From an essay that was scheduled to appear in the Spring 2024 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Islands. The issue has been on hold since the magazine went on hiatus late last year.
No one, not even the cartographers of Google, can tell you exactly how many islands there are on earth, for to count an island, you must first define it. Is Australia a continent, an island, or both? Its tectonic grandeur implies one answer. Its improbable marsupial wildlife, having evolved over epochs of biogeographic isolation, implies another.
Several years ago, a pair of fastidious geographers attempted to conduct a census of islands, putting the global total at 5,675, if by island one means a body of land, larger than ten square kilometers but smaller than a continent, encircled by water. This figure, as the fastidious geographers fastidiously note, excludes the additional 8.8 million islets (smaller than ten square kilometers) and 7 billion nano-islets (as small as one square foot, “just enough for a bird or a child to have a rest on”). Zoom in any farther and you arrive at micro-rocks, of which there may be several hundred billion.
The geographers might have kept counting, turning their attention to the mainland, where even in the absence of water, islands abound. “We see islands everywhere,” the late historian John Gillis noted twenty years ago in Islands of the Mind,
whether it be desert oases or city ghettos, kitchen workspaces, highway dividers, groups of cells (the islets of Langerhans), parts of the brain (Island of Reil), and patterns found in fingerprints. For centuries Europeans have been seeing islands in forests and on mountaintops. Now we imagine cyberspace archipelagically—we speak of “surfing” the Net and describe our browsers as “navigators.”
Some of the items on Gillis’s list of insular idioms—cyberspace, the net, city ghettos—are already out of date, but he’s right: we do see islands everywhere, and could add other idioms to the list. “To separate our thoughts into islands,” writes Gretel Ehrlich, “is a peculiar way we humans have of knowing something.”
For the West Indian writers Jamaica Kincaid, C.L.R. James, and Édouard Glissant, as for other islanders born on the insular satellites of empires, islands present as birthright a predicament to be embraced or fled from but which in any case they did not choose. Other authors, though born on the mainland, appear to have contracted, during their reading or travels, islomania, a condition first named and described—affectionately—by Lawrence Durrell in a book on the island of Rhodes. For islomaniacs, he writes, the “mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication.”
Durrell’s definition—a little world surrounded by the sea—is superior to the one proposed by the fastidious geographers. It’s as good as any definition I’ve come across: more than a body of land, an island is a microcosm—a world concentrated and miniaturized. Listen for it, and you will hear echoes of the idea throughout the literature of islands. It’s there in the title Kincaid chose (A Small Place) for her book about her native Antigua. It’s there in the reasons Henry David Thoreau gives for wishing he could build a hermitage on an island during his week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. “An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest,” he writes, “as a small continent and integral portion of the globe.” Meanwhile, in the Galápagos Islands, the phrase turns up again, in Charles Darwin’s journals. “The archipelago is,” he writes, “a little world within itself.”
The islands of the mind and those encircled by water can be difficult to disentangle. While navigating an archipelago, the annals of exploration suggest, it’s easy to get lost in the mists of metaphor and myth. Consider the magic-realist confusions of Christopher Columbus. On the island he calls Juana, known to us as Cuba, when he isn’t taking possession of the place by sprinkling names all over the map, he seems to wander about as if in a fever dream of Eden, describing a paradise of eternal spring where “the greatest variety of trees” reach “to the stars” and “never lose their leaves.” He hears the song of a nightingale—a species of passerine songbird endemic to Europe, Africa, and Asia but unknown to the Western Hemisphere. “I saw no monsters,” Columbus happily reports. That he suspected he might see them reveals, perhaps, the enduring influence on the European imagination of the Odyssey, though Homer was hardly alone in populating his islands with fantastic beasts.
Added up, the islands and islets in the world archipelago account for just 6.7 percent of the planet’s terrestrial surface, the fastidious geographers inform us. In the human imagination, they command a far greater share of the real estate. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—an eighteenth-century international bestseller acidly summarized by the German cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk as “the tale of the puritanical simpleton who created a micro-commonwealth of British Christian clichés on a desert island in the Atlantic”—spawned enough imitators to warrant the designation of a new literary genre, the robinsonade.
In recent decades, the archipelagoes have ascended to the heavens. You don’t have to be a scholar of the Age of Exploration to hear Captain Cook’s name in the one Gene Roddenberry chose for the captain of the starship Enterprise. The forest moon of Endor, the desert planet of Tatooine, the planets whereon Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany conduct literary experiments—imaginary islands all.
In the early months of the pandemic, our elder son, like millions of other housebound isolatoes, escaped into a video game called Animal Crossing: New Horizons, in which players guide an avatar around a cartoon island, collecting animals and fossils like some latter-day Darwin or Joseph Banks. “Explore your island,” the game’s tagline ran. At first, our younger child met up with friends on the grassy IRL island of a nearby public park, but as the pandemic wore on, they retreated to the virtual playgrounds of Minecraft. I, meanwhile—feeling, midway on life’s journey, a bit lost—fled into the virtual worlds of Dante’s Commedia, rereading the Inferno and for the first time continuing onward through Purgatorio and Paradiso. Famously, the architecture of Dante’s hell is circular. It is also concentrically insular, and at its center is Satan, an island unto himself, trapped upside down in a frozen sea chilled by the willful beating of his wings.
It’s not just that the alternate universes we visit in our stories even now owe something to the literature, history, and experience of islands. They do, but there is some subtler affinity here, I think. Isn’t every book a fuga mundi, carrying us away from the familiar or more deeply into it? What is a library but an archipelago?
