Dan Barry's Story of Exile and Union

Dan Barry's poignant story of a leprosy colony in Hawaii sat above the fold on the National page of the New York Times yesterday. It's title, "A Story of Exile and Union Few Are Left to Tell", grabbed me. The first line of the essay is this: "The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called Kalaupapa". With the newspaper in my hands, the dark of early morning outside my window, and the quiet and stillness of a yet busy world far away from me, I was struck with the power of Barry's storytelling. I was focused. I heard the words in my mind as I read this long and elegant story. Focus and quiet allow for deep, critical thinking. For centuries humans have sought retreat for reflection, for imagining, for consideration and for creativity.

Today, few of us remove ourselves from the distractions of our modern technologies to become immersed completely in one task, in one line of thought, or in a quiet, internal conversation. We talk on the phone while surfing on our computers, or worse, we play a game on our computers. Students today maintain they can't study without music playing, pulling part of their minds away from the main task of comprehension and memory building. Reading information on websites we are most often being bombarded with extraneous images and pulsating advertisements and uninvited audio messages. Communication is being conducted through snippets of thought, bullets of information, and disassociated ideas. We are losing our reverence for focused attention. We are losing our ability for critical thinking.

But in my intimate encounter with Dan Barry's story of the lepers and the caring priest who tended them, I was encouraged to hope. To hope there were enough people like me who treasure the longer stories, the fleshed out human complexities of stories like Barry's. Hope that there are numbers of people who relish thinking deeply about subjects. And who still read and consider in the quiet of the beginning, or end, of a day.

The literary language Barry uses gracefully, unfolds the history of this island where lepers were banished as early as 1866 when the spread of the disease in the Hawaiian Islands caused fear and panic. His own visit to the colony is the framework for his essay. He meets the few remaining patients there whose lives of pain and dislocation are revealed. And he learns of a priest, Father Damien, who came to the island in 1873 to, as Barry says, "give hope and dignity to a place often called a living tomb".

The end of the article is as evocative as the beginning. Barry leaves us with the shining dignity of one of the last surviving patients whose heart has not been hardened by his experiences. Barry writes: "Still, he believes he has had a good life, with a loving wife and a remote paradise to call home. He prays daily to Father Damien. And when sea breezes stir the whispers in the trees, he listens." My mind, in the quiet I had chosen yesterday morning, easily imagined a warm sea breeze and the beautiful spare trees of Hawaii and a colony of people now gone, who bonded and suffered together and found acceptance for their plight.

Find Dan Barry's work in the New York Times - in the actual newspaper, or online at nytimes.com/danbarry. The online title for the essay is "Island Isolation". The whole story is worth reading, alone and in a quiet room. You'll find voices of hope and courage.