a source of both life and death for us; and for some ocean islanders, especially, water is something that unites rather than separates, its bountiful blessings more important than its occasional brutality, a place of peace that passeth understanding. On the island of Tikopia in the Solomon Islands, death at sea is referred to as a “sweet burial.” When the islander William Wordsworth, in a time of trouble at the beginning of the 1800s, called on John Milton for comfort, he said the great seventeenth-century poet “had a voice whose sound was like the sea.” Life began in the sea, as far as we know; and when we seek evidence of life on other planets we look for water. But no matter how friendly our feelings toward it, we are not at home in the water. We don’t swim very well, or for very long, certainly not compared to our cousins the marine mammals, much less the fish and reptiles that live there. And while small amounts of salt water are cleansing, seawater makes us sick. “You can’t drink the sea,” sings the Newfoundlander Ron Hynes, echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient Mariner who cried “water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” shortly after he shot an albatross, perhaps not even knowing that albatrosses drink seawater quite happily.
The sea is undomestic, wild. “No man can ever in truth declare that he saw the sea look young, as the earth looks young in spring” observed Joseph Conrad, and the Newfoundland poet E. J. Pratt wrote: “There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence under the sea; / No cries announcing birth, / No sounds declaring death.” “Nothing can be put down in the sea. You can’t plant on it, you can’t live on it, you can’t walk on it,” reflects the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott from his island of St. Lucia. The sea “does not have anything on it that is a memento of man,” he adds; and memory is the mark of humankind.
The ocean is the only domain, other than outer space, where humans are so completely alien and where wonder holds us so close. This is the heart of the matter, for it is this wonder that has inspired voyagers for millennia to row and sail the seas in search of an island, sometimes any island; and it is this wonder that still inspires us to look for a planetary island like ours in the furthest reaches of space. Ultimately, we are all islanders on planet Earth, surrounded by the air and the water which we need in order to survive but which by themselves will not sustain us.
“No matter which direction I walked I would arrive at the border of another wilderness, the savage sea,” recalls the writer Thurston Clarke of his visit to Más a Tierra, one of the three Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile. Más a Tierra, which means “close to the mainland” (four hundred miles away!), is the island where Alexander Selkirk was marooned in 1704; and Selkirk’s four-year sojourn there was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s classic island novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719). “An island wilderness is different and more perfect than a continental one,” Clarke continues. And indeed there is something different—no, something indifferent, inhuman—about the sea. Only death is as indifferent, which is the sentiment behind the poet John Donne’s famous line: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” He wrote this in a prose meditation on death in 1624, and its truth also lies in the contradiction that the separateness of islands as well as of humans is underwritten by their respective connectedness. Not unlike the ocean floor, which is shared by sea islands and connects them underwater, our human connection is language, language that reminds us of both how united and how divided we are. In the end, the connection lies in death, which is to say in our shared human mortality, just as all islands will disappear eventually.
It is sometimes said that language is what defines us as humans. But it is really belief, and ceremonies of belief, of which language may be the most remarkable. It is not the only such ceremony, however. Just as language—its words and images—requires us to believe in its artifice, its man-made (or divinely inspired) ability to take us across the gulf that separates us as individuals, so leaving the shore and sailing to an island involves an act of faith in the technologies of craft and navigation.
“The water is wide, I cannot cross over, neither have I wings to fly. Give me a boat,” begins a famous lament from the British isles. Separateness is a condition that fills humans with both dread and delight. Much ancient and modern philosophy, politics, and now economics are about the insularity of our individual consciousness and the ingenious ways we have developed of making connections, forming relationships, and establishing commerce between you and me or them and us, while also maintaining distance and difference. “Thank God we’re surrounded by water” is the chorus line of a song by Dominic Behan (Ireland) and Tom Cahill (Newfoundland), celebrating the advantages of being separated from others by the sea. “Thank God we speak Irish” (which is to say, Gaelic rather than English) is its cultural counterpart, for we are all islanded by our individual languages. “Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy,” said Wordsworth about first learning a language. Walter Pater, writing in his book on the Renaissance (1873) about the inner and outer worlds of consciousness that words and images bring together, described how we can be bound by the very intelligence and imagination that give us freedom, with “each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.”
The contradiction is always there. Both islands and languages lay claim to their inhabitants, limiting as well as liberating them, holding them hostage even as they set them free—though from what, people don’t always agree. Indeed, it may be a consciousness of our “islanded” existence—and our capacity (and, more often than not, desire) for crossing the wide water between—that makes us truly human, a consciousness and a capacity that incorporates our uniquely human understanding of life and death, the ultimate separation. Crossing the water is an ancient image for the passing over that is death, as Donne knew well, and it is an image shared among many religious traditions. The Christian community, for its part, is often likened to a ship, its church nave and other architectural elements modeled after the ark that saved Noah’s family, with the priest as navigator and the cross conflating mast and anchor. “No man is an island” is a prayer as well as a proposition.
In the British Museum is an ancient Taino sculpture from Jamaica that portrays a bird on the back of a turtle. It represents a creation story that has wide currency among indigenous peoples in the Americas, telling of a special tree that grew on an island high above the world, and an ancient chief who lived there with a woman who was his beloved. She had a dream that the tree had been uprooted, and when she awoke she told her man about it. They went to look, and there it was still standing where it had always been. Just a dream. But dreams must be taken seriously, and the chief decided he’d better do something to make it come true. So he pulled the tree out of the ground.
In art as well as life, an action like this is usually followed by a reaction. Something is given, something must be taken away. Something is lifted up, something must fall down. And sure enough, the tree that the old man had uprooted left a great big hole; and when the woman came to look at it, she fell through.
Down below, water covered everything. The only living things were the fish and the seafaring animals and the birds. They all looked up, and saw a woman falling from the sky—like a meteor, which she eventually became in the stories of science. To save her, two seabirds—swans, some say, or maybe cormorants—caught and balanced her on their wings. They flew about for a long time, but eventually they needed somewhere to rest. Except there wasn’t anywhere. Just the sea below and the sky above.
Another of the waterbirds said she had heard that there was earth far below the surface of the sea. That would be ideal, they all agreed; but how to get it, if indeed there was earth down there. Everyone offered to help. First a beaver went down, but he didn’t find any. Then a loon tried, going down and down, but he, too, came up empty. Finally, a muskrat gave it a go, diving deeper and deeper until, just when she could go no further, she reached bottom, grabbed a pawful of earth, and swam back to the surface, gasping for air.
But where to put the earth? A turtle, swimming by at that very moment, said, “put it on my back.” Which the
