The revival of the dream of a fabled Eden came in the late 1960s, when the Indonesian government decided to reinvent Bali for the international tourist market as "The Island of the Gods," launching a massively successful marketing campaign. The tourists who were lured back to Bali were a fairly high-minded crowd (this was not Fort Lauderdale, after all), and their attention was guided toward the artistic and religious beauty inherent in the Balinese culture. Darker elements of history were overlooked. And have remained overlooked since.

Reading about all this during my afternoons in the local library leaves me somewhat con-fused. Wait—why did I come to Bali again? To search for the balance between worldly pleas-ure and spiritual devotion, right? Is this, indeed, the right setting for such a search? Do the Balinese truly inhabit that peaceful balance, more than anyone else in the world? I mean, they look balanced, what with all the dancing and praying and feasting and beauty and smiling, but I don't know what's actually going on under there. The policemen really do wear flowers tucked behind their ears, but there's corruption all over the place in Bali, just like in the rest of Indonesia (as I found out firsthand the other day when I passed a uniformed man a few hun-dred bucks of under-the-table cash to illegally extend my visa so I could stay in Bali for four months, after all). The Balinese quite literally live off their image of being the world's most peaceful and devotional and artistically expressive people, but how much of that is intrinsic and how much of that is economically calculated? And how much can an outsider like me ever learn of the hidden stresses that might loiter behind those "shining faces"? It's the same here as anywhere else—you look at the picture too closely and all the firm lines start to melt away into an indistinct mass of blurry brushstrokes and blended pixels.

For now, all I can say for certain is that I love the house I have rented and that the people in Bali have been gracious to me without exception. I find their art and ceremonies to be beautiful and restorative; they seem to think so, as well. That's my empirical experience of a place that is probably far more complex than I will ever understand. But whatever the Balinese need to do in order to hold their own balance (and make a living) is entirely up to them. What I'm here to do is work on my own equilibrium, and this still feels, at least for now, like a nourishing climate in which to do that. Eat, Pray, Love