Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
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c. 1891 / Polynesia

Natural Resources

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I am far, far away from the prisons that European houses are.

A Maori hut does not separate man from life, from space, from the infinite…. In the meantime I felt myself very lonely here.

The inhabitants of the district and I mutually watched each other, and the distance between us remained the same. By the second day I had exhausted my provisions. What to do? I had imagined that with money I would be able to find all that was necessary for life. I was deceived. Once beyond the threshold of the city, we must turn to Nature in order to live. She is rich, she is generous, she refuses to no one who will ask his share of her treasures of which she has inexhaustible reserves in the trees, in the mountains, in the sea. But one must know how to climb the tall trees, how to go into the mountains, in order to return weighed down with heavy booty. One must know how to catch fish, and how to dive to tear loose the shellfish so firmly attached to stones at the bottom of the sea. One must know how, one must be able to do things.

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Published In
Book of Nature
About the Text

Paul Gauguin, from Noa Noa. The painter's failed experiment with communal living in a cottage at Arles with Vincent van Gogh persuaded him, at the age of thirty-two, to seek a less troubled approach to "the infinite" among the natives of Polynesia.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather, 1913
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Author and translator Peter Ackroyd talks with Aidan Flax-Clark about his new retelling of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and discusses a little bit about his most recent book of London history, London Under.
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Lewis H. Lapham is Editor of Lapham's Quarterly. He also serves as editor emeritus and national correspondent for Harper's magazine.
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