States, nor can there be again for centuries to come—if ever. My aunt then questioned me as to my political opinions. I was in the course of explaining some of these, as well as I could, when she interrupted me.

‘I see now what is wrong,’ she said. ‘You are an anarchist! You may not admit it, but it’s true. If you had your way you would live in a place where there is no government at all!’

I consulted the dictionary to learn how, precisely, the word is defined. ‘Anarchist: one who believes in anarchy.’ ‘Anarchy: absence of government; disorder; confusion.’

I admitted, then, being an anarchist in the sense that I longed to live in a state where, without confusion or disorder, — quite the reverse, in fact,— government had been reduced to the vanishing-point. I was about to describe such a state, — not built by hands, — but she absolutely refused to listen.

‘No!' she said. ‘It is late and we won’t talk of this any more!'

She was really shocked, but she bade me good-night in her old gentle way as though convinced that an anarchist in her family must, somehow, he different from the general run of them. I was not sleepy and sat for a long time by the open window which overlooks some of the loveliest pastoral country in all the Mississippi Valley. The sky was cloudless, and under the ghostly light of the last-quarter moon the upland prairie seemed to be a part of that Land of Cockaigne which has always been my spiritual home no matter where my body happens to be.

Indeed, when I dream this land into being I sometimes identify it with Iowa, where I was born and reared; and, as soon as the identification is made, all of those actual residents of Iowa who do not and could not belong to this ideal commonwealth move of their own free will to California, which seems to be their spiritual home, and where, indeed, many thousands of them have already gone. When the last of them have crossed the Missouri River, invisible lethal walls rise, by magic, along the four boundaries of the state, and these are death to pass save to those people who are law-abiding without law — men and women of such enlightened understanding, so tolerant, just, humane, and farsighted, that, even when all are assembled from the uttermost parts of the Western world, they are not a great company, and have plenty of room for increase even in territory of Iowa’s modest dimensions. Here they live, and because they are all so richly endowed with the finest qualities of humankind at its best, the good of the individual and the good of their society are found to be synonymous.

No effort is needed to make this so; no laws need to be passed that it shall be so. It is so.

But when I approach one of the confines of this state of my own creation a feeling of drowsiness comes over me and I draw quickly back, out of danger. I realize that the walls are lethal for me, too. So I remain, gazing toward it from afar, comforting myself with the thought that the children of my children’s children, if they are wise in the choice of their forbears, may, perhaps, be admitted in humble capacities — as hewers of wood and drawers of water.

II

I do not, of course, believe that this anarchic state is likely to be builded soon. Meanwhile there is no reason why one should not seek out a place where one may at least play at anarchy. This is possible in Tahiti, which is one of the reasons why I live there.

In order to play at anarchy with any success, two conditions are essential: one must follow an art or profession or trade which provides the necessities of life; and it must be of such a kind that it may be practised, for the most part, in solitude. I have such a trade. It is journalism.

‘A journalist in solitude? How can that be?’ you say. ‘The words are antipathetic.’ I once thought they were, too, but I have found, in these days of specialization, that there may be all kinds of journalists just as there are all kinds of doctors, dentists, carpenters, clergymen. I do not know just how I fell into my particular branch of the trade or how long I may be able to follow it. Such as it is, I have it, and that suffices for the present.

You may ask, ‘How does one play at anarchy, granted that the conditions are favorable?’

One simply lives as though there were no government in existence. It will be understood that the fiction is more easily maintained in a country where one is an alien. The conditions are almost ideal in a small island colony half a world away from the parent Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But you must have no axes of any sort to grind, or exchange, or expose for sale there. When that is the case you may have very pleasant relationships with those who do. They realize that you are not competing or trying to compete with them; therefore they reveal to you only the best sides of their natures, and at length you are all but convinced that they have no other sides to reveal.

‘What an ostrich-like attitude!’ you may say.

Perhaps; but an anarchist, from the very nature of his belief, is forced to adopt it. And do not those of other faiths try, at times, to think as charitably as they can of their fellows? It is well that this should be. Suppose you have a friend who sees only your good qualities: although you may never deserve his high regard, you will often find yourself basking, to your own advantage, in the light of it. But I do not mean to infer that by living an aloof, disinterested life in Tahiti I have many baskers at my doorstep or that I have raised the standards of political or social or private morality there. In playing at anarchy the ends to be gained are, of course, sheer make-believe.

‘But what do you do with your time?’ you may ask. ‘You must find it hanging very heavily on your hands.’

Never — but for the sake of absolute veracity it is well to qualify that. Boredom is a universal spiritual disease and all men suffer from it at times, no matter where they may be. But I can say, truthfully, that attacks of it grow increasingly rare in Tahiti. In America, the most virulent cause of boredom, in my own case, was to see multitudes of people engaged in useless, joyless occupations. To be sure, many of them did not appear to be aware of the awful tedium of their lives, but, being a sensitive man, I suffered vicariously for them. This is the least endurable of all suffering. In Tahiti I escape it, for, with the exception of the government employees, there is no one engaged in joyless work.

It is curious, in a place where there are so few distractions of the usual kind, that time so rarely drags. After a month or two of this quiet, uneventful life you find that you are losing your old conception of time. It becomes, like the air, fluid, seemingly inexhaustible; you live in it and by it, but it never intrudes itself as something not to be wasted. You do waste it, — prodigally, I suppose, in the highlatitude sense: that is, you no longer make unremitting use of it to your own material advantage, — but I am not at all convinced that this is to be deplored. Often you will go for an all-day ramble up some grassy plateau which rises gradually toward the mountains, climbing on and on until you reach a vantage point where, on the one hand, you have a view into the depths of a great valley dappled with the shadows of clouds; and, on the other, of the palmclad lowlands and the broad lagoons beyond; and, beyond them again, of the sea — fifty, sixty miles of blue sea. There, listening to the silence, busy with your own thoughts or deep in fathomless reverie, you will sit until evening, surprised that evening comes so soon; and the strange thing — from the old, high-latitude point of view — is that such a waste of time brings not anxiety but peace of mind. It is easy to believe that you have been fulfilling, during those long hours of idleness, a small but important function in the scheme of things — holding up a tiny mirror that inanimate Nature might see through your eyes how beautiful she is. On such days you are convinced that loafing is a virtue and that three fourths of the unhappiness of the world is caused by the fact that men have forgotten how to loaf.

A few days ago I was reading Hilaire Belloc’s Cruise of the Nona. As he sailed his little boat along the coast of Wales he engaged in speculation as to the advantages and disadvantages of solitude and men’s capacity for it. A young man, he thought, might live alone as long as he chose, but older men found themselves increasingly in need of companionship as the years passed. I think it is just the other way around. A young man cannot endure solitude for any length of time. He needs and should have plenty of stimulating companionship, but by the time he has reached middle life it is my conviction that he can live most profitably with very little of it. Solitude, to be sure, is not an unmixed blessing, and too much of it might be as bad for one as too little; but in these days, when men swarm like ants over the greater part of the earth, there is small danger of anyone getting too much of it. The strange thing, to me, is that so few people seem to want any of it. They fly from solitude as though it were the wrath to come, and seem to have lost the capacity for being alone even during very brief periods. But it is a sound instinct, doubtless, which keeps the bulk of mankind in towns and cities where they are carried so swiftly along in the current of human affairs that they have little time to speculate as to the importance of either the speed or the direction of the current. Optimism is a crowd quality, and even spurious optimism may be healthy enough, and quite useful in a workaday world.

III

It is only fair to say that during my residence in Tahiti I have met but very few optimists, and I have not been able to decide thus far whether this, in itself, is one of the advantages or disadvantages of living here. I have often wondered why it is that this small island, in one of the backwaters of the world, should draw, as though by capillary attraction, so many authentic pessimists. It does, unquestionably. They are of all nationalities, from every walk of life, men of education, men of no education; but, diverse as they are in many respects, they have two qualities in common: they are all interesting men, and all are suffering from what the ancients — according to Dean Inge — called acedia (disillusionment), and which they defined as one of the seven deadly sins. It is not clear to me why disillusionment should be regarded as a sin, but perhaps it is, in a sense, from the social point of view. Certainly these men, almost without exception, are lookerson at life, out of sympathy with the spirit of their times. They are genial enough pessimists in many respects. They do not believe that this is the worst of all possible worlds, but they do believe that it might be, and never will be, a great deal better. Some of them appear to have been born too early and some too late; and so, not being able to act with any enthusiasm, they talk.

Many of them, through years of practice, have become past masters in the art of conversation, and it is this that makes them such interesting companions. I know, of course, that an abundance of stimulating conversation may be had in America if one knows where to seek it; but it seems to have been my misfortune, during the time I lived there, not to have known where, or it may have been how, to look for it. I used to wonder why it was that even small gatherings at home were usually so tedious. To be sure, words flowed perpetually, but they had little significance or interest. We were bored with each other without knowing why. The trouble was, I think, that we did not know how to talk or what to talk about. Things and events alone had importance as matter for conversation; so we discussed them, and, if you had had the courage and the patience, you might have sat through an endless number of those so-called conversations without hearing so much as a fleeting reference to an idea.

I wonder whether mine was a common experience? I hope not, but if it was, and still is, then something should be done about it. The best method of getting things done at home is to set aside a day for doing them. We have Mother’s Day when we must think of our mothers, and Father’s Day when we must think of our fathers. Well, why not have an Idea Day when those who are too busy during the rest of the year think and talk of ideas to the exclusion of everything else? But on second thought I am not sure that this would be a wise movement. There may be some connection between the frank discussion of ideas — particularly those capable of, but not likely to have, practical application — and the sin of acedia.

My experience leads me to believe that good talk is likely to result, even in groups of quite ordinary individuals, when favorable conditions lead to favorable occasions. In Tahiti one has ample leisure, not only to talk, but to think between periods of talk. Men come together after weeks or months of solitude, their minds surcharged with energy, their opinions carefully weighed and sorted against the time when they may be brought forth in company. Great lights dawn upon them during their lonely meditations. They are seized by great convictions or great doubts, and to share these is as necessary to them as breathing. The moment two or three of them meet, the conversation immediately centres around ideas, for things are conspicuous only by their absence, events by the rarity of their occurrence. What a satisfaction it is to escape the dominance of things— not to be perpetually reminded of them, stimulated to think of them or to want them, or to acquire them without wanting them! Very few people here have accumulated possessions. As for the pessimists I have been speaking of, nearly all have achieved affluence in the Diogenic sense, estimating their wealth in terms of the things they can do without. Encouraged by necessity and their example, I too have been storing up treasure of this sort for some time past, and, although not yet among the truly opulent ones, I live much more simply and cheaply than would be possible, even for a journalist, in America. In fact, my scale of living is about that of a small mechanic — even that of a day laborer — at home. One reason why my visits to America are both infrequent and brief is that, the moment I arrive there, I find that the acquisitive instinct in me is dormant merely, not dead, and within a week it quickens into life. I have to hurry away lest I yield to the old tyranny of things.

My friends, the Acediasts, are great readers, and this is another important minor advantage of living here: one has both the leisure and the inclination to read extensively. Most men would agree that literature is the finest of the arts, music alone excepted. If this is true, then the time one gives to the reading of good books should be considerable, and here it is so. In America, although I got through many books during the course of a year, it was reading with the eyes for the most part — rarely were mind and spirit fully engaged. There were too many distractions, and even when most deeply absorbed I was conscious all the while of the likelihood of interruption, so that I entered only half-heartedly the world of the imagination, like a doctor who goes to the theatre expecting at any moment to be called away. For reading, one must have solitude and the assurance of freedom from interruption, and in Tahiti as nowhere else I have been able to fulfill both of these conditions. I have a small house which stands on a peninsula about an acre in extent. No road passes through it — only a footpath used by two or three native families living in the vicinity. The house faces the sea, with a northwest exposure, and the nearest neighbors in that direction are the Manahiki Islanders, some eight hundred miles away. Those to the right and left are closer at hand, but they are the most discreet and thoughtful of neighbors and never intrude. Their houses are completely hidden by groves of palms and pandanus trees. Often I see no one for days, and in the secluded, sunny silence of the place it is easy to imagine that I am living on an otherwise uninhabited island. Here, many a time, secure from interruption, I have read fora solid week—mornings, afternoons, evenings, and until far into the night, living in books more intensely than I have ever lived in the world of reality.

Only a few weeks ago I was engaged in one of these periodical orgies, and one of the books was Conrad’s Lord Jim. I know it almost by heart, but my enjoyment was as keen at this fifth reading — or was it the sixth? — as it would be were I to hear Beethoven’s C-Minor Symphony for the twentieth time.

I had reached that point in the story where Marlowe tells of his visit to Stein, whom he wished to consult about Jim’s case: —

Late in the evening I entered his study, after traversing an imposing but empty dining-room very dimly lit. The house was silent. I was preceded by an elderly grim Javanese servant in a sort of livery of white jacket and yellow sarong, who, after throwing the door open, exclaimed low, ‘O master!’ and, stepping aside, vanished in a mysterious way as though he had been a ghost only momentarily embodied for that particular service.

The magic of this chapter has always been potent for me, but on this occasion it was something more than magic. I was on my knees, in spirit, before the beauty of it. I realized that here was something perfect. Nothing in it could be altered except to its detriment — nothing omitted, nothing added.

Reading it under these circumstances was an approach to what is commonly called a religious experience. It seemed to me that I had had a glimpse of something divine. When it faded, swiftly, as such glimpses do, I went over the chapter again, and, although the fine moment could not be repeated, I had a journalist’s delight in seeing with what complete mastery Conrad had worked here, how every word held its place by inevitable right, and how the chapter as a whole fitted into the story with that perfection which even the greatest artists do not achieve more than once or twice in a lifetime.

It is for pleasure so keen as this, among other things,— for profit so worth while, — that I live on this jog-trot island in the mid-Pacific. Pleasure as keen and profit as great may be found elsewhere, of course; I hold no brief for Tahiti as the one place in which to live. The important thing is for the individual to discover for himself the environment best suited to him and then to stick to it as long as he can. American life in these days is alien to me; it moves too rapidly and there is little time for the pursuits I love most. How little time there is was brought home to me with conviction quite recently. I received from a firm of publishers an advertising pamphlet in the form of a prospectus for a magazine which they planned to issue under some such title as ‘Tabloid Literature.’ The purpose of the magazine was ‘to give busy men an opportunity to survey, adequately and briefly, the whole field of modern English literature.’ In one department novels were to be condensed ‘by expert and sympathetic abridgers’ to the compass of from twenty to thirty pages, so that one might read a dozen of them in the time usually given to one. Samples were given of two novels thus condensed, and one of them was Lord Jim. I noticed that it did not contain even a brief extract from chapter twenty. At the top of the prospectus there was a quotation from Kipling’s ‘ If’: —

Under this was printed: ‘Minutes are priceless possessions in our hurried modern life. Use yours to the best advantage.’ I did — by throwing the prospectus in the waste-paper basket, proceeding then with a leisurely perusal of The Dance of Life (unabridged), by Havelock Ellis.

A better plan than this might be for an association of authors and publishers to establish a fund for subsidizing readers so that the art of reading may not be wholly lost. As for literary critics, it is a great pity that a few of them may not be subsidized as well and sent to the four corners of the world to do their work in solitude. Four of them would be quite enough to review all the books worth reviewing which are printed in the course of one year. One might be stationed in Tahiti, one in Iceland, one in the Sahara Desert, one in some mountain fastness of the farthest Andes. There, unharassed, unhurried, free from the depression which comes from being encompassed by multitudes of books, they might render service of real value to the world. If they were given not more than a dozen books a year to read and review, and if great care had been exercised in choosing both the books and the men, literary criticism in America might — and very likely would — surpass in excellence any that the Western world has yet enjoyed.

IV

I have talked long enough, and yet there are scores of excellent reasons why I live in Tahiti that I have not even mentioned. But there is one more which has great weight with me: in a small island world one may comprehend all individual, social, and political activity at a glance. This adds enormously to the pleasure of living. One is bewildered by the complexity of life on a great continent. Here there is diversity without complexity, a mingling of races comparable to that in America, but on a small scale. To visit the Tahiti market of an early morning is to see the world in miniature: Polynesians, Chinese, French, English, Americans, Russians, Danes, Scandinavians; and it is of endless interest to see how these diverse elements accommodate themselves to their environment and to each other — to listen to the confusion of tongues and to note the results of the mingling of bloods. But the ultimate result of this mingling is already clearly apparent. Within the space of fifty years the Chinese have conquered Tahiti as completely as they will conquer all of French Polynesia well before the conclusion of this century. I doubt whether there could be found anywhere else so triumphant an example of the efficacy of peaceful conquest.

And so the time is at hand when this island, which might so easily have been set aside for the spiritual refreshment of all harmless anarchists, will be swarming with a class of Orientals who care nothing for spiritual refreshment — whose one concern appears to be to increase and multiply to the limit of nature’s forbearance. But the Pacific is wide, and spangled with islands as the sky with stars. Although there is but one Tahiti, other crumbs of land exist where the anarchists may still find solitude and peace of mind, scaling lofty mountains for a distant view of the world, or walking lonely beaches, deep in unprofitable thought.