{"id":9889,"date":"2025-01-22T14:12:26","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T18:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/existential-lessons-from-islands-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-01-22T14:12:26","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T18:12:26","slug":"existential-lessons-from-islands-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/existential-lessons-from-islands-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Existential Lessons from Islands \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\u201cNo man is an island,\u201d John Donne wrote in his timeless ode to our shared human experience. And yet each of us is a chance event islanded in time; in each of us there is an island of solitude so private and remote that it renders even love \u2014 this best means we have of reaching across the abyss between us<\/a> \u2014 a mere row-boat launched into the turbulent waters of time and chance from another island just as remote. <\/p>\n

Perhaps because we live with such inner islandness, islands became our earliest theoretical models of the universe<\/a> and we came to envision utopia as an \u201cisland where all becomes clear.\u201d<\/a> Islands remain our best metaphors for knowledge<\/a> and for self-knowledge<\/a>. Islands are where we go to find our depths<\/a> and our limits<\/a>. They are the porcupine dilemma<\/a> rendered in rock and water, teaching us something essential about negotiating the balance between sovereignty and connection. <\/p>\n

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Island universes from Thomas Wright\u2019s 1750 book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Artist and poet (in the largest sense<\/a>) Sandy Gingras celebrates the many dimensions and delights of islands in her illustrated love letter How To Live on an Island<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

Prefacing her short illustrated instructions for being a good citizen of such a self-contained world \u2014 \u201cwalk tender,\u201d \u201cleave no wake,\u201d \u201cthank\u201d \u2014 she writes:<\/p>\n

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I think that there\u2019s no truer place than an island. Whether it\u2019s a sandbar or a bubble-up of volcanic rock or a jut of tropical coral, an island stands only by some whim of fate, given a chancy foothold among the chaos. When I go to an island, I know that I\u2019m in that state of grace in which anything can happen.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an island near where I live that keeps disappearing underwater and then reappearing again every few decades\u2026 I like to go out there and just stand on it. It almost convinces me that there is such a place as the present.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Map from Insularium illustratum<\/em> by Henricus Martellus Germanus, 1495 \u2014\u00a0an early descriptive atlas of island maps. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once, in the wake of a great upheaval of the heart, I moved to a remote mossy island to live for a time in solitude, to try to escape the grip of the past and find my foothold on the future. Instead, like Gingras, I found the present expanding. I found that change can be not just a vector of time but a point in place \u2014 here was a small station of land never in stasis, no hour of sunshine safe from a sudden storm, no forest trail the same from one day to the next, no beach stone unchurned from one tide to the next. I came to see the island as a daily defiance of entropy, a lesson in the imperative of self-renewal.<\/p>\n

With an eye to this salutary elasticity of being an island models for us captives of habit, Gingras writes:<\/p>\n

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Each day starts washed, swept, utterly different than the day before. The morning crackles like a never-turned page. Where else in the world do we get the chance to step out into so much renewal? Where else do we keep getting second chances at ourselves?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A single day on an island is a microcosm of that irrepressible aliveness: <\/p>\n

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The ground shifts and hisses, the boundaries grow and recede. The tides yearn. The moon pulls. The very air pushes us around. I can\u2019t help but know that a day here is not that grounded predictable thing I thought (sometimes hoped) it was, but it\u2019s as swervy and alive as we are.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the beach and the soul<\/a> and artist Rockwell Kent\u2019s magnificent meditation on creativity<\/a> drawn from seven months on a small Alaskan island, then revisit Oliver Sacks on the dignity of difference<\/a> lensed through the peculiar genetic mutation evolution developed on a remote Pacific island. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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