I have spent my life believing myself to be an extrovert, addicted to people and babble. I have always pitied those who enjoy their own company too much, writing them off as misfits and misanthropes. So when I was given a chance to go off, all alone, in search of paradise, it seemed like a challenge — could I really cope with peace and tranquillity?
Petit St Vincent, a privately owned Caribbean resort, has no riffraff, no commerce, no cars — rather, it has a patch of manicured lawn, imported palm trees and a single track around its 113 acres. And it is almost as sparsely populated. There are 22 secluded cottages and, when I was there, fewer than two dozen guests. No sooner had I arrived than I caught myself longing not to talk to them.
This was the start of a sea change. The plan had been to cut myself off from work and all that makes modern life so dreadful, to do and say nothing, without feeling guilty, lonely or going bonkers. But it was to be temporary. Which is not what it was for Haze Richardson. One day in the mid-1960s, this former US Air Force officer sailed out of New York in a yacht and never went home. When he found PSV — 40 miles (65km) south of St Vincent and a 30-minute plane hop from Barbados to Union Island, followed by a short boat trip — the atoll was inhabited, if only just. An old lady who had inherited it from the Bishop of Trinidad lived there along with two goats. A friend put up cash and the two of them built the cottages. But paradise, Haze found after his friend sold up to him, can be lonely: “It’s hard to find a mate here.” But find one he did, in the form of Lynn, a sailmaker from a neighbouring (populated) island.
On my first night on PSV, I had a drink with Haze. He was contained, but charming, unlike your typical loner, and a fine advertisement for solitary living. The languor he encourages in his activity-free resort is contagious. I spent my days doing nothing. I stared at my feet through the clear water. I washed a conch shell and lifted it to my ear to hear the sea. If I wanted something, I filled out a form and opened the high oak door that formed the entrance to my cottage. Then I walked down the hidden path from my cottage to a bamboo pole that served as a mailbox. I raised a yellow flag, then retreated. Within 15 minutes a bell would ring and my fresh lobster/daiquiri/toothbrush would arrive. When I wanted to keep the world away, I raised a red flag.
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But lotus-eaters get short shrift nowadays. Before I left for PSV, a Buddhist, Tim Kirkpatrick, told me that paradise “is not a place, it is a state of mind called Enlightenment. Without an altruistic dimension [it] can be a psychological cul-de-sac, a solipsistic blissed-out narcissism.” Ouch.
So cue the best part of a week spent on an island where I certainly didn’t want anything to be different, including the fact that I seemed to have been spontaneously reincarnated as a latter-day Trappist monk. If only life could be like this.
It can’t, of course, which is what gets on people’s nerves. But why, I thought as I dozed on my hammock, does paradise have to be real, or permanent? Why can’t we indulge our senses, listen to birdsong, watch fish leaping out of turquoise sea? Besides, who wants reality? Humankind, as T. S. Eliot noted, can’t bear very much of it. Far better to create your own Truman Show. Just ensure that you don ‘t look backstage. One of the resort’s employees said he loved his job, but that the island “is like a prison. Everything is always the same. There is no choice.”
It got worse. A day after reaching my retreat I was out sailing beneath an azure sky. A wine bottle floated by. My instructor and I wondered if it might contain a treasure map and agreed to split any booty. So far, so perfect. Then, as we ringed the island I pointed to a roof peaking out of frangipani. My cottage, I said. “Oh, yeah? You’re in 18? Wow. That’s the one your Prime Minister stayed in.” Tony in my bed. The horror. Maybe he even held my cocktail shaker and lay on my sun lounger. Paradise shared: how wretched. Still, I bet Tony didn’t swim naked. I did. To do so, I felt, was the litmus test of paradise. But it took me three days to psych myself up to nip down my private stone staircase into my private patch of sea.
I blame reality TV shows: it is impossible to accept that one is not being watched. Anyway, I survived the challenge, which was not pleasurable. Nor, it must be said, was my island gem come nightfall. The sound of the sea crashing against the rocks on which my cottage perched scared the hell out of me. I longed for concrete and the sound of helicopters overhead.
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Nor did I like the chunky grey crabs that scuttled across the rocks when I was staring at the sky (so much for communing with nature). I was, in my defence, moved by the experience of swimming with turtles off nearby Tobago Cays. Back on deck I devoured freshly grilled rock lobster, giant shrimp and cold white wine with my four fellow snorkellers. And we talked about the fish we had seen. How perfect: conversation, but only when you feel like it.
This, I admit, is not realistic, which is why, once I got back to London, I sought expert advice. Dr Dorothy Rowe, a psychologist, says that the world divides into extroverts and introverts. And that’s when lightning struck. According to her, and contrary to what I have always thought, I am an introvert.
To be an introvert, she suggests, is culturally unacceptable. “Most holiday paradises are built for extroverts. In America you are supposed to be extrovert. It is un-American not to be. You have to stay in a hotel for 500 people. That sense of being able to be on your own in some beautiful place is paradise to many of us, but the rest of the world doesn’t want us to have that.” This is why, she adds, friends were so edgy before I left. “Others would find the idea of you being alone insulting, upsetting. Many would find the idea very frightening.”
Maybe I’ll have to set up a colony for introverts. Meanwhile, there’s something else I’ll have to keep quiet about. Julian Baggini, the editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine, says that most people have outgrown the idea of paradise: “Its demise is a sign of maturity. A paradise beyond this Earth was the traditional promise of religion, which helped to keep us quiet about the world ‘s injustices.What we need to do is not fall into despair but to live as well as we can, accepting that paradise is only occasionally glimpsed and can never be found and colonised.”
The trouble is, I think I found it.