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If I were young again I would forego Tahiti and move to America to begin a new life in New York, a city both human and classical in its geometric modernity, as I have discovered much too late, on my passage to the Pacific Nonetheless I pay homage to the lovely Polynesian women and tour the scenery dutifully I search out Gauguin’s son, Emile, living the life of a fisherman, with no wish for European ways and a contentment unknown to his father They are filming a movie here, Taboo, and its directors, FW Murnau and Robert Flaherty, invite me to live for a week in their camp on an idyllic cove more lovely than any I have seen before   Still I find myself eager to depart for the outer islands, the far Tuamotos, eager to escape Papeete with its film of dust and colonial snobbery   For three years I have painted nothing at all I have abandoned my wife on her sickbed to travel half-way around the globe in search of what— jungle flowers, an exotic cast of light? Why does my heart remain loyal to art alone?   My dearest Amélie, let me tell you about the Tuamotos: night is a wash of stars in ash-blue ether, dawn the rustle of trade winds, glitter of flying fish at the horizon Days, I swim in the lagoon amidst marvelous creatures of preposterous vividness,   seahorses, anemones, plumed aquatic ferns   Imagine a life stripped clean of every artifice, nothing but a small house on white sand amid coconut palms, and all of it, everything, subordinated to those two vast, borderless fields of color—   the sky and the sea   It would require a new medium to equal their purity, and at this I age I doubt myself capable of more than these sketches of tropical foliage, shapes and notations toward a project I sense at the furthest horizon of consciousness,   a voyage   to the outer islands within   the far Tuamotos of myself   moon-stroked atolls across an endless gulf of molten gold   oarless brushless   a voyage undertaken without promise of safe passage or realistic hope of return