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tags: Islands
NOTE
More Islands study. The text seems to be focusing on Islands as objects, as a way to contain itself (vague island reference here?). Less metaphorical, though admits to partaking in some slightly.
There are no more islands - Albert Camus
There are still blissful islands - Nietzsche
Brave New World, title comes from The Tempest is based around Exile, along with A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells.
Both use islands as prisons, but the key point is that islands are different from the mainlands, whether they provide sanctuary or quarantine.
Many islands are too small to count and come and go with the changing water levels.
Yes:
Everything is potentially an island. Is an automobile a kind of floating island. Is a duck an island? Is Berghain an island?
Artists and philosophers would go to islands in order to get work done. George Orwell (1984) completed in Jura. Ingmar Bergman wrote and set many films in Faro in the Baltic. Raoul Hausmann and other intellectuals and exiles went to Ibiza (along with Camus in youth, whose mother was Balearic ancestry.)
The dark side of romantic solitude and adventure, however, is the tendency towards the domination and exploitation of fellow humans and nature. This colonial mentality lives on in island holiday resorts and advertisements serving up a stereotypical fantasy of tamed domestic adventures with pricy isolation for paying guests from the wealthy global north - who are too often modern day Gullivers, ignorantly pissing on everything and everyone. Consuming Romantic Utopia - Eva Illouz
Judith Schanlansky, remote islands “are well suited as places in which to gather everything that is undesireable, displaced, and digressive” How does the paradise island relate to, or reconcile its opposite?
New Yorkers might not think of a journey from Manhattan to Brooklyn as an island-to-island trip, although technically both boroughs are on islands; yet going from Manhattan out to Fire Island, the barrier islands connected to Long Island by a bridge, or even Montauk at the far end of Long Island, would probably be considered an island getaway—with the feeling of seaside solitude, and the transition from work and responsibilities to the carefree pleasure that islands typically offer.
Full Camus quote
There are no more islands. Yet there is a need for them. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away form it on occasion.
When you are surrounded by the sea, it is hard to be anywhere else: the hypnotic sound of the breaking waves keeps you present saying, “be here, be here.”
We are rapidly losing sacred spaces to what David Foster Wallace called “Total Noise”
Island Fever - islands accessible only by boat or plane can be claustrophobic places. A woman tried to swim out to a cruise ship, to escape Madeira and was found floating on her handbag in the darkness - a mile out.
John Donne “No man is an island”, because each of us is a piece of the continent and a part of the main. Thus, this thinking, we are all islands, isolated yet connected in a global archipelago. Sometimes a bit of autonomy, after all, in harmony with others, can be a good thing.
Islanders rarely see their island the way visitors do.
Nearly drowning, without notice
I was furthest out, then James a bit closer to shore, and then my son. James was calling to him. Then none of us said a word and there was only the sound of crashing waves and the taste of salt water. James tried to swim to my son, as did I, but all of us were immobilized as if in a terrible nightmare, trying to keep our heads above water. The thing that terrified me was seeing James, a powerful swimmer, in as much trouble as we were. Meanwhile on the beach nothing had changed. We struggled in silence, and no one noticed. We could see people lying on their towels, reading paperbacks, their children digging in the sand.
Coming for a holiday, and never leaving.
Islands have a silence you can hear.
The pandemic “introduced something which I had always fantasized about since I was little, which was being marooned.”
Eight songs about islands
- Cesaria Evora “Isolada”
- The Paragons “The Tide is High”
- U.S. Girls “The Island Song”
- Mona Baptiste “Calypso Blues”
- Autechre “Montreal”
- De La Soul “Wonce Again Long Island”
- The Pastels “Leaving This Island”
- Sergei Rachmaninoff “Isle of the Death (Opus 29)”