Making Peace with Paradise

Diane and I were swept away by a dream of foreign living thirty years ago, when I was merely middle-aged. Later, it happened again. We still live in both our dreams, but it hasn't been easy. This memoir targets the two travel destinations which caught us: Taormina in Sicily, with a few Italian side trips, and a small, mainly self-contained village on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. The double focus enriches each portrait, and enlarges our own. In our first year together, we laid the sweet fearful patina of romance over our autumn in Venice and our long winter in Taormina. We found that living with unfamiliar customs forced us to face ourselves more directly than at home. In this glow, we have been returning to Taormina for thirty years. The memoir describes this too: how the place feels after all this time -- its many-layered textures, its intricate network of personalities, its richness in beauty and history. It also describes life in the West Indian fishing village where for fifteen years we have been the only non-Tortolan landowners. Our house is on the main road in the middle of the village. Much of its daily activity swirls around us and catches us up in it. This Caribbean part of the book describes the textures of the village, its personalities, its beauty and history, all just as complex as those of Taormina. And also like Taormina, it requires a stranger to shift his attitude, to learn to take the village on its own terms. The rewards of this shift are the pleasure of self-discovery and the delight in touching our common humanity. Suddenly there are larger possibilities in ourselves than we had known.