the brightness and the distance

And thinking about places with no winter, made me wonder about Hawaii --

travel writer Paul Theroux wrote,

[excerpts]------ Hawaii seems a robust archipelago, a paradise pinned like a bouquet to the middle of the Pacific....But in 50 years of traveling the world, I have found the inner life of these islands to be difficult to penetrate, partly because this is not one place but many, but most of all because of the fragile and floral way in which it is structured.  Yet it is my home, and home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.

Two thousand miles from any great landmass, Hawaii was once utterly unpeopled.  Its insularity was its salvation; and then, in installments, the world washed ashore and its Edenic uniqueness was lost in a process of disenchantment....Anything but robust, Hawaii is a stark illustration of Proust's melancholy observation:  "The true paradises are the paradises we have lost."...

...Hawaii offers peculiar challenges to anyone wishing to write about the place or its people....

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.  I think other serious travelers do the same, looking for a story, facing the world, tramping out a book with their feet -- a far cry from sitting at a desk and staring mutely at a glowing screen or a blank page.  The traveler physically enacts the narrative, chases the story, often becomes part of the story.  This is the way most travel narratives happen....

My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands.  This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones....

One of the traits that I've found in many island cultures is a deep suspicion of the outsiders, palangi, as such people are called in Samoa, suggesting they've dropped from the sky; a haole in Hawaii, meaning "of another breath"; the "wash-ashore" as non-islanders are dismissively termed in Martha's Vineyard and other islands.

Of course it's understandable that an islander would regard a visitor with a degree of suspicion.  An island is a fixed and finite piece of geography, and usually the whole place has been carved up and claimed.  It is inconceivable that a newcomer, invariably superfluous, could bring a benefit to such a place; suspicion seems justified.  The very presence of the visitor, the new arrival, the settler, suggests self-interest and scheming....

...In an archipelago of multiethnicity the trend to apartness is not a simple maneuver.  To emphasize separation, the islander created his own metaphorical island, based on race, ethnicity, social class, religion, neighborhood, net worth and many other factors; islands upon islands.  Over time I have begun to notice how little these separate entities interact, how closed they are, how little they overlap, how naturally suspicious and incurious they are, how each one seems to talk only to itself. ...

...What looks in Hawaii like hostility is justifiable wariness, with an underlying intention to keep the peace.  Confrontation is traumatic in any island society, because, while there is enough room for mutual coexistence, there is not enough space for all-out war. ...

..."Aloha" is not a hug, it is meant to disarm.  More and more I have come to see this subtle greeting, a word uttered with a floating ambiguous smile, as less a word of welcome than a means of propitiating a stranger.  But perhaps all words of welcome perform that function.

...In Hawaii there's also a palpable difference in weather from one place to another, the existence of microclimates that underline the character of a place.  I can drive 20 miles in one direction to a much drier part of the island, 20 miles in another to a place where it is probably raining, and in between it might be 12 degrees cooler.  The people in those spots seem different, too, taking on the mood of their microclimate.

...It is reassuring for an islander to know that the Big Island is big, as well as multidimensional, and to maintain the belief that much of Hawaii is hidden and undiscovered.  It helps, if you want to cherish the idea of distance and mystery, that you do not stray far from home, your very own metaphorical island.

[excerpts from "Paul Theroux's Quest to Define Hawaii" -- Smithsonian.com]

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