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A deeper reason for the steady decline of idyls, though, may be that travelers love to report that paradise is lost. If it is the first secret conceit of every voyager to imagine that he alone has found the world's last paradise, it is the second to believe that the door has slammed shut right behind him. A paradise is by its nature a fine and private place, a deserted island or a solitary glade; Adam and Eve would have seemed considerably less charmed had they been surrounded by squawking kids, knickknack vendors and a row of time-share condos. Every visitor hopes to keep his idyl to himself; he's in heaven, and hell is other people. "The place is a Utopia," he's likely to tell his friends, "but there's no point in your going there. I saw it pristine, but now it's spoiled forever."
In a sense, paradise is precisely what's lost. Nothing is more incorruptible than what is irretrievable. And just as a good man, once dead, becomes a saint, so a nice place, once quit, becomes an Eden. As the years slide by, the places we have visited are steadily pushed back to an enchanted distance, and memory, the mind's great cosmetician, begins to remove wrinkles, soften edges, touch up the past in a golden glow. The 26-hour bus trip, the simultaneous swarm of hucksters and mosquitoes, the revolutions of the stomach are all forgotten or, better yet, transfigured into the unforgettable adventures with which we can impress our friends. Paradise's loss is our gain. Small wonder that Proust, great poet laureate of reminiscence, wrote, "Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus." Nothing is ever what it used to be.
That kind of plangent wistfulness is hardly confined to Mother's account of her honeymoon or Grandpa's homesickness for his youth. The tug and ache of nostalgia pull even at the hardiest of travelers. The caustic Evelyn Waugh introduces his collection of travel essays, When the Going Was Good, with a heartbroken valedictory to a vanished Golden Age of travel that is, in effect, a valentine to his own lost youth. In every traveler's eulogy there is a strain of elegy, and every traveler hearkens to the raven's knelling cry of "Nevermore."
So it is, perhaps, that the world's most fabled paradises are being lost each day yet never seem to lose their paradisiac allure. Take Bali, for example, the Indonesian tropical garden visited this spring by President Reagan and the world. Every intruder on the island quickly registers its palm- fringed beaches, magical dances and golden native beauties out of Gauguin and then remarks that all these delights are being corrupted by a camera- toting crush of alien surfers, satyrs and souvenir hunters. The single most changeless feature of Bali, indeed, is this litany of laments. " 'Isn't Bali spoiled,' is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler," wrote Miguel Covarrubias. That was in 1937. "This nation of artists is faced with the Western invasion, and I cannot stand idly by and watch their destruction," wrote Andre Roosevelt, introducing a book titled--what else?--The Last Paradise. That was in 1930. Fifty years later, thousands of visitors continue to "discover" Bali each year, acclaim it as a paradise and, once home, mourn that it is lost forever.