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By Root 484 0

my capacity to invent and sustain myself. If I hadn’t been in the right circumstances and had a lot of luck, I don’t know what I would have become. I might have been a con man and gone to jail, or if I’d been lucky enough to get a job without a high-school education, I might have spent my life on an assembly line, had three children, and then at fifty or fifty-five been cast off like yesterday’s garbage, the way a lot of Americans have been recently. This doesn’t happen in Tahiti because it is a classless society, and this is probably the main reason I’ve gone there whenever I could during the past thirty years. In Tahiti I can always be myself. There’s no fawning or kowtowing to people who consider themselves famous or more important than others. Tahitians have a quality I’ve never observed in any other large group: they have no envy. Of course, there are pretentious Tahitians who want to appear knowledgeable about the world and put on airs, but I’ve run into very few of them. What I admire about the people of Tahiti is that they are able to live in the moment, to enjoy what is going on now. There are no celebrities, movie stars, rich men or poor men; they laugh, dance, drink and make love, and they know how to relax. When we were making Mutiny on the Bounty, a Tahitian girl in the cast missed her boyfriend and decided to go home. The producer said, “You can’t quit; you signed a contract. If you do, we’ll sue you.” The girl said, “Well, I’ve got a dog and a couple of goats, and you can have them.”

The producer said, “Then we’ll have you arrested,” and she said, “All right.” Then she left and they had to rewrite the movie. Hollywood meant nothing to her.

When I wake up in Tahiti, my pulse is sometimes as low as 48; in America, it’s nearer 60. Living in our so-called civilized society makes the difference. There are no homeless people in Tahiti because somebody will always take you in. If there’s a shortage of anything, it’s of children; they love kids. It’s not perfect. There’s crime, fighting, disorder and family conflicts, but by and large it is a society where people are internally quiet and outwardly full of laughter, gaiety and optimism, and they live each day as it comes. Unfortunately, life is changing there as outside forces try to improve, as well as exploit, what they regard as a primitive culture. In all of Polynesia, there are only about 200,000 people, and they are constantly under assault, from patronizing and condescending religious missionaries to fast-buck promoters who consider them simple and primitive. They are neither primitive nor simple, but sophisticated in their own way of experiencing life to the fullest. Outsiders who call them backward do so out of racial snobbery and a prejudice rooted in the foolish notion that equates technological advancement with civilization. Westerners seldom acknowledge the extraordinary feats of early Polynesian seafarers who, without compass, radar or navigational satellites, but only by dead reckoning and a knowledge of the winds, traversed thousands of miles of uncharted waters in open ships. Along with the Micronesians, the Polynesians settled the Pacific, and their descendants enjoy life more than any people I know. Tahitian women are the toughest I’ve ever met. They are independent and have no inhibitions, about sex or anything else. After falling in love and having children, they usually stay with the same man, but not always; sometimes two or three women move in with the same man. They feel jealousy, have fights and feuds like everyone else, and when a Tahitian woman takes against a man, she’s likely to tell everything about him to everyone. No secrets are left untold.

Most of all, Tahitians love parties. Once, when Charles de Gaulle was scheduled to visit Tahiti while I was there, the word was passed from village to village. Most people ignored his arrival until someone said there would be a party when he came. Then they flocked aboard buses, brought their drums and skirts and celebrated the joy of life, not De Gaulle; they didn’t give a damn about him and