How Paradise Is Lost--and Found

By Pico Iyer

Every month, it seems, brings news of another paradise lost, and every year new Edens fall like palm trees before a hurricane--first Tahiti, then Bali, then Hawaii, Mykonos, Sri Lanka. The process is, in a sense, irresistible: after all, paradises cannot get better any more than children can grow purer. Each passing season (and each passing tourist) can only bring to the world's forgotten areas new developments--and in a never-never land, any development is a change for the worse. Elysium cannot be universally enjoyed until it has been discovered, and once it is discovered, it is lost.

Sometimes an Eden is brought down by the quite literal invasion of the real world, as even the most faraway places get placed in the sights of the superpowers. Tibet was stormed by the Chinese, and now the dreamed-of Shangri- La is vanished forever; Cambodia was caught in a cross fire, and an earthly paradise so gentle that ricksha drivers were said to tip their passengers is now a land of skulls; Afghanistan was overrun by Soviet tanks, and now a book of photographs remembering its fugitive beauties is subtitled, mournfully, Paradise Lost. In an age when airlines and satellites are rapidly turning the global village into the smallest of small worlds, no man can be an island. These days, not even an island can be an island.

Usually the spoiling of paradise comes more gently, and more gradually, at the hands of individuals. The trouble with paradise is that it is almost made to be lost: as fast as idyls seduce visitors, visitors reduce idyls. And as soon as a new last paradise has been found, so many people hurry to make claims on it that it becomes, almost instantly, a lost paradise. With crowds of strangers flocking together to escape the crowds, last year's lotus land becomes this year's tourist trap.

The mere presence of visitors, moreover, inevitably strips perfection of its most distinctive blessing: its innocence of self-consciousness. As soon as Eden is told that it is Eden, it becomes something else. These days every Arcadia is tempted to regard itself as a potential commodity, and paradise is less often lost than remaindered. The visitor to Nepal, which was long known as the Forbidden Land and closed to foreigners until as recently as 1951, can now stay comfortably at the Hotel Eden in Katmandu. Just around the corner, he can dine at the Paradise Restaurant or the Earth's Heaven Restaurant; after dinner, he can stroll to Nirvana Tours, the Hotel Shangri-La or a host of other 50 cents-a-night flophouses and cappuccino houses. There, the locals are sure to remind him that the real paradise is that great American city across the sea, rich with Cadillacs and videos and fast-food joints. By now, even New York, least otherworldly of cities, lists in its phone books 27 Edens, nine Arcadias and almost 100 Paradises (including the Paradise Memorial Pet Crematory and Paradise Guard Dogs, Inc.).

A deeper reason for the steady decline of idyls, though, may be that travelers love to report that paradise is lost. If it is the first secret conceit of every voyager to imagine that he alone has found the world's last paradise, it is the second to believe that the door has slammed shut right behind him. A paradise is by its nature a fine and private place, a deserted island or a solitary glade; Adam and Eve would have seemed considerably less charmed had they been surrounded by squawking kids, knickknack vendors and a row of time-share condos. Every visitor hopes to keep his idyl to himself; he's in heaven, and hell is other people. "The place is a Utopia," he's likely to tell his friends, "but there's no point in your going there. I saw it pristine, but now it's spoiled forever."

In a sense, paradise is precisely what's lost. Nothing is more incorruptible than what is irretrievable. And just as a good man, once dead, becomes a saint, so a nice place, once quit, becomes an Eden. As the years slide by, the places we have visited are steadily pushed back to an enchanted distance, and memory, the mind's great cosmetician, begins to remove wrinkles, soften edges, touch up the past in a golden glow. The 26-hour bus trip, the simultaneous swarm of hucksters and mosquitoes, the revolutions of the stomach are all forgotten or, better yet, transfigured into the unforgettable adventures with which we can impress our friends. Paradise's loss is our gain. Small wonder that Proust, great poet laureate of reminiscence, wrote, "Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus." Nothing is ever what it used to be.

That kind of plangent wistfulness is hardly confined to Mother's account of her honeymoon or Grandpa's homesickness for his youth. The tug and ache of nostalgia pull even at the hardiest of travelers. The caustic Evelyn Waugh introduces his collection of travel essays, When the Going Was Good, with a heartbroken valedictory to a vanished Golden Age of travel that is, in effect, a valentine to his own lost youth. In every traveler's eulogy there is a strain of elegy, and every traveler hearkens to the raven's knelling cry of "Nevermore."

So it is, perhaps, that the world's most fabled paradises are being lost each day yet never seem to lose their paradisiac allure. Take Bali, for example, the Indonesian tropical garden visited this spring by President Reagan and the world. Every intruder on the island quickly registers its palm- fringed beaches, magical dances and golden native beauties out of Gauguin and then remarks that all these delights are being corrupted by a camera- toting crush of alien surfers, satyrs and souvenir hunters. The single most changeless feature of Bali, indeed, is this litany of laments. " 'Isn't Bali spoiled,' is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler," wrote Miguel Covarrubias. That was in 1937. "This nation of artists is faced with the Western invasion, and I cannot stand idly by and watch their destruction," wrote Andre Roosevelt, introducing a book titled--what else?--The Last Paradise. That was in 1930. Fifty years later, thousands of visitors continue to "discover" Bali each year, acclaim it as a paradise and, once home, mourn that it is lost forever.

All this suggests that paradise may ultimately lie more in the eye of the beholder than the heart of the beheld. That is the secret of its beauty, and its poignancy. For paradise must always, in a sense, be a creation of the imagination, must always, if it is to be worth seeking, be unattainable, just around the corner or behind us in the past. To find perfection is to bring it down to earth and make it mortal. We want, we need to be taken in--both welcomed and illusioned. And in the end, perhaps, the search for paradise may really come down to nothing more than a search for a paradise within. If only we can rediscover Eden, we imagine, we will recover our unfallen selves, and so lead simpler lives with happier hearts and consciences unsullied. That may be why some shrewd paradise seekers never leave home at all.