Conversation on an Island

I

‘THIS is a happy surprise! When did you come?’

‘Two hours ago.’

‘And you’ve been waiting all this time? I’m sorry. You should let me know when to expect you.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve had a pleasant afternoon on your verandah, reading, listening to the mynah birds, and watching the light change color on the lagoon. The mynahs interest me. It is easy to imagine that they are actually conversing, exchanging ideas; and they seem to have as many moods as there are hours in the day, with a call to suit each one.’

‘They are too quarrelsome, I think, for such a peaceful little island as Tahiti. Anyone would know that they had been imported. . . . What have you been reading?’

‘Robert Frost’s poems. This small volume seemed to bow itself into my hand from the shelf, as though it expected to be taken down. I noticed that your Carl Sandburg is held firmly in place by spider webs.’

‘That was a gift volume — none of my own choosing. You may have it if you like.

‘Did you read that? And “Going for Water,” and “House Fear”? It seems extraordinary to me that twentieth-century America could have produced Robert Frost — or, rather, have failed to crush the poetry out of him.’

‘I like his sonnet called “Mowing” better than those you have named.’ ‘Read it aloud, will you?’

‘“And scared a bright green snake”

— I wish that might have been altered.'

‘WhatI Do you object to the little green serpent streaking away through the grass? It belongs there; it’s precisely right.’

‘Yes, I see that now; it does belong. I suppose it was “scared” that grated on me, but I don’t see what other word he could have used.’

‘The line that follows is the one I hoped you would notice. “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows” — that is what all scythes whisper to the ground, and all men to themselves, both in thought and in action, as long as they have breath in their bodies. What a world of difference between Frost’s way of saying this and Longfellow’s “Something attempted, something done, has earned a night’s repose”!’

‘You believe it, then?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘The mere perfect saying of it in this case seems to make it valid; but in my opinion the facts that labor knows are not the only ones, nor do they necessarily give rise to the sweetest dreams.’

‘Now what do you mean by that?’ ‘Precisely what the words import. But men will never see alike in this matter — and fortunately so, for us idle ones. Let those who must, mow, and take pleasure at evening in the fact of their labor and its accomplishment. Let those who will — only a handful of the sons of earth — sit idly by, watching their own fields of uncut grass ruffled to a deeper, richer green by the summer breeze, and dappled by the shadows of clouds. They will have pleasure and profit — as great in degree, perhaps, as that of the mowers — in the indisputable fact of their idleness.’

‘This kind of nonsense is what comes of rambling in the hills so often. I suppose that is what you’ve been doing all day?’

’Yes. I went far up the Haapape plateau to that highest point you can just make out from the road. It’s the most beautiful spot on Tahiti, and save for myself and a few natives who pass that way to gather mountain plantains no one goes there from year’s end to year’s end. And the same is true of all the hills, plateaus, upland valleys, and mountains of the island, as you would discover if you were not so lazy. Once the narrow fringe of coastal land is left behind, you have more than one

hundred square miles for a pleasure garden, and no one ever to disturb you in it.'

‘The sea is a pleasure garden large enough for me, and a thousand times more varied in its interest than your mountains. How wide a view do you have from that highest point?’

‘Don’t expect me to tell you. You must visit the place for yourself, sometime. Now and then I can make out your little boat, and although you are miles offshore you seem to be creeping just outside the barrier reef. From my eyrie I can see the rotundity of the world, and in imagination I visit thousands of islands scattered over the downward slopes of the Pacific. I have come back to-day feeling so spiritually refreshed that it seems to me now that nothing could ever disturb, or depress, or sadden me again. These baths of solitude bring me a profound peace of mind and heart.’

‘Perhaps I had better go? I might say or do something to mar your sense of peace.’

‘It is less easily marred than you may think. Please stay! Let’s have another of our desultory conversations. It is n’t often that we see each other.’

II

‘How do you occupy your time on these all-day excursions? What do you think about? What, for example, were you thinking to-day?’

‘For a part of the time, of nothing at all. I have acquired the habit of reverie; but often it is something deeper than reverie. I sit for half an hour at a time, even longer, lost in what I can only describe as a dreamless dream, if that means anything to you — a waking trance that seems as deep as the sky itself on a cloudless day. At other times I am aware of my identity, but what passes over the surface of consciousness disturbs it no more than cloud reflections stir the depths of these lagoons. I see the beauty of the shadows in ravines and hollows among the mountains, and I feel rather than hear the fern rustling in the wind, as though silence itself were making the sound as it flows seaward from the hills. Sometimes the call of a wood pigeon comes to me from an immeasurable distance; but that is as far as sensibility goes. I often think of it as sensibility lying somewhere between that of animals and that of vegetables.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that the habit of reverie might be a dangerous one to cultivate? Even in the South Seas you must keep some contact with a workaday world. You have your living to earn, and the worst possible preparation for that, it seems to me, is to sit on a plateau dreaming dreamless dreams.’

‘Most of the good things of life have their dangerous elements, as someone has remarked before now. Common sense sometimes hints that my solitary rambles are a waste of time, or worse, but uncommon sense assures me of the contrary. I am convinced that much of the world’s unhappiness is caused by the fact that men have lost the faculty of being idle. Think of the friends and acquaintances we have in common at home: how many of them are even moderately content, to say nothing of being happy, in their beautifully appointed treadmills? How many of them love the modern gods of Business, Efficiency, Speed, Creature Comfort, Luxury? They are typical of hundreds of thousands who have slaved the better part of their lives away to secure such blessings as these gods can offer, and they are beginning to recognize them for what they are. I believe that, a change is coming soon — that it must come. Men will turn back to a simpler, ampler, more wholesome way of living, and once they do they will wonder that they were ever so foolish as to have been led astray from it. They will seek wisdom from Henry Thoreau rather than from Henry Ford, and refuse to be cheated longer by either business, social, or even family obligations of leisure, the most precious of all gifts.’

‘This brings the discussion round to the old question: leisure for what? Only a small number of men really want leisure. There are untold thousands who would not know what to do with it if they had it; thousands more, who might have it, refuse to accept it at any price. They travel frantically from one place to another, from one country to another, from one distraction to another. in order to escape this boon. It strikes me that most of those who seek it find and enjoy it even in these days, and whatever their circumstances may be. Some have more than is good for them, and so they cultivate the habit of reverie.’

‘I am not alone in thinking it a habit worth cultivating. Let me read you a passage from a very interesting article I found in a recent number of the New Republic. It is called “The Case for Religion,” and was written by a hardheaded professor of economics. What is a man to do to save his soul in these troubled times? How is he to bring order and peace into his own life, however chaotic the spiritual and social conditions around him may be? This is one of the suggestions, and as it is the concluding one it was evidently considered of importance: “And one thing more let him learn: learn to be still — to sit or walk alone, say, an occasional half hour, not thinking, not reading, with mind and body as quiet as he can make them. Let him practise that stillness, persevering (for this is difficult) night and morning, until he have its secret. And all for the sake of adventure, to see what would come of it, with no guarantee that anything would come except boredom.”'

‘And boredom is all that would come of it in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.’

‘My opinion of the average man is higher than yours. I believe that he has unguessed faculties for discovering himself; all that he lacks is the knowledge of how to get at them. Nothing could be better, as a preparation for his work of exploration, than to learn to sit quietly, his mind fallow, and his habitual nervous tension relaxed. Having acquired this faculty, he would never, willingly, lose it. Every man has it who knows anything at all of the art of living. It seems to me a great pity that there are no secular establishments where the distracted and harassed average man might go into retreat, as the Catholics do. If I had a fortune that I wished to use wisely, I would found such houses, and they should be free to those who knew how, or could learn how, to use them. They would be situated, some of them, in cities, but high-walled and secret from the outside world. Others would be in the loneliest possible places — in the deserts, in the mountains, at vantage points where wide views of the landscape might be had. The food would be simple and wholesome; all the appointments would be in keeping with the spirit of such an enterprise, and beyond the immediate vicinity of the houses wild nature would be in no way interfered with. Here men could throw off all care, and study to know themselves. They could be as solitary as they chose; their privacy would be scrupulously respected, but for those who wished it, and who, perhaps, lacked it in their ordinary lives, there would be evenings of stimulating conversation.’

‘And who would do the stimulating?'

‘Themselves. Men who seem dull and commonplace are often so only because of the soul-killing conditions under which they must live. Give them room to expand, to breathe freely and naturally, and they throw off lethargy as though it were an old coat.’

III

‘And these houses for spiritual refreshment would be for the average man, you say — the man one sees at ball games and lodge meetings, in hotel lobbies and suburban trains. Well, it is fortunate that you lack the means to build your retreats, for the average man could be neither persuaded nor bribed to visit one of them. But, to come back to Tahiti and ourselves, I have often wondered why you stay on here, year after year. Is it because you love solitude so much?’

‘Partly that, although one doesn’t, of course, have to come so far to find it. But the remoteness of this tiny island appeals to me in a particular way. Isolation is made tangible by thousands of miles of unfrequented sea stretching away on every side; you know that it can’t be easily violated. Then, too, I love a circumscribed world, one small enough to be comprehended at a glance, so to speak, and yet large enough to offer a certain amount of variety in the way of landscape. In such a world you can keep your thoughts at home, occupied with affairs that really concern you; neither your time nor your energy is dissipated in thinking of extraneous matters. And for a lover of uninterrupted reading, what could be more delightful than a crumb of land in the middle of the Pacific? I am never for a moment lonely here, and almost never bored. By means of books and quiet meditation I have become more and more aware of the reality of the “uncovenanted society of spirits” Mr. Santayana speaks of in one of his Soliloquies in England. Wait — let me find the passage.’

‘I was glancing through your bookshelves this afternoon. How many volumes have you here?'

‘Seven hundred odd.’

‘Have you read them all?’

‘Most of them two or three times. Nearly all of them at least once. A dozen or more gift novels I have not examined, and probably never shall; and no one, I imagine, ever reads a volume of “Complete Poems” from cover to cover.’

‘What a striking picture of yourself these bookshelves offer! A stranger, examining these volumes, would be able to conjure you up — “the portrait of a man deduced from his library.’”

‘It would not be a good likeness. Many of the books I love most have been lost or left behind as I have wandered from place to place.’

‘Supposing that you had to choose ten books to suffice you for the rest of your life: what ones would you select? I mean from those now on your shelves.’

‘Could you make an offhand choice in such a matter? I should need many days for the decision.’

‘Well, put it this way: if you had to make such a choice to-night, what ten would you most regret leaving behind?’

‘We’ll talk of that another time. This is the passage from Santayana; it concludes an essay called “CrossLights”: “There is an uncovenanted society of spirits, like that of the morning stars singing together, or of all the larks at once in the sky; it is a happy accident of freedom and a conspiracy of solitudes. When people talk together, they are at once entangled in a mesh of instrumentalities, irrelevance, misunderstanding, vanity, and propaganda; and all to no purpose, for why should creatures become alike who are different? But when minds, being naturally akin and each alone in its own heaven, soliloquize in harmony, saying compatible things only because their hearts are similar, then society is friendship in the spirit; and the unison of many thoughts twinkles happily in the night across the void of separation.’”

’He puts the case eloquently, but that sort of companionship is too ethereal for my taste. I prefer actual companionship, the presence in the flesh of other men whom I can see and hear and touch with my physical senses, men who emit their forces of attraction and repulsion as I do mine. The communion of spirit with spirit across a void of separation — no, no! Give me two or three good companions sitting check by jowl around a table, with several bottles of excellent wine before them. What if we do become somewhat entangled in a mesh of vanity and propaganda? That is because we are human. Conversation will only sparkle and crackle the more. Don’t you agree?’

‘Such conversations are delightful, but they are on an altogether different plane, it seems to me, from those Mr. Santayana has in mind. And even in this case I have heard you yourself say that you like your friends better at a distance, and that you enjoy their companionship more when you don’t see them. Have your actual friends ever brought you the pure joy that you sometimes find through books? I doubt it; they disappoint you, and you them. That is why friendship in the spirit is usually to be preferred to such friendship in the flesh as chance may put in one’s way in the course of a lifetime. Chance distributes its favors with such an appalling lack of forethought and discrimination, and, in the matter of friendships, more than likely the ones you receive are not at all the ones you should have had, or would have chosen for yourself. Therefore one falls back gladly, of necessity, upon this uncovenanted society of spirits, one of the oldest and most valuable societies in the world. Books are not wholly necessary to its existence, but they furnish an excellent means whereby messages may be transmitted from one member to another. Here one finds the friendship most worth having, and humble men need not feel abashed in the presence of their betters. This is society in the highest sense, the true world democracy, and the only one there will ever be.’

IV

‘But you need n’t have come all the way to the South Seas to enjoy these privileges. You might have done that as well — even better — in New York City, or London, or Paris.’

‘Perhaps. . . . But why do you live at Tahiti rather than at home, in the United States?’

‘Because I like a tropical climate, fishing in tropical waters, and going to seed slowly and pleasantly.’

‘You think one does go to seed here?’

‘I know it. Consider our own cases as examples: we are neither of us anything like so alert, mentally, as we were only three years ago. We used to have delightful conversations — do you remember? We discussed everything under the sun, and agreed upon nothing. Now, when we have a difference of opinion it is usually only a momentary one. We dislike the mental effort necessary to sustain a disagreement; so one or the other of us is sure to nod his head drowsily and say, “Perhaps.

. . . Yes, I suppose you are right,” and that ends the matter. More often than not we gossip like a couple of old native women, rather than talk. We discuss island personalities and the small change of island happenings. Our visits to one another’s houses and to those of our friends are becoming more infrequent every year. I sit on my verandah at Taonoa and you on yours at Arué, both of us in a pleasant stupor streaked through with sluggish musings. Days pass, each one like the day preceding. We are under the agreeable illusion that time is standing still for us, but if you pause to reflect you will realize that the illusion is the result of the monotony of our existence. Where there is no great variety of happenings from one month to the next, a year slips by before you are aware that it has fairly begun. You flatter yourself that you have acquired, through effort, the habit of reverie. No effort was needed. You are merely going through the same process of mental disintegration experienced by all white men after they have lived a certain number of years in such a tropical backwater as this. It is an inevitable process; it can be hastened, but not retarded. The island has put its stamp upon both of us. I am surprised that you have n’t the wit to see it.’

‘Why don’t you fly, then, if you feel that? Why don’t you try to save yourself before the disintegrating process has been carried too far?’

‘I have just said that I enjoy going to seed. I am clear-sighted enough to realize what is taking place within me, but I don’t care — I don’t in the least object. I am now in my fortieth year. Thus far I have had as varied an experience of life as any man could wish, and more varied than I might reasonably have expected. I have followed various occupations among various races in various countries. I have known all kinds and conditions of people. Up to my thirtieth year my life was full of action, color, picturesque incident. I have learned many things and unlearned many. During those thirty years, by hard thinking, I arrived at various conclusions with respect to the meaning of life and man’s place in the universe — more particularly, my own place. By hard thinking I have discarded, in turn, these conclusions, each of which once seemed so plausible. I shall form no new ones. I no longer care whether there is meaning in life or not, or whether or not I am entitled to a place in the cosmical scheme. I have now had the place for a considerable number of years, and in the presence of that fact I can afford to be complaisant, if not impertinent, in my attitude toward the unseen powers, if there are any such. Fly from Tahiti? For what reason? And whither should I fly? To the United States? What chance should I have to go to seed there? I should not be permitted to. I should be coaxed, or bribed, or forced out of my quite natural desire to go downhill. I should be driven uphill to the very end, and so cheated out of my birthright to an agreeable old age. And think of the freedom of a special kind one has here: freedom from the influence of the mass mind, with its intolerance, its disregard for minority rights and opinions, its profound belief in material progress and in the idea that science will ultimately solve all the riddles of the universe. It is impossible for the individual living within the scope of this mighty influence not to be somewhat affected by it. This is one advantage in living here sufficiently important to offset a great many of the disadvantages.’

‘But have you no desire ever to live at home again?’

‘Why do you say “at home ”? Don’t you feel that Tahiti is home to you after all these years?’

‘No; and that, I think, is one of the chief disadvantages in living here. All of my roots are still in America, in the upland prairie country of the Middle West. I now realize that it is futile trying to grub them up and transplant them on this little island. I shall have to do without ground-root nourishment for the rest of my life, but I have put forth innumerable aerial roots that thrive well enough in this environment.'

’I am surprised to hear you say that. It is not the case with me. I came to Tahiti taproots and all, and they are now comfortably embedded in the rich volcanic soil. Nevertheless, I know that I am an exotic northern plant and must suffer the consequences of so drastic a change of habitat. But although my growth here has been sickly, my decay will, I believe, be luxuriant and slow.’

‘You talk as though you were already on the threshold of old age.’

‘And so I am. I mean to depart from the foolish practice of most men of my years. They cling to the fiction that they are vigorous youngsters until, at the age of forty-five or thereabouts, the fact that they have long been middle-aged is forced upon them. They then persist in being middle-aged until they are almost ready to topple into their graves, crowding their old age into a scant year or two. I have known for several years that I am middleaged. I now mean to skip the rest of that period and to enter upon my old age at once. Think of it! I have before me perhaps thirty or forty years to spend in this enchanting garden of eld. I shall have ample time to enjoy to the full an old man’s pleasures. I shall read old books, sort over old memories, think of old friends, indulge myself in the gentle, half-melancholy reflections privileged to elderly men. My fishing will keep me healthy in body, and the humdrum existence we live on this beautiful island will keep me tranquil in mind. . . . But it is already quite dark, and I have three miles to walk. I never go to bed later than nine-thirty. What a glorious night! Look at those coconut palms against the sky with the faint starlight glinting along the fronds. What could be more beautiful!’

‘Wait a moment till I light the lamp.

I will show you down to the road. . . . Mind the second step! There’s a board loose there.’

‘Oh, the decay, the decay, in houses and men, in this humid climate! Will you never remember to replace that rotten board? Well, good night, my son.’

‘Good night. Sleep well, father.’