I think being sociable is just a hysterical way of being alone, and my mind often wanders in a crowded room to a quiet place far from the world. I could be cracking a joke, revealing a piece of gossip or doing the police in different voices, but my true self, as I sentimentally think of it, is always nostalgic for the life one lives by oneself. Not everyone is calm alone, but I am – and I think John Donne got it all wrong. Every man is an island. Every man and every woman: an island, a government, a parcel of selfhood wrapped in doubts. Of course, one hears the sound from other islands and swims there often, but isn’t our home in isolation?
Maybe it was just the house I grew up in, but I always had trouble understanding why Robinson Crusoe repined and had such a hard time with his solitude. “We never see the true State of our Condition,” he says, “till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries; nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.”
“Nonsense,” I thought, as my brothers tore the book from my hand and lobbed it down the stairs on the way to a football match. Later I took great hope from the dexterity shown by the lucky Crusoe when he worked out how to build a life for himself. First shelter and fire, then a means of keeping animals and mastering his days.
I remember feeling disappointed when he saw the footprint in the sand and bumped into that man Friday. I imagined being on an island might be the only way to realise who one actually is.
In travel terms, these days, complete isolation is virtually impossible. No island is an island. But I wanted to tempt my old fascination back into life, just a bit, and go to the island that lies farthest from my home in London. You don’t buy loneliness, you buy luxury, so I diluted my darker purpose with sunny thoughts, packed my shorts and took my girlfriend.
During the flight to Tahiti, I had plenty of time to think about the people-less miles of ocean underneath: maybe only a solo sail across those waters, on a raft without a radio, like the one in The Life Of Pi, would actually approximate to the kind of loneliness one fantasised about as a child.
“Do you think there’s anything down there?” my girlfriend said as she pressed in for the view.
“Not a whisper,” I said. “Not even broadband.”
The flight from Papeete in Tahiti to Bora Bora took an hour. It was so far down in the South Pacific that I was already convinced, stepping on to the tarmac, that we’d burst through all the normal time zones and had emerged, slightly technicoloured, into another dimension altogether, which we might as well call Elvis Time, a zone of healthy smiles, romantic certainties and quick guitars. As if to confirm the fact, a pair of nice Polynesian ladies stepped forward to hang some sweet-smelling lei around our necks. I was firmly on Elvis Time from the minute I stepped on to the boat.
I’d always wondered what people meant when they said a sea was “impossibly blue”. It was blue like the eyes of Cameron Diaz. And out there in front of us, the heights of Bora Bora were like the crags of Shangri-La, an earthly paradise where all is harmonious and people are immortal. If heaven had an architect, then surely this place would have appeared somewhere on his samples board. Maybe it was the drink, or the immortal people, but the boat journey to the hotel felt like a trip across the Elysian plain.
It’s emotional living on Elvis Time. We could see our hotel in the distance, Le Méridien, with its grass-roofed bungalows on stilts, and then, as we approached the jetty, the sound of a guitar wafted towards us over the water. It was just us, the evening air, the impossibly blue sea and a smiling man with a red guitar. My girlfriend started crying and we stepped off to receive more lei and were escorted into the bowels of paradise.
Great hotels don’t just offer nice rooms and good service; they produce an atmosphere, as Claridge’s does in London, or as the Plaza used to do in New York. But the atmosphere at Le Méridien was like nothing I’ve ever known, except in dreams of a sort you are apt to have during a year of Scottish rain. Actually, I thought of childhood quite a lot during my spell in paradise. The hotel sold pearls, and it reminded me of a book by John Steinbeck that we read at school, in which a family is dragged down by greed and corruption until they throw a pearl back into the sea. It’s a bit of an issue in paradise: the sense that one is surrounded by innocent, unspoilt nature, but that these things come at a price. Hotels in Bora Bora are expensive, but this one didn’t stint on nirvana’s daily rituals.
We swam. We ate lychees. We canoed. We slept every night in a giant bed over a glass floor, beneath which you could see fish and coral. At night, lamps burned in the distance, and a stream of pure air flowed to our open patio, where we drank champagne. I’m sorry to be such a prick, but paradise would make pricks of us all. That’s why one goes. The hotel was magnificent and it kept offering more treats, as if the previous 300 weren’t enough. While on Elvis Time, the sea kept getting bluer and the clouds whiter, and the people got better-looking, and the sunny days flowed towards evening as if the world was devoid of problems.
It took me quite a while to notice that all the couples – and they all were couples – in the restaurant were looking at each other in a particular way. Initially, I thought that they, too, were on Elvis Time, but then I noticed that every one of them was in fact on Doris Day Time. In a flash, or a glint, I suddenly noticed that every single person in the room, apart from us, was wearing a brand new wedding ring! What’s a fellow to do: sing, run, clap, or propose? We decided to laugh. On Elvis Time, your teeth get whiter and your heart gets purer and you’re happy for everyone.
I kept going on little wanders to the other side of the resort. At that end, the surf was bigger and you felt it had rolled unimpeded for thousands of miles. The palm trees were mighty and the urge to lie in a hammock overwhelming. So I lay there many an afternoon with a hat covering my face, and I dreamed of previous writers’ ventures in the South Pacific.
If you followed that ocean out there, it would take a while even to reach Samoa, where Robert Louis Stevenson spent the last part of his life and where he is buried. He died writing at Vailima, and in one of his letters he describes the strange peace to be found at the bottom of the world. “A heavenly day again!” he writes. “The world all dead silence, save when, from far down below us in the woods, comes up the crepitation of the little wooden drum that beats to church. Scarce a leaf stirs; only now and again a great, cool gush of air that makes my papers fly, and is gone.”
It was ill-health that first drove Stevenson to the South Sea Islands. He left San Francisco in June 1888 and spent a long time going between the islands: “The time of my voyages,” he wrote, “had passed like days in fairyland.” If you come from a small, wet country such as Scotland, one with a vigorous collective mind and a fierce sense of exploration, then the farthest reaches of the Earth can begin to seem like a destination. And when he landed among the palm trees and sampled the cool waters and the balmy afternoons, a part of Stevenson’s mind began – as mine began, before it recovered – to make a clearing for a future home. “No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor,” he writes in The Marquesas. “The first experience can never be repeated... the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.” In a letter to Henry James before his departure, Stevenson had told of the very high hopes he had for a renewed existence in the South Pacific. “It seems too good to be true,” he wrote, “and is a very good way of getting through the greensickness of maturity which, with all its accompanying ills, is now declaring itself to my mind and life.”
Would that we all could seek such refuge from old mortality. On Bora Bora, there was nothing but the sunlit life of the mind and heart, and carnival-coloured fish hovering along in an ambience of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Maybe solitude is only a species of vanity. I didn’t really want to be alone once I reached the ends of the Earth, and I was glad I had my partner with me. The place itself was lonely – a mere pinprick on a curving map of ocean – but the people there, the honeymooners, were celebrating their chance to share their burden of aloneness, thereby halving it. At least, that is the theory, that is the hope and the chance they take, and I felt a little Doris Day myself as we ambled slowly back to our grass hut under the stars.
When we got there, the hotel organisers had spread flowers on the pathway leading to our chalet. They’d made a heart of hibiscus on the wooden floor and hung frangipani on the door handle. Inside, there were candles burning everywhere, Polynesian music was playing on a stereo, and the bath, filled with water, was crowded with orchids. The patio doors had been flung open and the smell of jasmine was floating into the lagoon. They’d put a new bedspread on the bed, a frieze of white flowers out of Matisse, and a chilled bottle of champagne stood on the nightstand next to a basket of chocolates.
“You don’t get this in Glasgow,” I said.
“Que sera sera,” said she.
Factbox
Flights to Tahiti via LA with Air New Zealand and Air Tahiti Nui were provided by Round The World Experts, which offers a US and South Pacific holiday staying four nights at the W Hollywood Los Angeles, on a room-only basis, and six nights at Le Méridien Bora Bora in a beach bungalow, with breakfast, from £3,269 per person; the price includes flights
Andrew O’Hagan’s novel The Illuminations is published next month at £17.99 by Faber & Faber
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