Paradise Lost and Found

Searching for the best of all possible spots in this best of all possible worlds is a pastime everyone dreams of, but a few can afford. Most of us give up the idea of a search for a 20th century Garden of Eden and settle for a convenient, familiar place where the back fence hides a neighbor's garbage cans.

During World War II, Richard Tregaskis began to wonder "whether the paradise of our prewar existence, that we had dreamed of overseas, was so wonderful after all." While still on duty, however, he typed his way through the Coral Sea, the Solomons, Midway, North Africa, and Sicily, and gave Guadalcanal Diary and Invasion Diary to eager watchers on the home front. He covered most of the war's big battles from the front lines for newspapers all over the country. After the last island surrendered and Tregaskis ran out of his well-known war stories, he returned to find life dull and petty. So he began a pilgrimage to enchanted places he remembered. The trip took him through most of the world's fairy-tale lands and left him in California, a wiser if not happier man.

For it seems that the idylls of memory and legend are no longer to be found. Beautiful Bali is torn by revolution, Shanghai is a pit of poverty where sin is sold in the marketplace and loses its flavor, and New York still races to its grave.

Although the text is fascinating enough, Tregaskis is too much the war correspondent to capture thoughts, instead of facts, on paper. Had the idea of paradise been original or unknown to men, he could not have explained it. He luckily abandons his analysis of perfection after the first three chapters, and fills the rest of the book with histories of the Chinese peasant Jong Yosen, the Indian untouchable Ramji Lal, and the Swedish jet pilot Buster Schnell. In these lie the greatest value of the book. Using his correspondent's approach. Tregaskis traces the lives of these people from their traditional existences to the new one each finds himself leading.

In a last, quick chapter, Tregaskis decides that paradise can never come on this earth, as human beings are constantly changing their tastes. One man's paradise is another man's purgatory. The only common paradise is "to be alive and close to the world's life current."

Yet, after this invective, Tregaskis describes his own paradise--peaceful, beautiful California. And here he admits that paradise is merely that spot of green so far from the fast stream of life that the gurgle never reaches his ears.