Pico Iyer writing in The New York Times:

As a constant traveler for 49 years now, I sometimes feel I’ve been zigzagging from one “paradise” to the next. From Tahiti to Tibet, from the Seychelles to Antarctica, I’ve found tourist posters conspiring with travelers’ hopes to present every place as a kind of Eden. Yet often it’s our very notions of paradise that intensify divisions. In Sri Lanka I’d realized that the island has so often been taken to be Arcadia — Arabs saw it as “contiguous with the Garden of Eden,” and an Italian papal legate announced that the waters of paradise could be there — that the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and millions of us tourists have all scrambled to grab a piece of it.

Besides, if I really did come upon a calm and self-contained Eden, what would it have to gain from me? I, like any visitor, could only be the serpent in the garden.

All our paradise, our only hopes, had to be uncovered here, in the midst of real life and in the face of death.