A Vermont mail-order clerk on the phone asked for my address. “You live on an island?” she asked. “Is it wonderful?” “Of course it is,” I said. The clerk sighed, “I’ve always wanted to live on an island.” If I had been calling from a small town in Kansas, our conversation would have remained bland and businesslike, but my island address sparked a personal chat and kindled our imaginations. Islands have a way of doing that.
What is an island that it should awaken feelings and fantasies within us? The word’s history holds some clues. Latin terra en sala (land in the sea) became in English “isolated land,” then simply island. The adjective insola became “insular,” or “by itself.” For many centuries, the word island has conjured images of boundaries separating the self from others, here from there. Islands are places apart.
Living on an island makes me aware that everybody does. John Donne’s observatIon that “no man is an Island” is convertible to its opposite, everyone is an island, depending upon whether one prefers to emphasize autonomy or interconnectedness. Both are facts of life, all life. The sea that forms a moat about my home is a spatial edge, and it resembles the temporal edge of nightime that distinguishes yesterday from today. Recognition of boundaries is serious business for all creatures of the Earth, as is crossing them.
It was on an island in the Galapagos Archipelago where Darwin met birds that set him thinking. Musing upon variations in mocking birds, young Darwin wrote in his diary that these islands would be "well worth examination, for such facts would undermine the stability of species." The evolutionary ideas that Darwin explored on those islands have reverberated through modem consciousness. Exploration around the edge of things often undermines stability, but it also encourages the growth of new forms and new perceptions.
