Diane and I were swept away by a dream of foreign living thirty years ago, when I was merely middle-aged. Later, it happened again. We still live in both our dreams, but it hasn't been easy. This memoir targets the two travel destinations which caught us: Taormina in Sicily, with a few Italian side trips, and a small, mainly self-contained village on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. The double focus enriches each portrait, and enlarges our own. In our first year together, we laid the sweet fearful patina of romance over our autumn in Venice and our long winter in Taormina. We found that living with unfamiliar customs forced us to face ourselves more directly than at home. In this glow, we have been returning to Taormina for thirty years. The memoir describes this too: how the place feels after all this time -- its many-layered textures, its intricate network of personalities, its richness in beauty and history. It also describes life in the West Indian fishing village where for fifteen years we have been the only non-Tortolan landowners. Our house is on the main road in the middle of the village. Much of its daily activity swirls around us and catches us up in it. This Caribbean part of the book describes the textures of the village, its personalities, its beauty and history, all just as complex as those of Taormina. And also like Taormina, it requires a stranger to shift his attitude, to learn to take the village on its own terms. The rewards of this shift are the pleasure of self-discovery and the delight in touching our common humanity. Suddenly there are larger possibilities in ourselves than we had known.
About the Author: At 46, feeling out of place in the world and a stranger to myself, I went with my beloved fellow traveller Diane to try living in truly foreign places. Making Peace with Paradise is my description of the difficulties of this trial, but also of the ways it taught us joy. For five years, spasmodic torticollis had slowly twisted me out of my old life as a conventionally handsome English professor living in the suburbs of Burlington, Vermont. In our runaway, we first chose Taormina, Sicily as our paradise. Later, when botox took the pain away, we moved to a totally different place, Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, to spend our winters, though still returning annually to Taormina. Both places are challenging to a foreigner, but they are also forgiving, charming, finally magnificent, and almost always in unexpected ways. It is somehow in learning to welcome the unexpected that joy resides for me, and this is a lesson that applies to the apparently familiar United States as well. I invite you to join us in our travels, and to learn as we do.