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The part of The Divine Comedy most people find interesting
is the first third: Hell.
The least interesting section: Paradise.
The poem Milton is famous for is: Paradise Lost.
Milton's least interesting poem: Paradise Regained.
Making Paradise interesting seems to be an almost insoluble literary problem.
How does one have an interesting life in Paradise? It is a problem I have been struggling with here for twenty years now.
The Bible doesn't say very much about how Adam and Eve lived before they were thrown out of Paradise. Milton has some ideas about that, but I think the whole story of that episode has never been told.
One day Adam & Eve were strolling around the Garden of Eden and Eve said, "You know, Adam, it's really nice here and the weather is great. But don't you ever get the feeling that you'd like to go somewhere? Don't you ever get tired of seeing the same old plants and the same old animals, over and over again? Do you ever have times when you wish that a great big thunderstorm would come along, with lightning blasting down from the sky and trees crashing to the ground? Or even snow, and bitter cold temperatures. It would be tough, but at least it would be something different."And don't you ever get bored with us just talking to each other? Don't you ever get desperate for some people that you could have real intelligent conversations with?
"Besides, I want to be in a place where there are more cultural opportunities. Where we can go to the opera more than once a year and there are theatres showing foreign films. And when we have kids, I'd like to live someplace where there are really good schools for them to go to. I don't want to think of my kids growing up and having dead-end lives because they never got a good education."
Hawaii is charming. Local culture is charming. Pidgin is charming (in a way that Black English, for instance, is not). The local literature is charming.
Hawaii is ... nice. The weather is nice. The people are really nice.
If you had told me, when I was twenty years old, that I would spend the largest part of my life in a place that is nice, I probably would have given up on life, moved to Greenwich Village and become a heroin addict.
Whenever I mention to a local resident in Hawaii the idea of living somewhere else, they always start talking about how cold it is there, or, sometimes, how hot. How did I ever wind up living in a population that considers weather the most important thing in life?
My idea of Paradise would be Paris around 1910, or maybe 1925.
My idea of Paradise would be New York or San Francisco around 1955.
My Paradise would have coffee houses full of intellectuals and chess players, lots of dingy little theatres showing foreign films, bars where people argue about literature and philosophy, and tiny little jazz clubs. And there would be a real university, with real intellectual life.
Coming to Hawaii is: learning to say "Mo bettah," "da kine," "canno' handle," and "whatevahs."
In the evening, people living in the duplex next door to me sit out in the carport in lawn chairs, playing their ghetto blaster.
If you walk around the city in the late afternoon or early evening, you encounter this a lot: three or four people sitting out on their tiny front lawn or in their garage, drinking beer. Maybe a couple of them are strumming ukeleles and singing.
In some places I've lived,
a party meant keg of beer and a big sound system,
with people dancing.
In some places, a party meant a full assortment of liquor.
In Hawaii, parties are centered around food.
"This is really good kal-bi!"
"Where'd you get the kim chee?"
"What's in this soup?"
"You make this yourself? Is it your own recipe?"
I walk into a bar and before I even get through the doorway, a middle-age hostess grabs my arm in a firm grip and says, "Hi, my name Marilee. What your name? You like sit down table? You like buy me one drink?"
Twenty years ago, I was going through a dismal, depressing time, about to be fired by the University of Kansas. At the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society, the chairman of the Mathematics Department at the University of Hawaii asked me if I'd be willing to consider coming to Hawaii.
Yes, after five years of sub-zero winter temperatures and snow in Kansas, I was definitely willing to consider living in Hawaii. Besides, Honolulu seemed a lot more like a big city than Lawrence, KS, or Las Cruces, NM, or Arcata, CA, or most of the other places I'd been living recently. And at that moment it was the only job offer I had, and there seemed to be no reason to think I'd be getting any others.
You came to Hawaii because you wanted to live in a big city?
Yes. Little did I know what a small town Honolulu is!
I grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D. C. Takoma Park was very much a small town, and my experiences growing up were small-town experiences. There was a small woods next to our house, and a creek a few blocks away. I spent a lot of my time playing in the woods and at the creek. On weekends, my parents liked to take us kids on long drives into the countryside, where we could pick blackberries, go wading in a stream, and build a fire to roast hot dogs.
And yet by the time I finished high school, I knew that the life I wanted was to be found on the pavements of big cities.
And yet Honolulu is in fact closer to what I wanted than Lawrence, KS had been. It has more movie theatres than Lawrence and even when I first came here, it had more bookstores. It has lots more restaurants, many of them quite affordable. It has one good bar (Anna Bannanas), and lots and lots of strip clubs.
It's scarcely farther from San Francisco than Lawrence had been, and you don't have to drive thirty miles to the airport.
If Honolulu wasn't what you wanted, why haven't you left?
Inertia. Cowardice.
Certainly by the time I'd been here two years, I knew that this was not a place I could stay. Not because of its lack of big-city-ness, but because of my financial situation here. But as I looked at the academic job market, it was clear that universities were overstocked with senior faculty, and when they had any openings at all, they were looking for assistant professors. Since I was convinced that it was absolutely essential that I leave here, this meant I would have to figure out a new way of earning a living.
But time went by. I spent a sabbatical in Berkeley, and at the end of that year my wife said that she was staying there, because she was unwilling to live any Hawaii any longer. (Although she didn't say so, it was also clear that she wasn't willing to live with me any longer.)
I came back from my sabbatical with the firm intention that the following year would be my last year in Hawaii. But inertia took over. And the university starting talking about giving us raises. And I found that my life here was a lot more tolerable (although also a lot more lonely and more horny) without a wife.
Besides, being a university professor is the only thing I know how to do.
For the past ten years, I've had one foot out the door of this university. And yet here I still am.