Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Paradise Possible
After yesterday's stunning performance by the Obama campaign and the celebrations in the streets all over the world, people's spirits might just have been lifted high enough to believe in the possibility of paradise.
Not to say that Obama's election ushered in a thousand years of apres-Bush prosperity or was the catalyst for peace on earth. But rather, his election stands as proof of belief in change, people-power, and ideals.
Belief in ideals reminds me a lot of the backpacker's search for paradise. Either disappointingly crowded or frustratingly elusive, the perfect beach is a promise of the perfect self. It is a space in nature that is completely redeemed, flawless, and pure. In The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, they write that "like the Romantics, we come to be spiritualized, to recover from broken hearts and broken lives, and to decipher the tangled ways of our souls in the chaos of the turbulent sea."
My friend Ted remarked that the beach is also a space for the sublime. Edmund Burke, the eighteenth century philosopher, also grasped the idea that "terror inspired by danger, darkness, solitude and the prospect of the infinite, when experienced in safety, can give a most enlightening and satisfying conjunction of pleasure and pain." The beach is the edge of that safety and the beginning of the unknown, so humans have a kind of metaphysical mezmerization with the space of the beach. White sand, blue sky, turquoise water and green palm trees is a 
colour combination found only on tropical beaches. When we enter this space, it's as though we are forced into conversation with the divine (read ideal) in ourselves.
That this search is so subjective, so elusive and so liable to destruction makes finding the ideal beach all the more remarkable. Perhaps we are under the impression that only truly remarkable people would even attempt this search and why the roaming backpacker in search of himself ends up spending a good deal of time on the beach.
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