Take one part of sun-soaked, palm-lined beach, add a hammock stretched between two palm trees, a dash of ice-cold beer, and a pinch of gentle tradewinds, and finish with a twist of tropical sunset. It's easy to lose track of time in the land where time begins. Welcome to the South Sea Island Paradise of Ha'apai in the tiny Kingdom of Tonga!
There are so many romantic beaches to wander at sunrise and sunset, or in fact, all day long! You can explore on foot or mountain-bike too - just bring along a change of clothes, beach towel, and snorkel and mask. As you stay in a traditional fale on a deserted beach or uninhabited island, you may think for a moment you have died and gone to heaven. But this paradise is real. And you can live this dream lifestyle for a fraction of what it costs to live anywhere else.
Which is what a man from Austria (not Australia but Austria, that little country in Central Europe where they speak German with a funny accent) had done in 1995 at the ripe old age of 39, following a workplace accident in Vienna which gave him a small pension to live on.
By the time I met him in Pangai on the island of Lifuka in 2006, he had already fully succumbed to the siren song of these remote and soporific islands which is that on this small and human-sized stage your life counts for more and even your smallest accomplishments will be remembered.
His one accomplishment since coming to Tonga had been to marry a local girl and sire two kids. By the time we met they had already separated again but he was still paying for her and the two kids which made his small pension even smaller. Suddenly, paradise seemed more like paradise lost!
He didn't seem to be ever struck by homesickness. And why would he want to leave? He subscribes to Louis Becke's sentiments - of whom he knows nothing - who once wrote about life in the South Seas, "Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid which they wandered day by day all unheeding of the morrow. Why - why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?"
We kept up a correspondence over many years, sporadic at best because of the unreliable mail service in Tonga, but in recent years heard nothing from him. He'd be 67 years old now which, given the restricted diet and even worse health service, would make him an old man in the islands.
We had talked about this back in 2006, and he seemed to accept the fact that if he ever grew old or sick, he would be far away from any help. He seemed to accept his eventual fate with the stoicism of a man still in the prime of his life, but I wonder if he was still as accepting of his fate now.
As Somerset Maugham wrote in his story "The Lotus Eater" about a certain Thomas Wilson who had moved to the island of Capri with an annuity that would last him for twenty-five years: "Most people, the vast majority in fact, lead the lives that circumstances have thrust upon them, and though some repine, looking upon themselves as round pegs in square holes, and think that if things had been different they might have made a much better showing, the greater part accept their lot, if not with serenity, at all events with resignation. They are like train-cars travelling forever on the selfsame rails. They go backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, inevitably, till they can go no longer and then are sold as scrap-iron. It is not often that you find a man who has boldly taken the course of his life into his own hands. When you do, it is worth while having a good look at him."
In the story, Wilson is asked, "Have you never regretted?", to which he replies, "Never. I've had my money's worth already. And I've got ten years more. Don't you think after twenty-five years of perfect happiness one ought to be satisfied to call it a day?" In short, when the money had run out he was going to commit suicide. As the author observed, "Wilson's plan was all right. There was only one flaw in it and this, I suppose, he could not have foreseen. It had never occurred to him that after twenty-five years of complete happiness, in this quiet backwater, with nothing in the world to disturb his serenity, his character would gradually lose its strength. The will needs obstacles in order to exercise its power; when it is never thwarted, when no effort is needed to achieve one's desires, because one has placed one's desires only in the things that can be obtained by stretching out one's hand, the will grows impotent. If you walk on a level all the time the muscles you need to climb a mountain will atrophy. These observations are trite, but there they are. When Wilson's annuity expired he had no longer the resolution to make the end which was the price he had agreed to pay for that long period of happy tranquility. I do not think, as far as I could gather, both from what my friend told me and afterwards from others, that he wanted courage. It was just that he couldn't make up his mind. He put it off from day to day."
I lost contact with the Austrian a long time ago and don't know if he's still living his lotus-eating existence, but I do know what happened to Wilson.
And so will you after you've read "The Lotus Eater".
