Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–1898) remains a stirring reminder of this newfound understanding. Gauguin traveled around the world to find himself in the same place. It is boundless, or only bounded by our biological and temporal limits. There is no journey one can take to free oneself from its clutches. What Gauguin came to realize in Tahiti, however, is that the fundamental human condition is inescapable. In Tahiti, Gauguin sought a simpler existence or, less charitably, a life of romantic dissipation, which was believed to be possible amongst the “noble savages” of Polynesia. Wilson begins his account of man’s long socio-biological evolution with a vignette about the painter Paul Gauguin, who, abandoning his family in France, boarded a Tahiti-bound ship in 1891.
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