Quote of the Hour: Where You Belong, and Where You Don't

I paddled away thinking how I had once seen these islands as idyllic. I had been wrong. An island of traditional culture cannot be idyllic. It is, instead, completely itself: riddled with magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries, and its old routines. You had to take it as you found it. The key to its survival was that it laughed at outsiders and kept them at arm's length. And thought it seemed strange that they thought of themselves as human and me as subhuman, a dim-dim, I could now see the utter impossibility of my ever understanding the place.

 - Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, p.150