A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

outlook: “This is all, of course, too good to last. Not only is Kaua’i eroding an
infinitesimal bit at a time, so that in a few million years it too will be a rock on its way to
Siberia, but Hanalei itself doesn’t have that long” (95). Development threatens its quiet
beauty, and the sarcastic fatalism of “Oh well, it will last until Thursday when I have to
fly back to Honolulu” is a mere cover-up for the narrator’s despair: The endangered place
is a stand-in for the relationship with his infant daughter.
Nor does she understand that she is soon to be shuttled 5,000 miles every six
months from one parent to the other. Diane is worried that living in Hawaii will
distort her picture of the world. Diane has a point. What do you tell a child who
has run across the sands at Hanalei that will prepare her for New Jersey? (104).
Thus, the carpe-diem stance and the happiness he displays at such simple things as
dinner, walks on the beach, and watching his two-year-old “Beast” suddenly turned
“cherubic, round and pink, and filled with joyous energy” (103), are not at all out of
proportion. The whole story can be seen as the attempt to get as much out of a mere
‘being there’ as is possible in the face of inevitable change and finality. Hawaiian space
here is neither appropriated nor re-inscribed, rather it is borrowed to illustrate the inner
landscape of the narrator’s feelings. Likewise, the community depicted in “Hanalei” is
coincidental and momentary, friends and lovers, and a daughter soon to be seen only
intermittently. Although they appreciate living in “paradise” (10, 18), they also seem to
take it for granted, and the story contains no hint at the place being endangered by
anything besides development and time itself: “I think we’re all damned. […] You get
inevitably older each day. You watch them bury your parents, your older friends, your
contemporaries. […] And that’s the best that can happen” (92-3).
It is no coincidence that Hanalei is a bay, a place on the verge of the ocean, where
waves can drown the little girl easily, where “love is an octopus ready at any moment to
seize her heart and pull it under” (104). It should come as no surprise that for writers
living on islands, the ocean is a vast and accessible reservoir of metaphors, a space that
can function as setting, plot, and protagonist.
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