The Man who loved islands

This short story was unknown to me until I was introduced to it at breakfast by a Dulverton visitor. It fits in well with my blog thoughts for today.

The Man who Loved Islands

A short story published in 1929 by the British author D.H. Lawrence (who has garnered most of his reputation from the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover). This story's nameless protagonist attempts to disprove the axiom about human nature that "no man is an island"; he is rich enough to buy islands for himself, and he buys and successively lives on three of them, going through progressive stages of isolation as he does so.
When he moves onto his first island, he gets lonely at night; his imagination carries him away, and he has visions of the island's Celtic history (here Lawrence makes references to the Druids as portrayed in the records of Julius Caesar). So, the man decides to turn his island into a community. He gets some servants to work in his house, a few other people to live in cottages, and dreams of turning the island into a self-supporting farm. But the dream is in vain; not only can the island not turn a profit, the man is far from breaking even on the venture. So, he sells his island to a hotel: "There, take that, island which didn't know when it was well off. Now be a honeymoon-and-golf island!" And he moves to the second island.
On the second island, he is accompanied only by two of the families that he had gotten to live with him on the first island: a carpenter and his wife, and a widow with her adult daughter. On this island, the man feels at home, and spends his days typing up a book about flower classifications, until he gets involved in a love affair with the widow's daughter. The problem, according to Lawrence, is that neither of them really want the affair; the man feels the pressure of the woman's will, and the woman forces her will upon the man for no clearly identifiable reason (she herself is at a loss to explain her behavior). Eventually, the woman conceives, and she and the man marry, but the man refuses to spend the rest of his life in misery. He buys and moves to the third island, leaving his wife with ample means to support herself.
On the third island, the man is alone. Initially, he has a cat, and some sheep that were on the island when he got there, but eventually the cat disappears and he hires some people to herd the sheep off the island because their bleats begin to annoy him. He wants to dwell in absolute silence, except for the sounds of the sea, and this is what he gets. He forgets the sound of his own voice; eventually, printed words offend him, and he destroys anything on the island that might be construed as text.
He lives in a stupor of solitude, and all this might be well and good, until winter comes. Suddenly, the man finds that the island he was so comfortable with is a foreign landscape covered in alien snow. At first, he tries clearing paths, but eventually he gives up hope of ever reclaiming his space. The story ends forebodingly: "He looked stupidly over the whiteness of the foreign island, over the waste of the lifeless sea. He pretended to imagine he saw the wink of a sail. Because he knew too well there would never again be a sail on that stark sea. As he looked, the sky mysteriously darkened and chilled. From far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the snow rolling over the sea. He turned, and felt its breath on him."
Lawrence's message is clear: without social contact, a person loses his/her humanity and identity; isolation should not be absolute. No one who is familiar with his other works should be surprised at this message.

The BBC Castaways

On their remote island off the coast of New Zealand the 14 castaways continue their adventure in survival and community formation. However each week so far they have voted a fellow castaway to be banished for a few days isolation on a minimalist beach on a neighbouring island to reflect on why they were chosen. Even in this situation the BBC has given a companion for the greater part of their stay.

St Cuthbert

These island thoughts started with the awareness that today is the feast day of St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne who started out as a shepherd boy in the Scottish lowlands around the year 640. His lonely work gave him prayer opportunity leading to a vision of a saint being transported to heaven which led him to become a monk at Melrose. When he became abbot, and later bishop, of Lindisfarne he balance his life between travelling as a preacher and teacher and living as a hermit on Farne Island. As his death drew near he wished to be completely alone with God though just a few of his monks returned to be with him at the end.

Poustinia

This is a way of encountering God in silence, solitude and prayer deriving from the Orthodox tradition and introduced to Western Christianity by Catherine Doherty. I try to keep a day a month in a poustinia at Madonna House, Robin Hoods Bay along the coast from here.

"Solitude requires only a small place. It can be a room in a large convent or monastery. It can be a place in the attic or the basement of a family home. It may be part of a room, separated by curtains. That would be a sufficient temporary solitude for simple recollection and greater peace....Solitude, unless one is called to a lifetime of it by God, must always be a temporary thing, lest it cease to be solitude and become an escape......It is good to have periodic solitude. It is good to gather oneself up, to be awake with the Lord in Gethsemane, to watch not only one hour with him but perhaps more; to be with him along the way of his Incarnation and on to Golgotha, to the Resurrection, on to the bosom of the Father and the Spirit."

Solitude

"It is God who makes solitude holy. 'I will lead you into solitude and there I shall speak to your heart' (Hos. 2.16). ...Little solitudes are often right behind a door which we can open, or in a little corner where we can stop to look at a tree that somehow survived the snow and dust of a city street. There is the solitude of a car in which we return from work, riding bumper to bumper on a crowded highway... Think of the solitude afforded by such humble tasks as housecleaning, ironing, and sewing....But our hearts, minds, and souls must be attuned, desirous, aware of these moments of solitude that God gives us"

Castaway but not adrift

I am ready, once again, to get hooked on reality tv - a repeat of the original and the best.

Castaway by the BBC, 30 minutes from town
By Nick Squires in Sydney

A former heroine addict, an 18-year-old public schoolboy and a deaf divorcee come together on an idyllic sub-tropical island this week in what the BBC hopes will be a repeat success of Castaway, the pioneer of reality television.
Seven years after 36 people were thrown together on a remote island off Scotland, the same social experiment is being tried on Great Barrier Island, in New Zealand.

Home to the Castaway volunteers: Great Barrier Island, off New Zealand. It is just a half-hour flight from Auckland
Thirteen blindfolded participants will disembark at Harataonga Bay, one of the island's stunning white sand beaches.
The idea, says the BBC, is to "take a group of Brits as far away from their current lives as possible and see if they can survive".
Aged between 18 and 64, all were single when they were first selected from 2,500 applicants. At least one, a female conservationist, has since married. Unlike in Scotland in 2000, there are no children.
They include a former RAF officer cadet, an ex-skinhead, a topless model photographer, a linguist and a woman who was once offered £10,000 to spend the weekend with someone. She turned them down.

The BBC calls it a "social experiment with a purpose" - presumably to distinguish it from the voyeurism featured on most reality TV.
Each person is reported to have a specific reason for wanting to flee more than 11,000 miles to the other side of the world - from lack of self-esteem to a broken marriage.
For the next 12 weeks the participants will be filmed as they attempt to build a self-sufficient community from meagre beginnings. The group's first task will be to make habitable a cluster of wooden huts, strengthening them against the storms and high winds that can sweep across the island and surrounding Hauraki Gulf.
Although candles will be plentiful, only one match will be provided for the entire 12-week period.
The original Castaway, set on the Scottish island of Taransay, became a media phenomenon, the precursor to more tawdry shows such as Big Brother, Celebrity Love Island and Shipwrecked.
It was intended to be worthy, middle-brow educational television but instead turned into a ratings phenomenon, with the audience gripped by fights, feuds and secret affairs.
While islanders have welcomed the cash injection from the production's 150-strong crew, they say the bay hardly represents the sort of wilderness evoked by the word castaway.
"Castaways marooned - 30 minutes from a latte" chortled the New Zealand Herald in January, when the location was announced.
The paper pointed out that Great Barrier Island is a half-hour flight or two-hour ferry ride from the comforts of Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city.
Flight times may, however, be a little longer from now on - the local airline has been asked to divert its aircraft away from Harataonga Bay for the next three months.
The bay itself is only a half-hour drive from shops, a chemist, a cafe, a golf club and an airfield. Farmers have moved their herds away from the beach in preparation for filming.
"You can't possibly have a cow mooing in the background when you're a castaway," said Izzy Fordham, who lives a mile up the road.
For company the castaways will have the endangered brown teal, known by its Maori name pateke, and the rarely seen Hochstetter's frog.
Lying 50 miles from the mainland and home to 700 people, Great Barrier was named by James Cook in 1769 and was once a thriving base for whalers.
It has the unusual distinction of having launched the world's first airmail postal service - using pigeons - in 1897.
In keeping with the castaway theme, it was a notorious site for shipwrecks, claiming many lives.
"This is one of our treasured places, and Castaway presents us with an opportunity to show it off to the world," said Dale Tawa, of New Zealand's department of conservation.
Some islanders are angry about a letter sent by the programme's location manager, asking them to avoid Harataonga Bay for the duration of the series.
"Nobody should tell a New Zealander they can't go to a beach," Joyce Gibson, who has lived on the island for 20 years, told the local paper. The show should have been filmed on private land, not in a national park, she added.
Castaways are allowed to bring a suitcase full of possessions, although writing material, books and knives are prohibited.
Each week the programme's host, Danny Wallace, will present the participants with a decision they have to make - anything from which vegetables to grow, to who will be allowed to make a telephone call home.
Castaway starts tonight on BBC1 at 9pm.

Here's what the presenter, Danny Wallace, says about the series:

"After Castaway is all over, I'll see you walking down the street when I get back, and we won't say a word to each other; we'll just hug. Because we'll have learnt a lot about human kind. This is an extraordinary programme. We're taking a gang of ordinary people and making them fend for themselves on a remote island off New Zealand where we can watch how they create a community - and how it dissolves in places. It is a responsible show - Reality with a purpose. None of our entrants wants to be a pop star. It's about getting back to basics and asking important questions. What do we really need in our lives, in terms of material things and emotional networks - can we just bring ourselves to somewhere and survive? It is reality tv which retains a sense of moral purpose."

Once again I expect it to illustrate the dynamics and truths of any human community including the one in which I live.