Remote Island Quotes

We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some-more spectacularly-squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer God. Their solitude is a self-moritification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind. Grenouille's case was nothing of the sort. There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating-and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake lived in the wide world outside.

Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker. Sometimes you've got to dye your hair cobalt blue, or wander remote islands in Sicily, or cook your way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, for no very good reason.

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

3 people get stranded on a remote Island A Banker, a Daily Mail reader & an Asylum seeker All they have to eat is a box of 10 Mars bars The Banker says "Because of my expertise in asset management, I''ll look after our resources" The other 2 agree So the Banker opens the box, gobbles down 9 of the Mars bars and hands the last one to the Daily Mail reader He then says " I'd keep an eye on that Asylum seeker, he's after your Mars Bar

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death. It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? let us give it all up.

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken,as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits--the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.

In the life of each of us there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.

We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.

Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote ... can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That's why I wrote this book.

In every remote corner of the world there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving threatened species. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction. But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks? Well, yes, it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients or many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones, that we need most. Even so, the loss of a few species may seem irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving. There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

We are familiar with people who seek out solitude: penitents, failures, saints, or prophets. They retreat to deserts, preferably, where they live on locusts and honey. Others, however, live in caves or cells on remote islands; some-more spectacularly-squat in cages mounted high atop poles swaying in the breeze. They do this to be nearer God. Their solitude is a self-moritification by which they do penance. They act in the belief that they are living a life pleasing to God. Or they wait months, years, for their solitude to be broken by some divine message that they hope then speedily to broadcast among mankind.

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it!

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy….The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities…To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back.

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans.

And even after supposedly happy endings...well, we don't know for sure what happens after the final credits. Elizabeth probably dies in childbirth while Darcy sits stoically outside the bedroom door. Nurse Hathaway might get bored of Doug Ross and his cable-knit sweaters and run off to a tropical island. Even Bella might discover that Edward always hogs the remote and has an annoying laugh and decide to call it quits-no hard feelings.

There is no "tropical island paradise" I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.

remote and seemingly lone trees were not as badly affected as those living together in close proximity. Today, I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease. Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit. Better to keep some distance from all collective beliefs and certainties, I always remind myself.

On Saturday Ben and I drove to Johns Island to see Skyfall.” “You did?” Hi asked sharply. “Thanks for the invite, jerks.” Shelton raised his palms. “You were at temple. We’re supposed to just wait around? Plus, you’ve seen that move like five times.” “You still could’ve asked,” Hi grumbled. “I don’t—” “Guys!” I clapped my hands once. “The story, please.” “An hour in, I go for a popcorn refill.” Shelton shuddered. “When I get back, Ben’s sitting in the dark, flaring away, and he’s not even wearing his sunglasses! I almost wet myself. He said he wanted to watch the movie in HD. Man, I don’t remember a single minute from the rest of the film.” “In a theater!?” My temper exploded. “That stupid mother—” “Hiram!” Our heads whipped. Ruth Stolowitski was standing on her front stoop. “Get back in here this instant! You’re not dressed.” Ruth wore a fuzzy pink bathrobe, her free hand vising the garment closed. Her eyes darted, as if worried that cagey perverts were surveilling our remote island, waiting for just this opportunity to get an eyeful.

Night" The cold remote islands And the blue estuaries Where what breathes, breathes The restless wind of the inlets, And what drinks, drinks The incoming tide; Where shell and weed Wait upon the salt wash of the sea, And the clear nights of stars Swing their lights westward To set behind the land; Where the pulse clinging to the rocks Renews itself forever; Where, again on cloudless nights, The water reflects The firmament’s partial setting; —O remember In your narrowing dark hours That more things move Than blood in the heart.

There are numerous doors in varying locations. In bustling cities and remote forests. On islands and on mountaintops and in meadows.

To take a good rest in life time to time, you must know the ways to make yourself a remote island! An island no one can reach…

In my own case, the process is more or less unvarying. I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem. I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have had to retrace my steps by way of the shadows.

...but by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island..

A glassy calm replaced the storm surrounding their boat. The distant thunder struck a note, white-hot and remote. An invisible magnet seemed to steer their course. The island pulled them in with its dreamy force.

My face flushed scarlet. I was a stranger in my own skin. I had ever felt this kind of anger in my life. Fort and confusion grew. Its sensation was an overwhelming concoction of hate. The only things I knew - the only things keeping me remotely calm- was the following litany. My name is Eleanora Ada Stone. I was moved from home to home for seventeen years. I am now living on this god-forsaken island in Maine. I was being kept from a world of secrets. I have abilities. I am not human. I do not know what I am.

So warped, however, are the standards by which men measure criminality that players of these games are more apt to be regarded as “pillars of society” than dangerous lunatics who should be exiled to remote islands where they can do no harm to themselves or others.

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem

You idolize peasants. You look up to island savages living “at one with Nature,” I ask you to see what happened to Margaret Mead, and how the Polynesians punked her—most of the things she wrote about their views on life, about their sexual freedom, was nonsense they made up to make her look foolish. In same way the fools like Gimbutas and others who believe that mankind at some remote point lived under a benevolent matriarchy, again, “at one with Nature,” in balance with the needs of the soil and such: sheer nonsense. Everywhere historians, archaeologists find what we thought was matriarchy was really no such thing.

It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle.

We all die young. He was around your age then. I had just turned 18 and met Evelyn. We fell hard for each other. Any moment I could find, I was with her, which in turn led to her getting pregnant with Neal. My plan was for us to take my inheritance and live on some remote island somewhere. But, when my brother died, I had to step forward. I hated the life with a passion." "And now you can't let go." He was good at what he did. The stories of young Sedric were the things that nightmares were made of. "It's like a possession," he whispered. "It crawls into your soul and takes root. You have no control over it. You allow it to grow, because it helps. It's the reason you can let blood flow across the floor like fine wine and not flinch. It helps you become the monster you need to be. The only side effect is that it's always there. No amount of holy water can wash it off. So there's no letting go. I will forever be who I allowed myself to be, and the person I allowed myself to be enjoys the chaos." Truer words were never spoken.

significant contributing factor to her ability to buy this remote and little-valued island

If someone doesn’t like who you are, trying to change for them is rarely successful and doing so carries even more remote odds that you will end up being happy yourself.

To search is more blessed than to find, Gissler thinks.

If one plays on fear, takes away any remotely complicated ideas, and offers people a sense of confidence and right, one’s followers will beat to death any enemy they are pointed at.

Le carte geografiche sono astratte e allo stesso tempo concrete, e nonostante pretendano di essere oggettive, non offrono una riproduzione della realtà, bensì una sua ardita interpretazione.

An Ojibwa tradition seems relevant. It speaks of a comet that 'burned up the earth' in the remote past and that is destined to return: 'The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That's the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail ... Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong with nature on the earth, and a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The Holy Spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. ... The comet burnt everything to the ground. There wasn't a thing left ... There is a prophecy that the comet will destroy the earth again. But it's a restoration. The greatest blessing this island [Turtle Island/America] will ever have. People don't listen to their spiritual guidance today. There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars when the comet comes down again.

What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, backyard barbecues, air travel as a commonplace—all were brand-new and marvelously exciting. It is amazing we didn’t choke to death on all the novelty and wonder in our lives. I remember once my father brought home a device that you plugged in and, with an enormous amount of noise and energy, it turned ice cubes into shaved ice, and we got excited about that. We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. —

If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom.

While my library contains the works of travel writers, I have mostly searched for those who speak about their own place in the world. But the world is changing and many people have no place to call home. Some of the most important kinds of travel writing now are stories of flight, written by people who belong to the millions of asylum seekers in the world. These are stories that are almost too hard to tell, but which, once read, will never be forgotten. Some of these stories had to be smuggled out of detention centres, or were caught covertly on smuggled mobiles in snatches of calls on weak connections from remote and distant prisons. Why is this writing important? Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist and human rights campaigner who has been detained on Manus Island for over three years with no hope for release yet in sight, puts it plainly in a message to the world in the anthology Behind the Wire. It is, he wrote, ‘because we need to change our imagination’.

Wave after wave, Ralph followed the rise and fall until something of the remoteness of the sea numbed his brain. Then gradually the almost infinite size of this water forced itself oh his attention. This was the divider, the barrier. On the other side of the island, swathed at midday with mirage, defended by the shield of the quiet lagoon, one might dream of rescue; but here, faced by the brute obtuseness of the ocean, the miles of division, one was clamped down, one was helpless, one was condemned, one was-

The naturalist E. O. Wilson gave a name to this warm, fuzzy feeling I’m experiencing: biophilia. He defined it as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” Wilson argued that our connection to nature is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. That connection isn’t always positive. Take snakes, for instance. The chances of encountering a snake, let alone dying from a snakebite, are extraordinarily remote. Yet modern humans continue to fear snakes even more, studies have found, than car accidents or homicide or any of the dozens of other more plausible ways we might meet our demise. The fear of snakes resides deep in our primitive brain. The fear of the Long Island Expressway, while not insignificant, was added much more recently.

Whether an island such as Easter Island can be considered remote is simply a matter of perspective. Those who live there, the Rapa Nui, call their homeland Te Pito Te Henua, 'the navel of the world'. Any point on the infinite globe of the Earth can become a centre.

It is tempting to look upon England as a sort of musical Australia, an island culture inhabited by, and sustaining, its own insular fauna – musical kangaroos, koalas, and platypuses. That, however, would be very much to exaggerate England's musical isolation or independence. It is also a considerable exaggeration to view the English preference for thirds as something altogether alien or opposed to continental practice, as if only in remote geographical corners (and behind closed doors, among consenting adults) could harmonies unsanctioned by Pythagoras or the Musica enchiriadis be furtively enjoyed.

It was degrading to play with girls and in our talk we relegated them to a remote island of life. We had somehow caught the spirit of the role of our sex and we flocked together for common moral schooling. We spoke boastfully in bass voices; we used the word “nigger” to prove the tough fiber of our feelings; we spouted excessive profanity as a sign of our coming manhood; we pretended callousness toward the injunctions of our parents; and we strove to convince one another that our decisions stemmed from ourselves and ourselves alone. Yet we frantically concealed how dependent we were upon one another.

...there is nothing certain in life but death. We may labour under the delusion that we know what the day ahead of us holds, what the hour holds. But we do not. We may think our death, our very certain death, is something distant and remote, an island we might never visit. But for some of us, its right here, waiting.

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

The formal British Government submission to UNESCO had stated, ‘The fact that the island community held out until its eventual evacuation in 1930 is a remarkable enough story. But what is most tragic is that a community which had survived the remoteness and physical hardships for over 2000 years should finally succumb to the influences of modern civilization.

[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' [...] The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.

Along the western coast of the Sahara desert, about half way between the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands, lays a sand spit called Cape Barba’s. In 1441, ships attached to Estêvão da Gama’s fleet were sent by Prince Henry to explore the coastline south of Cape Barba’s, which, five years earlier, was the farthest point reached by any of Prince Henry’s captains. Although there are some conflicting stories regarding the discoveries of the mid-Atlantic islands, it is safe to assume that in 1501 João da Nova discovered Ascension Island. The desolate island remained deserted until it was rediscovered two years later on Ascension Day by Alfonso de Albuquerque. He was also the first European to discover the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

Naturalmente, il mappamondo corrisponde alla Terra più di quanto facciano le carte raccolte nell'atlante: nelle camerette dei ragazzini, inoltre, crea un'atmosfera piena di nostalgia dei paesi lontani. La sua sfericità, però, è tanto geniale quanto critica. La forma sospesa della Terra non ha margini, non conosce un sopra e un sotto, non ha un inizio né una fine e fa sì che un lato del globo rimanga sempre nascosto.

Whoever they were, the so-called Lapita people appeared to be the first people on the scene in these places, and this, in turn, meant that not only were they the true pioneers of the remote Pacific—the first people to sail over the horizon to islands that were too far away to see—but they were also the first people to reach the Polynesian Triangle. And this meant that they were the immediate precursors and ancestors of the Polynesians.

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupe with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits, and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand. So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

She’s often thought about this, the risks of a crime in a remote location. How vulnerable people would be, how much damage could be inflicted in a short period of time. Her mind flickers to the terror attacks in Norway in 2011. Anders Breivik, a right-winger on a rampage, shot at teenagers gathered on the island of Utøya during an annual summer camp. The island’s remote location meant that by the time the police had reached them sixty-nine people had already been massacred.

Are you sure you can’t just…maroon him on a remote island with a bottle of rum?” Etta asked, only half kidding. “Make him walk the plank straight into a shark’s mouth?” “Maroon him? Walk the plank?” To her surprise, he actually laughed. It felt like a reward to hear it. “Why, Miss Spencer, I believe there’s a pirate’s heart in you. I wish Captain Hall had stayed, if only so he could have told you some of his stories over dinner.” “Too bad,” she agreed, relieved that a small bit of the tension had finally eased. “Do you know any good ones?” “I’m not as good in the telling as he is,” Nicholas said. “Perhaps you’d be interested in hearing the charming tale of pirates who disemboweled and cut out the heart of a British officer, soaked it in spirits, and ate it?” Her jaw dropped. “Spirits? As in, alcohol? Was that supposed to make it taste better?” “I’d imagine few things could improve the experience,” he said. “But anything is possible with enough rum and courage, I suppose

Mammoths had flourished for millions of years over most of the northern hemisphere, but as Homo sapiens spread – first over Eurasia and then over North America – the mammoths retreated. By 10,000 years ago there was not a single mammoth to be found in the world, except on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel. The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island.

Among the best shows were these, some of which have attained cult followings: The Most Dangerous Game (Oct. 1, 1947), a showcase for two actors, Paul Frees and Hans Conried, as hunted and hunter on a remote island; Evening Primrose (Nov. 5, 1947), John Collier’s too-chilling-to-be-humorous account of a misfit who finds sanctuary (and something else that he hadn’t counted on) when he decides to live in a giant department store after hours; Confession (Dec. 31, 1947), surely one of the greatest pure-radio items ever done in any theater—Algernon Blackwood’s creepy sleight-of-hand that keeps a listener guessing until the last line; Leiningen vs. the Ants (Jan. 17, 1948) and Three Skeleton Key (Nov. 15, 1949), interesting as much for technical achievement as for story or character development (soundmen Gould and Thorsness utilized ten turntables and various animal noises in their creation of Three Skeleton Key’s swarming pack of rats); Poison (July 28, 1950), a riveting commentary on intolerance wrapped in a tense struggle to save a man from the deadliest snake in the world—Jack Webb stars

After a day on Mykines, I changed my mind about life not going on. A sort of life was going on, beating with a reasonalbe version of a pulse, but that life consisted for the most part of travelers like myself. There were maybe a dozen of us -- one third of the island's population. Our tribe could only increase as the Mykines tribe dwindled away, a few falling down steps, most simply emigrating, until there would be, sad to say, only our peripatetic selves. We were the future of all places condemned by remoteness to a lingering, photogenic death.

I am a face myself. The quickest way of retiring from social Face-eating competition occurred to me when I attacked a policeman with my strong steel umbrella. I was quickly put into prison, where I spent months of health-giving meditation and compulsive exercise. My exemplary conduct in prison moved the Head Wardress to an excess of bounty, and that is how the Government presented me with the island, after a small and distinguished ceremony in a remote corner of the Protestant Cemetery. So here I am on the island with all sizes of mechanical artifacts whizzing by in every conceivable direction, even overhead. Here I sit.

I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests, and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.

If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia - such as the extinction of all other human species - and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cube, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures. At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools. This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution. The archaeological record of island after island tells the same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, without any trace of humans. In scene two, Sapiens appear, evidenced by a human bone, a spear point, or perhaps a potsherd. Scene three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre stage and most large animals, along with many smaller ones, are gone. (p. 80)

A survey of oceanic (i.e. remote) islands found that, as far back as records exist, they have been accumulating alien plants. In 1860 the average oceanic island had less than 1 introduced plant for every 10 natives. By 1940 the ratio was 1 alien for every 2 natives, and today the ratio is about 1:1. Despite all these new arrivals there have been very few extinctions among the original inhabitants, so the number of plant species on such islands has approximately doubled. Thus, although left to themselves remote islands tend to have rather few species (compared to similar continental areas at the same latitude), so many species have been introduced to Hawaii that it now has as many plants as a similar area of Mexico. Moreover, the evidence suggests that remote islands are by no means ‘full’ of plants, and that there is room for even more alien plants to establish, and thus for total plant diversity to increase: at the current rate the average oceanic island will have 3 aliens for every 2 natives by 2060. Do we have any idea how many different plant species might eventually be able to coexist on an island like Hawaii? No, we don’t. Or, to express that conclusion in a more general form, in a report from US ecologists Dov Sax and Steve Gaines: ‘we have a relatively poor understanding of the processes that ultimately limit how many species can inhabit any given place or area

now known to exist in substantial numbers in the rain forests of Zaire—the total population is estimated at perhaps thirty thousand—yet its existence wasn’t even suspected until the twentieth century. The large flightless New Zealand bird called the takahe had been presumed extinct for two hundred years before being found living in a rugged area of the country’s South Island. In 1995 a team of French and British scientists in Tibet, who were lost in a snowstorm in a remote valley, came across a breed of horse, called the Riwoche, that had previously been known only from prehistoric cave drawings. The valley’s inhabitants were astonished to learn that the horse was considered a rarity in the wider world.

In real life, a group of boys actually were shipwrecked on a remote Polynesian island in 1965, as Rutger Bregman described in his book Humankind. What happened in this true story? The kids hollowed out tree trunks to catch rain water. They worked in pairs, drawing up a schedule of chores to ensure that gardening, cooking, and guard duty all got taken care of. They started a fire and kept it going for 15 months, until they were rescued. How did they manage such remarkable cooperation? Whenever they got into conflicts, they had a ritual. Each boy would go to opposite ends of the island to calm down. They created time and space, in other words. Then, after about four hours apart, they’d come back together and apologize.

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and walking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear, I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can fell the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

quoted his commencement address at Ohio State University in June 1971: “My enthusiasm for the future of space travel, I think you’ll grant is understandable. To stand on the surface of the Moon and look at the Earth high overhead leaves an impression not easily forgotten. Although our blue planet is very beautiful, it is very remote and apparently very small. You might suspect in such a situation, the observer might dismiss the Earth as relatively unimportant. “However, exactly the opposite conclusion has been reached by each of the individuals who has had the opportunity to share that view. We have all been struck by the similarity to an oasis or island. More importantly, it is the only island that we know is a suitable home for man.

The name Mary Jo Quinn was written neatly in faded blue marker on the front of the scrapbook, its gray edges frayed with age and wear, as though it had been handled often. Such a memento was a strange thing to find in a used bookstore, especially when one considered its contents. I’d discovered the handmade tome buried on the bottom shelf on the back wall of a little musty-smelling shop in the tiny resort town of Copper Harbor. This picturesque community is the gateway to Isle Royale National Park, an island in the western quarter of Lake Superior that beckoned to hikers, kayakers and canoers. Copper Harbor is the northern-most bastion of civilization in Michigan on a crooked finger of land called the Keweenaw Peninsula. Its remote, pristine shoreline provided an excellent respite from a hellacious year for my best friend from high school and me on a late September weekend.

Of course it was not only the Bourbons’ mistakes which helped decide Napoleon to risk everything to try to regain his throne. Emperor Francis’s refusal to allow his wife and son to rejoin him was another, and the fact that his expenses were running at two and a half times his income. There was also sheer ennui; he complained to Campbell of being ‘shut up in this cell of a house, separated from the world, with no interesting occupation, no savants with me, nor any variety in my society’.88† Another consideration was paragraphs in the newspapers and rumours from the Congress of Vienna that the Allies were planning forcibly to remove him from Elba. Joseph de Maistre, the French ambassador to St Petersburg, had nerve-wrackingly suggested the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay as a possible destination. The exceptionally remote British island of St Helena in the mid-Atlantic had also been mentioned.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

IN THE fifteenth century, a swampy parcel of land in the sestieri of Cannaregio was set aside for the construction of a new brass foundry, known in the Venetian dialect as a geto. The foundry was never built, and a century later, when the rulers of Venice were looking for a suitable spot to confine the city’s swelling population of unwanted Jews, the remote parcel known as Ghetto Nuovo was deemed the ideal place. The campo was large and had no parish church. The surrounding canals formed a natural moat, which cut off the island from the neighboring communities, and the single bridge could be guarded by Christian watchmen. In 1516, the Christians of Ghetto Nuovo were evicted and the Jews of Venice were forced to take their place. They could leave the ghetto only after sunrise, when the bell tolled in the campanile, and only if they wore a yellow tunic and hat. At nightfall they were required to return to the island, and the gates were chained. Only Jewish doctors could leave the ghetto at night. At its height, the population of the ghetto was more than five thousand. Now, it was home to only twenty Jews.

We may think of volcanic islands like Ascension as unusual because their recent origin and remoteness mean their ecosystems are made up of a motley crew of mariner migrants. But much of the world is like that. Nature is constantly in flux, and few ecosystems go back very far. Only ten thousand years ago, much of Europe and North America were covered in thick ice. All soil had been scraped away and with it most forms of life. Everything we see today in these former glaciated zones has either returned or arrived for the first time since the ice retreated. Looked at from this perspective, the spread of alien species today is merely a continuation of a natural process of the colonization begun when the ice retreated. A broad time horizon shows there is no such thing as a native species. All lodgings are temporary and all ecosystems in a constant flux, the victims of circumstance and geological accident. As the pioneer British ecologist Charles Elton argued, “Were it not for the ice age, we [in Britain] should probably have wonderful mixed forests with wild magnolias and laurels and epiphytic orchids, such as . . . in China.

Although they made it their own, the Vikings were not the first explorers of the North Atlantic. For at least two centuries before the beginning of the Viking Age, Irish monks had been setting out in their curachs in search of remote islands where they could contemplate the divine in perfect solitude, disturbed only by the cries of seabirds and the crashing of the waves on the shore. The monks developed a tradition of writing imrama, travel tales, the most famous of which is the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot). The Navigatio recounts a voyage purported to have been made by St Brendan (d. c. 577) in search of the mythical Isles of the Blessed, which were believed to lie somewhere in the western ocean. The imrama certainly show a familiarity with the North Atlantic–the Navigatio, for example, describes what are probably icebergs, volcanoes and whales–but they also include so many fantastical and mythological elements that it is impossible to disentangle truth from invention. There is no evidence to support claims that are often made that St Brendan discovered America before the Vikings, but Irish monks certainly did reach the Faeroe Islands and Iceland before them. Ash from peat fires containing charred barley grains found in windblown sand deposits at Á Sondum on Sandoy in the southern Faeroes has been radiocarbon-dated to between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. Although no trace of buildings has yet been found, the ash probably came from domestic hearths and had been thrown out onto the sand to help control erosion, which was a common practice at the time. As peat was not used as a fuel in Scandinavia at this time but was widely used in Britain and Ireland, this evidence suggests that seafaring Irish monks had discovered the Faeroes not long after Ireland’s conversion to Christianity. No physical traces of an Irish presence in Iceland have been found in modern times, but early Viking settlers claimed that they found croziers and other ecclesiastical artefacts there. There are also two papar place-names (see here) associated with Irish monks, Papos and Papey, in the east of Iceland. The monks, all being celibate males, did not found any permanent self-sustaining communities in either place: they were always visitors rather than settlers.

The current generation of huts might help creative folk focus on making new work but the bothy's original function was more egalitarian. It wanted to offer shelter in remote Scottish locations for walkers and climbers, the idea being that if hikers made the sacrifice to explore extreme locations they should be rewarded by basic accommodation that was free of charge. The concept was rolled out across the country and aroused a new kind of generosity among landowners. More than a hundred of these shelters are provided by estate owners on the proviso they are left clean and undamaged. "Bothying" came about as agricultural methods changed and farmsteads were increasingly abandoned. During the 1940s the idea of leisure was shifting as it began to mean roaming in the hills and countryside. Walkers looked for shelter on their meanderings and these small buildings did the trick. All share the same unique highlight: they are sited within some of the most breath-taking scenery that rural Scotland has to offer. To come across a bothy is the closest experience Scotland has to a palm tree dotted island mirage after hours stranded out at sea. With one slight difference: this vision is real.

Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat–Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.

Straight off, we were in the country. It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys lying spread out below, with streams winding through them, and island groves of trees here and there, and huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching away in billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we knew was a castle. We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew, and we moved like spirits, the cushioned turf giving out no sound of footfall; we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green light that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of runlets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of whispering music, comfortable to hear; and at times we left the world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and scurried by and were gone before you could even get your eye on the place where the noise was; and where only the earliest birds were turning out and getting to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder and a mysterious far-off hammering and drumming for worms on a tree trunk away somewhere in the impenetrable remotenesses of the woods. And by and by out we would swing again into the glare.

Modern electrical power distribution technology is largely the fruit of the labors of two men—Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Compared with Edison, Tesla is relatively unknown, yet he invented the alternating electric current generation and distribution system that supplanted Edison's direct current technology and that is the system currently in use today. Tesla also had a vision of delivering electricity to the world that was revolutionary and unique. If his research had come to fruition, the technological landscape would be entirely different than it is today. Power lines and the insulated towers that carry them over thousands of country and city miles would not distract our view. Tesla believed that by using the electrical potential of the Earth, it would be possible to transmit electricity through the Earth and the atmosphere without using wires. With suitable receiving devices, the electricity could be used in remote parts of the planet. Along with the transmission of electricity, Tesla proposed a system of global communication, following an inspired realization that, to electricity, the Earth was nothing more than a small, round metal ball. [...] With $150,000 in financial support from J. Pierpont Morgan and other backers, Tesla built a radio transmission tower at Wardenclyffe, Long Island, that promised—along with other less widely popular benefits—to provide communication to people in the far corners of the world who needed no more than a handheld receiver to utilize it. In 1900, Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted the letter "S" from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland and precluded Tesla's dream of commercial success for transatlantic communication. Because Marconi's equipment was less costly than Tesla's Wardenclyffe tower facility, J. P. Morgan withdrew his support. Moreover, Morgan was not impressed with Tesla's pleas for continuing the research on the wireless transmission of electrical power. Perhaps he and other investors withdrew their support because they were already reaping financial returns from those power systems both in place and under development. After all, it would not have been possible to put a meter on Tesla's technology—so any investor could not charge for the electricity!

See how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and dis­torted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad." I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. "They say that they think with their heads," he replied. "Why of course. What do you think with?" I asked him in surprise. "We think here," he said, indicating his heart. I fell into a long meditation. For the first time in my life, so it seemed to me, someone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man. It was as though until now I had seen nothing but sentimental, prettified color prints. This Indian had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. I felt rising within me like a shapeless mist something unknown and yet deeply familiar. And out of this mist, image upon image detached itself: first Roman legions smashing into the cities of Gaul, and the keenly incised features of Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, and Pompey. I saw the Roman eagle on the North Sea and on the banks of the White Nile. Then I saw St. Augus­tine transmitting the Christian creed to the Britons on the tips of Roman lances, and Charlemagne's most glorious forced con­versions of the heathen; then the pillaging and murdering bands of the Crusading armies. With a secret stab I realized the hol­lowness of that old romanticism about the Crusades. Then fol­lowed Columbus, Cortes, and the other conquistadors who with fire, sword, torture, and Christianity came down upon even these remote pueblos dreaming peacefully in the Sun, their Father. I saw, too, the peoples of the Pacific islands decimated by firewater, syphilis, and scarlet fever carried in the clothes the missionaries forced on them. It was enough. What we from our point of view call coloniza­tion, missions to the heathen, spread of civilization, etc., has another face - the face of a bird of prey seeking with cruel in­tentness for distant quarry - a face worthy of a race of pirates and highwaymen. All the eagles and other predatory creatures that adorn our coats of arms seem to me apt psychological representatives of our true nature.

Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd. Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih. It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups. My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.

someone doesn’t like who you are, trying to change for them is rarely successful and doing so carries even more remote odds that you will end up being happy yourself.

KGB might have replaced the songoma in this Russian empire, where no citizen was allowed to believe in holy spirits except in great secrecy. It seemed to him that a society that attempted to put the gods to flight would be doomed. The nkosis know that in my homeland, and hence our gods have not been threatened by apartheid. They can live freely and have never been subjected to the pass laws; they have always been able to move around without being humiliated. If our holy spirits had been banished to remote prison islands, and our singing hounds chased out into the Kalahari Desert, not a single white man, woman or child would have survived in South Africa. All of them, Afrikaners as well as Englishmen, would have been annihilated long ago and their miserable skeletons buried in the red soil. In the old days, when his ancestors were still fighting openly against the white intruders, the Zulu warriors used to cut off their fallen victims’ lower jaw. An impi returning from a victorious battle would bring with him these jawbones as trophies to adorn the temple entrances of their tribal chiefs. Now it was the gods who were on the front line against the whites, and they would never submit to defeat. The first night in the strange

West was remote in the minds of most New Yorkers during the holiday season of 1948. But, despite the new wealth that was flooding into the city, and the self-confidence that victory naturally brought, there was a generalized sense of anxiety about the future. “The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible,” the essayist E. B. White had observed that summer. “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions.” White was writing at the dawn of the nuclear age, and the feeling of vulnerability was quite new. “In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning,” he observed, “New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

Virgin Sands I kayaked to the far side of the island, too remote for the fishermen’s cast. Her virgin sands blistered white by the sun molded my footprints like a first kiss pressed upon her heated lips. I swam until my lungs heaved in exhausted bliss and I laid my body upon her timeless sands. She caressed me, stroked her fingers through my hair and let the salt water trickle on my lap. I closed my eyes. The sun beat brighter beneath my lids as I contemplated all the beaches where I had been and how none could compare to this one. The setting sun aroused me. Night fell impetuously. I made my bed in a deserted hut on piles of heather and tall grasses and though the stars signaled to me in glittery seduction and though the ocean flirted with me in breathy song, that night I dreamt only I dreamt only of my beach.

A statistically significant number of correspondents write to say they met someone else reading one of my books on a remote Greek island. It may of course always be the same person.

( O1O'2920'8855 )PCASH( O1O'2920'8855 ) The Onsite Outreach Program provides counselling service to the residents of remote rural areas and islands who are not easy to visit the ACRC or have difficulties in accessing the internet to file their complaints. Also, the program serves as a communication channel between the people and the government by collecting various opinions and voices at the meetings with the local residents

The two of them had fled civilization a few months earlier, living as recluses on the remote south Pacific island of Nuku Hiva, a three-hour flight from Tahiti.

For I must confess I had the Londoner’s sense of superiority in those days, the half-formed belief that countrymen, and particularly those who inhabited the remoter corners of our island, were more superstitious, more gullible, more slow-witted, unsophisticated and primitive, than we cosmopolitans.

One thing I noticed back then, and have never forgotten, was that remote and seemingly lone trees were not as badly affected as those living together in close proximity. Today, I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease. Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit. Better to keep some distance from all collective beliefs and certainties, I always remind myself.

He's not fond of town, to put it mildly. He's not impressed by luxury or appearances. He loves his simple life on the island, and doing things out in nature." "And you dislike nature," Phoebe said sympathetically. "'Dislike' is too strong a word. Nature and I have an understanding- we try not to interfere with each other. It's a peaceful coexistence." Phoebe looked skeptical. "Dear, no matter how attractive this man is, I can't envision you existing happily on a remote Scottish island." "It's possible," Merritt argued. "I'm a woman of many facets." "You don't have a single facet that wants to live in a hut." "I didn't say he lived in a hut!" "Five pounds says it has a stone floor and no indoor plumbing." "I never take bets," Merritt said loftily. "Which means you think I'm right.

English, in this light, is the odd one out, and what distinguishes it from its relatives is that it underwent marauding hordes of Vikings who never went home, and proceeded to speak the language, as they did so much else, Their Way. They never wrote down that they were doing so—most of them couldn’t write anyway. But Icelandic stands as virtual confirmation that adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is. The people who can still read ancient sagas live on a remote, undisturbed island. The people whose language became the most user-friendly member of the family live on an island nearer the Continent, that was, due to that proximity, lustily disturbed by invading migrants.

She imagined her mother would decide to move away, possibly sequester herself, becoming a priestess on some remote island versus facing her friends at the club after news got out that her only daughter had been elf-napped in an orc nudist colony.

It has always seemed extraordinary to me how the name of the island, Colonsay, seems to hang suspended in the minds not only of my immediate relatives but also of collateral clansmen in scattered parts of the United States and Canada, whose stories—from island to mainland to emigration—are essentially the same, and whose historical remoteness from Colonsay is comparable. Just the name of the island seems to set off in virtually all these people, who now live anywhere between the oceans, some sort of atavistic vibration, and all they really have in common is the panoptic glaze that will appear in their eyes at the mention of the word “Colonsay.” Given the combined efforts of the MacLeans, the MacDonalds, and the sheep farmers of Lochaber, it is hard to imagine a clan more broken and rebroken and dispersed than this

The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.

I could live anywhere in the world with the right partner!

No, it isn’t. But what I’m saying is that some species can survive if they can find somewhere remote and they are left alone. So, yeah, there’s a precedent.” “There’s an old saying.” Elle smiled and leaned forward. “Eventually all things hidden are revealed. Time does that for us, whether we want it to or not.

The connection between birthrates and politics is arresting. In 2012 each of the ten states with the highest fertility rates voted for Mitt Romney. The top five were the mostly rural states of Utah, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Idaho. None are remotely politically competitive at the presidential level. In contrast, all eleven states with birthrates below sixty births per thousand women of childbearing age went to Barack Obama, with Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Connecticut making up the bottom five in fertility.

tossed the mask and snorkel aboard and with surprising ease, pulled his upper body quickly out of the water, allowing his legs to find the rungs.  He reached back and unbuckled each fin, tossing them up and grabbing his towel in the same motion. He retrieved a bottle of orange juice from the small refrigerator and went forward to relax on the trampoline.  Peering at the larger island, he could make out the faint image of a jet ski skirting across the water.  It amazed him how many people loved noise.  Insistent that they need a break from the grind, they travel to a remote area to unwind, only to shop with a thousand other tourists, or zip across the bay on a rocket running at 80 decibels.  He smiled to himself and tipped his orange juice in their direction.  To each his own, he thought.  He should, in fact, be thankful.  If they were not over there, they would probably be here next to him.  With that, he stood up and squinted at the glimmering horizon.  Having to decide what to do every day was just the type of problem he wanted. His body suddenly stiffened.  The sound was extremely faint but unmistakable, and he felt a flutter of grim acceptance before reaching for the binoculars.  He wiped the water from his

I was reading a story by Ariadne Albright called And Then There Were Buns. It was about a group of witch bakers who think they’re being taken to a remote island for a baking contest, but they actually get murdered one by one by their mysterious human host.

My gaze alighted on the pale-blue globe one last time. I soon found the location. Right there, to the South of the equator, between a few scattered islands, this perfect patch of land had stood, remote from the world, having forgotten everything it had ever known about it. The world, though, only grieves for what it knows, and has no inkling of what it lost with that tiny islet, even though, given the spherical form of the earth, this vanished dot could just as easily have been its navel, even if it was not the sturdy ropes of war and commerce that bound them one to the other, but the incomparably finer-spun thread of a dream. For myth is the highest of all realities and – so it struck me – the library the true theatre of world events.

Sunlit bazaars in exotic cities thronged with faces that were transparent masks for insectoid countenances; moonlit streets in antique towns harbored a strange-eyed slithering within their very stones; dim galleries of empty museums sprouted a ghostly mold that mirrored the sullen hues of old paintings; the land at the edge of oceans gave birth to a new evolution transcending biology and remote islands offered themselves as a haven for forms having no analogy outside of dreams; jungles teemed with beast-like shapes that moved beside the sticky luxuriance as well as through the depths of its pulpy warmth; deserts were alive with an uncanny flux of sounds which might enter and animate the world of substance; and subterranean landscapes heaved with cadaverous generations that had sunken and merged into sculptures of human coral, bodies heaped and unwhole, limbs projecting without order, eyes scattered and searching the darkness.

Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different