ISLANDS: A MEMOIR SPLASHING ON THE SHORES OF AN ESSAY
“The real meaning of the island is to be found in the experience of the journey”
Cavafy
“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any given point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us and vanishes forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition and yet most contradictory to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation on which to build a tower reaching to the infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.
Blaise Pascal
Islands: I’m floating on the ocean (floating, then swimming - splashing, rowing and sailing), somewhere between islands of the imagination and the real things: enormous rocks covered in earth and grass and trees. The imaginary ones overlay the solid ones, so that I see the geographical entities through a filmy lens. No matter how hard I try to remove the mother of pearl filminess, the real islands are coloured by fantasy, a sense of adventure and anticipation, a quickening.
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs.Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, referring to a trip to an island, "But you'll have to be up with the lark,"she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch."
This is how Virginia Woolf's island novel begins. A mother's
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