Self Aware

Contemporary Studies from the Islands – The Marginal

“No man is an island,” wrote John Donne in his timeless treatise on our shared human experience. And yet each of us is a lucky coincidence; each of us is an island so private and so remote that it even offers love – this is the best way we have to reach across the abyss between us – just a boat entering the turbulent waters and opportunity from another island. just far away.

Perhaps because we live with such inner islands, islands became our first examples of the doctrine of the universe and we arrived at the idea of ​​utopia as “an island where everything becomes clear.” Islands remain our best metaphors for knowledge and self-awareness. Islands are where we go to find our depths and our limits. They are complex porpoises found in rock and water, teaching us something important about negotiating the balance between sovereignty and communication.

Island universes from Thomas Wright's 1750 book The Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe. (Available as a printed book and as note cards.)

Artist and poet (in the big sense) Sandy Gingras celebrates the vastness and abundant delights of the islands in her illustrated romance. How to Live on an Island (public library).

Presenting his brief pictorial instructions for being a good citizen of the world so well behaved – “go tender,” “don't get up,” “thank you” – he writes:

I think no place is truer than an island. Whether it's a sandbar or a bubble-up of volcanic rock or a collection of hot corals, the island is just waiting for something, given the opportunity to enter the chaos. When I go to the island, I know I'm in that state of grace where anything is possible.

There is an island near where I live that keeps disappearing underwater and reappearing every few decades… I like to go out there and just stand on it. It almost convinced me that there is such a place.

Map from Insularium illustratum by Henricus Martellus Germanus, 1495 – the first descriptive atlas of island maps. (Available as a printed book and as note cards.)

Once, after a great turmoil of the heart, I moved to a remote mossy island to live alone for a while, to try to escape the grip of the past and find my place in the future. Instead, like Gingras, I found the moment increasing. I found that change can not only be a vector of time but a point of existence – here was a small station of the world that has never been in stasis, no hour of sunlight is safe from a strong storm, no forest route is the same from one day to another. , there is no sea rock that does not move from one wave to another. I saw the island as a daily defiance of entropy, an important lesson in self-renewal.

Looking at this comfortable stretch of being models for our habituated islands, Gingras writes:

Each day begins with a wash, a sweep, completely different from the previous one. The morning flows like an unturned page. Where else in the world do we have the opportunity to experience such a revival? Where else do we keep getting second chances for ourselves?

A single day on the island is a microcosm of that irresistible lifestyle:

The ground changes and heaves, boundaries expand and recede. The waves are eager. The moon is drawing. The very wind pushes us. I can't help but know that the day here isn't the foundation-based thing I thought (sometimes hoped) it was, but it's swewvy and alive as we are.

Train Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the beach and the soul and beautiful meditations of the artist Rockwell Kent with creativity taken in seven months on a small island in Alaska, and then revisit Oliver Sacks about the dignity of the difference obtained through rare genetic mutations developed in the remote Pacific. the island.

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