the home he knows not

Noa, Noa: the Tahitian Journal

By Paul Gauguin

Harvard art museum

the first half of the book is excellent. one feels that the passion within is so pent-up as being on the verge of exploding. then he found his child wife, and love and peace. passion is delivered as joy and creativity. he settles down, with daily adventures or routines with his Tahitian brothers and sisters. all serene and beautiful. some unquietness and he is back to civilization.

a significant portion of the small journal is a narrative of the Oceanic religion/mythology, which is dry and superfacial, not unlike those read elsewhere.

Gauguin's search for a true life has often been looked upon with conventional suspicion. this writing is like the artist's confession by holding out his heart: look, look here. nobody believes or cares, of course.

Gauguin had to self-publish the journal - below is the kind of wood prints he had intended to accompany the text.

my old post on "the moon and sixpence":

http://passerby100.blogspot.com/2011/11/heavy-handed-portrait-of-artist.html

a quote from Maugham's book (brought up by net friend lyz23):

 I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deeprooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.