Susan Sontag on how paradise is always being lost

"Travelers continue, in ever larger numbers, to make trips to exotic, non-Western lands, which seem to answer to some of the old stereotypes: that simpler society, where faith is pure, nature pristine, discontent (and its civilization) unknown. But paradise is always being lost. One of the recurrent themes of modern travel narratives is the depredations of the modern, the loss of the past — the report on a society's decline. The nineteenth-century travelers are noting the inroads in the idyllic life in, say, the South Sea made by the modern money-economy, for travelers who would never dream of living like the natives generally still want the natives to stay wholesome, rustic, sexy, and uncomfortable."

–Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls: Essays (2002)