Stranded On An Island Quotes

The optimist lives on the peninsula of infinite possibilities; the pessimist is stranded on the island of perpetual indecision.

If I were stranded on a desert island, and could have only one person and three things with me, I’d want Nietzsche, a pen, paper, and a stick-on mustache.

Look around you--there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.

We have all at one time been stranded on islands shouting lies across the seas of misunderstanding, hoping the fog will carry our mischief to the distant ports in people’s minds.

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

...I think we should find some kind of shelter; a cave or something." "I don't want to do that! What if there's like, a creature living in the cave?" Tiara said. "Seriously, I saw this show once where these people were stranded on an island and there were these other people who were sort of crazy-slash-bad and there was this polar bear creature running around." "What happened?" Miss Ohio asked. "I don't know. My parents got divorced in the middle of season two and we lost our TiVo.

Knowing that someone here cared about me was like being given a box of matches when you’re stranded on a cold, deserted island.

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers in feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, in one way or another.

She kissed her like she’d been stranded on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. She filled Michelle like weather, worked her mouth like a cherry stem being tongued into a knot.

If you were to be stranded on a desert island, what three items would you take? I gave this frivolous answer: A cat, a hat and a piece of string.

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You’re two inches shorter than you used to be. You’re ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don’t work as well as they once did and you can’t open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don’t have room for breakfast. You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they’re irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

But the Count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, it’s climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

You spend long moments worrying and wondering only to see the wash up on the shore of a sea of wasted hours. Only to see them stranded on the island of foolishness. He wants that time back. He wants that energy back.

I am a child of Alban’s earth Her ancient bones brought me to birth Her crags and islands built me strong My heart beats to her deep wild song. I am the wife with bairn on knee I am the fisherman at sea I am the piper on the strand I am the warrior, sword in hand. White Lady shield me with your fire Lord of the North my heart inspire Hag of the Isles my secrets keep Master of Shadows guard my sleep. I am the mountain, I am the sky I am the song that will not die I am the heather, I am the sea My spirit is forever free.

A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful.

There is an old joke: A physicist, an engineer, and an economist are stranded on a desert island with nothing but canned food. The physicist proposes to make a fire and heat the can until it bursts. The engineer proposes to climb to a local ridge and drop the can, which will burst on landing. The economist says: “Assume a can opener.

A person who was stranded on a desert island would live a lot longer on hot dogs than on spinach.

Own nothing! Possess nothing! Buddha and Christ taught us this, and the Stoics and the Cynics. Greedy though we are, why can't we seem to grasp that simple teaching? Can't we understand that with property we destroy our soul? So let the herring keep warm in your pocket until you get to the transit prison rather than beg for something to drink here. And did they give us a two-day supply of bread and sugar? In that case, eat it in one sitting. Then no one will steal it from you, and you won't have to worry about it. And you'll be free as a bird in heaven! Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday. Look around you-there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heartout because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there. What strange stories you can hear! What things you will laugh at!

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us who are stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in others ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk.

Good. then I will stay here until I get stranded. The water will get higher and higher and no one will be able to reach me, to save me, and I will deserve it. I will deserve to be stranded on an island all by myself.

Das Bus,” The Simpsons (season 9, episode 14) A tongue-in-cheek retelling full of clever references to Golding’s novel. After their school bus veers off a bridge during a Model United Nations field trip, Bart, Lisa, and their classmates find themselves stranded on a desert island. Overt allusions to fear (of an island monster), hoarding of resources (junk food salvaged from the sunken bus), warring factions (those who support Bart, and those who oppose him), a violent chase scene (Bart, Lisa, and Milhouse running for their lives), and a final voiceover (about how the children learned to function as a society until they were rescued) serve as inside jokes for knowledgeable viewers.

I'm not stranded on a desert island. No, he thought, I am a desert island. if he could fully grasp that concept, he could deal with whatever lay ahead. he had always been comfortable with solitude. His nerves could cope with the solitude.

Hanna. Her middle child. The difficult one. The tiring one. The one she wouldn't want to be stranded on a desert island with. And a terrible thought shot through her, so fast she barely registered it. 'It should be you missing and Ellie eating beans on toast.

I’ve fought dragons, attended balls and chased a whale. I’ve won wars, lost court cases, travelled India, ridden broomsticks and stranded myself on numerous islands. I’ve died a dozen times. Because here’s the thing about a book: when you pick up a story, you put down your own.

Fire, fire! The branches crackle and the night wind of late autumn blows the flame of the bonfire back and forth. The compound is dark; I am alone at the bonfire, and I can bring it still some more carpenters' shavings. The compound here is a privileged one, so privileged that it is almost as if I were out in freedom -- this is an island of paradise; this is the Marfino "sharashka" -- a scientific institute staffed with prisoners -- in its most privileged period. No one is overseeing me, calling me to a cell, chasing me away from the bonfire, and even then it is chilly in the penetrating wind. But she -- who has already been standing in the wind for hours, her arms straight down, her head drooping, weeping, then growing numb and still. And then again she begs piteously "Citizen Chief! Please forgive me! I won't do it again." The wind carries her moan to me, just as if she were moaning next to my ear. The citizen chief at the gatehouse fires up his stove and does not answer. This was the gatehouse of the camp next door to us, from which workers came into our compound to lay water pipes and to repair the old ramshackle seminary building. Across from me, beyond the artfully intertwined, many-stranded barbed-wire barricade and two steps away from the gatehouse, beneath a bright lantern, stood the punished girl, head hanging, the wind tugging at her grey work skirt, her feet growing numb from the cold, a thin scarf over her head. It had been warm during the day, when they had been digging a ditch on our territory. And another girl, slipping down into a ravine, had crawled her way to the Vladykino Highway and escaped. The guard had bungled. And Moscow city buses ran right along the highway. When they caught on, it was too late to catch her. They raised the alarm. A mean, dark major arrived and shouted that if they failed to catch the girl, the entire camp would be deprived of visits and parcels for whole month, because of her escape. And the women brigadiers went into a rage, and they were all shouting, one of them in particular, who kept viciously rolling her eyes: "Oh, I hope they catch her, the bitch! I hope they take scissors and -- clip, clip, clip -- take off all her hair in front of the line-up!" But the girl who was now standing outside the gatehouse in the cold had sighed and said instead: "At least she can have a good time out in freedom for all of us!" The jailer had overheard what she said, and now she was being punished; everyone else had been taken off to the camp, but she had been set outside there to stand "at attention" in front of the gatehouse. This had been at 6 PM, and it was now 11 PM. She tried to shift from one foot to another, but the guard stuck out his head and shouted: "Stand at attention, whore, or else it will be worse for you!" And now she was not moving, only weeping: "Forgive me, Citizen Chief! Let me into the camp, I won't do it any more!" But even in the camp no one was about to say to her: "All right, idiot! Come on it!" The reason they were keeping her out there so long was that the next day was Sunday, and she would not be needed for work. Such a straw-blond, naive, uneducated slip of a girl! She had been imprisoned for some spool of thread. What a dangerous thought you expressed there, little sister! They want to teach you a lesson for the rest of your life! Fire, fire! We fought the war -- and we looked into the bonfires to see what kind of victory it would be. The wind wafted a glowing husk from the bonfire. To that flame and to you, girl, I promise: the whole wide world will read about you.

The gravity of our situation isn't lost on me, but I stall for a few more moments. No one will like what I have to say. Our island is self-sufficient alright. Except for the threads of kelp we use to make súgán, rope that makes the trambles that we desperately need to catch fish. The long-stranded kelp comes from a dangerous, forbidden place below the island, a land belonging to no one that is situated between us and an enemy tribe, a tribe of fish people known as Iasc. As such, for lack of a better name, my people call the almost mythical area, as none of us has laid eyes on it, the Between.

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.

The Chorus Line: The Birth of Telemachus, An Idyll Nine months he sailed the wine-red seas of his mother's blood Out of the cave of dreaded Night, of sleep, Of troubling dreams he sailed In his frail dark boat, the boat of himself, Through the dangerous ocean of his vast mother he sailed From the distant cave where the threads of men's lives are spun, Then measured, and then cut short By the Three Fatal Sisters, intent on their gruesome handcrafts, And the lives of women also are twisted into the strand. And we, the twelve who were later to die by his hand At his father's relentless command, Sailed as well, in the dark frail boats of ourselves Through the turbulent seas of our swollen and sore-footed mothers Who were not royal queens, but a motley and piebald collection, Bought, traded, captured, kidnapped from serfs and strangers. After the nine-month voyage we came to shore, Beached at the same time as he was, struck by the hostile air, Infants when he was an infant, wailing just as he wailed, Helpless as he was helpless, but ten times more helpless as well, For his birth was longed-for and feasted, as our births were not. His mother presented a princeling. Our various mothers Spawned merely, lambed, farrowed, littered, Foaled, whelped and kittened, brooded, hatched out their clutch. We were animal young, to be disposed of at will, Sold, drowned in the well, traded, used, discarded when bloomless. He was fathered; we simply appeared, Like the crocus, the rose, the sparrows endangered in mud. Our lives were twisted in his life; we also were children When he was a child, We were his pets and his toythings, mock sisters, his tiny companions. We grew as he grew, laughed also, ran as he ran, Though sandier, hungrier, sun-speckled, most days meatless. He saw us as rightfully his, for whatever purpose He chose, to tend him and feed him, to wash him, amuse him, Rock him to sleep in the dangerous boats of ourselves. We did not know as we played with him there in the sand On the beach of our rocky goat-island, close by the harbour, That he was foredoomed to swell to our cold-eyed teenaged killer. If we had known that, would we have drowned him back then? Young children are ruthless and selfish: everyone wants to live. Twelve against one, he wouldn't have stood a chance. Would we? In only a minute, when nobody else was looking? Pushed his still-innocent child's head under the water With our own still-innocent childish nursemaid hands, And blamed it on waves. Would we have had it in us? Ask the Three Sisters, spinning their blood-red mazes, Tangling the lives of men and women together. Only they know how events might then have had altered. Only they know our hearts. From us you will get no answer.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original— the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones—so goes the story— to throw at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?

You come first; I won’t accept it any other way. If a madman is waving a gun, you step behind me. If we are stranded on a desert island, you get the fresh water. If we both come down with the flu, I pick up the medicine. If we both have a crap day, you vent first. If there is anything you can’t do, we won’t do it ‘til you can – regardless of how much I want it

A sailor was stranded on a desert island and managed to survive by making friends with the local natives—such good friends, in fact, that one day the chief offered him his daughter for an evening’s entertainment. Late that night, while they made love, the chief’s daughter kept shouting, “Oga, boga! Oga, boga!” The arrogant sailor assumed this must be how the natives express their appreciation when something is fantastic. A few days later the chief invites the sailor for a game of golf. On his first stroke, the chief hit a hole in one. Eager to try out his new vocabulary, the sailor enthusiastically shouted “Oga boga! Oga boga!” The chief turned around with a puzzled look on his face and asked, “What you mean, ‘wrong hole’?

A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

If I were stranded on a desert island and could bring only one instrument to keep me company, I’d take a guitar. It’s versatile, and it gives you such a huge repertoire to draw from. I’d be able to play so many more types of songs than I could with a mandolin or a fiddle or a banjo. A guitar is handy to sing along with, too, and I’d have a lot of singing to do to keep from getting too lonesome. Praising God fights depression and loneliness like nothing else can. When you’re praising Him, you’re not thinking about yourself.

Just sit right back And you'll hear a tale A tale of a fateful trip, That started from this tropic port, Aboard this tiny ship. The mate was a mighty sailin' lad, The Skipper brave and sure, Five passengers set sail that day, For a three hour tour, A three hour tour. The weather started getting rough, The tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage of the fearless crew The Minnow would be lost. The Minnow would be lost. The ship set ground on the shore Of this uncharted desert isle With Gilligan, The Skipper too. The millionaire And his wife, The movie star, The professor and Mary Ann, Here on Gilligan's Isle. So this is the tale of our castaways, They're here for a long long time. They'll have to make the best of things, It's an uphill climb. The first mate and his Skipper too Will do their very best, To make the others comf'terble In their tropic island nest. No phone, no lights, no motor car, Not a single luxury Like Robinson Crusoe It's primitive as can be. So join us here each week my friends, You're sure to get a smile, From seven stranded castaways Here on Gilligan's Isle!

Every night, millions of Americans spend their free hours watching television rather than engaging in any form of social interaction. What are they watching? In recent years we have seen reality television become the most popular form of television programming. To discover the nature of our current “reality,” we might consider examples such as Survivor, the series that helped spawn the reality TV revolution. Every week tens of millions of viewers watched as a group of ordinary people stranded in some isolated place struggled to meet various challenges and endure harsh conditions. Ah, one might think, here we will see people working cooperatively, like our ancient ancestors, working cooperatively in order to “win”! But the “reality” was very different. The conditions of the game were arranged so that, yes, they had to work cooperatively, but the alliances by nature were only temporary and conditional, as the contestants plotted and schemed against one another to win the game and walk off with the Grand Prize: a million dollars! The objective was to banish contestants one by one from the deserted island through a group vote, eliminating every other contestant until only a lone individual remained—the “sole survivor.” The end game was the ultimate American fantasy in our Age of Individualism: to be left completely alone, sitting on a mountain of cash! 　　While Survivor was an overt example of our individualistic orientation, it certainly was not unique in its glorification of rugged individualists on American television. Even commercial breaks provide equally compelling examples, with advertisers such as Burger King, proclaiming, HAVE IT YOUR WAY! The message? America, the land where not only every man and every woman is an individual but also where every hamburger is an individual! 　　Human beings do not live in a vacuum; we live in a society. Thus it is important to look at the values promoted and celebrated in a given society and measure what effect this conditioning has on our sense of independence or of interdependence

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing. The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled.

So often it can seem like life would be so much easier if people didn’t need each other, or if everyone could just ask for what they need in a way we can hear, or if everyone could just intuit what we need so we don’t have to say it. It’s so easy to think people are islands, and anyone who gets stranded on another island did something wrong, or they should reach out to the other support systems they may or may not have, because we “shouldn’t have to” take care of them. And that is all the more reason we should choose the friendships we cultivate carefully, so that if someone we’ve chosen, someone we love, is more isolated than we knew and doesn’t have anyone but us, we will see this as a gift, an opportunity to be the person who finally shows up. To see their SOS and finally answer the call, ideally, before they even have to make it.

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.

We remembered the delicate fig-shaped island,stranded between the American Empire and peaceful Canada, as it had been years ago, with its welcoming red white-and-blue flag-shaped flower bed,splashing fountains, European casino, and horse paths leading through woods where Indians had bent trees into giant bows. Now grass grew inpatches down to the littered beach where children fished with pop topstied to string. Paint flaked from once-bright gazebos. Drinking fountains rose from mud puddles laid with broken brick stepping stones. Along the road the granite face of the Civil War Hero had been spray-painted black. Mrs. Huntington Perry had donated her prize orchids to the Botanical Garden in the time before the riots, when civic money still ran high, but since her death ion the eroding tax base had forced cutbacks that had laid off one skilled gardener a year, so that plants that had survived transplantation from equatorial regions to bloom again in that false paradise now withered, weeds sprang up amid scrupulous identification tags, and fake sunlight flowed for only a few hours per day. The only thing that remained was the steam vapor, beading the sloping greenhouse windows and filling our nostrils with the moisture and aroma of a rotting world

All this is happening right next to you; you can almost touch it, but it's invisible ... At the big stations the loading and unloading of the dirty faces takes place far, far from the passenger platform and is seen only by switchmen and roadbed inspectors ... And you, hurrying along the platform with your children, your suitcases, and your string bags, are too busy to look closely ... The train starts - and a hundred crowded prisoner destinies, tormented hearts, are borne along the same snaky rails, behind the same smoke, past the same fields, posts, and haystacks as you ...You are dissatisfied because there are four of you in your compartment and it is crowded. And could you possibly believe ... that in the same size compartment as yours, but up ahead in that zak car, there are fourteen people? ... And if there are thirty? And ... why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water ... for enemies of the people? It isn't done especially to torture people. A sentenced prisoner is a laboring soldier of socialism, so why should he be tortured? They need him for construction work. But ... there is no reason in the world to treat him so well that people out in freedom would envy him ... Look around you ... Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this ...

But my point applies to a broader audience. Indulge me in one more thought experiment, a familiar one: You will be stranded on a desert island, and you can take just 10 books and 10 music CDs. What do you choose? My prediction is that even people who don’t listen to classical music regularly will take Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Even people who haven’t picked up Shakespeare in years will take the collected works of Shakespeare. When we want something we can go back to again and again, we choose the same giants that the experts choose. My proposition about the literature, music, and visual arts of the last half century is that hardly any of it has enough substance to satisfy, over time. The post-1950 West has unquestionably produced some wonderful entertainments, and I do not mean wonderful slightingly. The Simpsons is wickedly smart, Saving Private Ryan is gripping, Groundhog Day is a brilliant moral fable. The West’s popular culture is for my money the only contemporary culture worth patronizing, with its best stories more compelling and revealing than the ones written by authors who purport to write serious novels, and its best popular music with more energy and charm than anything the academic composers turn out. It is a mixed bag, with the irredeemably vulgar side by side, sometimes intermingled, with the wittiest and most thoughtful work. But the quality is often first-rate—as well it might be. The people producing the best work include some who in another age could have been a Caravaggio or Brahms or Racine, and perhaps dozens of others good enough to have made their way onto the roster of significant figures. Why not be satisfied with wonderful entertainments?

If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

Daß er aussichtsreiche Positionen in der Programmindustrie gegen die Ruinen und Weiden Horse Islands getauscht hatte, war vielleicht dem einfachen Umstand zuzuschreiben, daß ihn die meisten Grenzen empörten – es sei denn, sie hatten die Gestalt eines Strandes.

So thank you to the writers and creators of LOST for giving us an alternative to an hour of Geraldo Rivera that will actually lead us to think and pick up an essay written by a wig-wearing man form the 1600s. Who would have guessed all this could come from a story of a cadre of beautiful people stranded on an island?

Word has traveled quickly that just because you're on island doesn't mean you have to be stranded---as long as you have cash.

A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn’t taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindleshaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

If you were stranded on an island, what 3 things would you bring with you?

The Christ of Lembata Island Lately my dreams seep out of me, I who have a reputation of an airtight presence, I guess I'm past my expiration date, I fear both have gone out with the tide, and I am left stranded, a beached whale surrounded by a thousand curious and hungry eyes. Impatient villagers, whale hunters of Lamalera, carve slabs of meat and blubber from me before I am dead. I am the Christ of Lembata island, ready to feed the masses with my flesh, to redeem them of their hunger that goes beyond the flesh. The old harpooner will attest my heart's as large as a Sumo wrestler. Take it. My brain is five times as big as a humans. Take it. My heart and mind are yours. Take my oil to fill your lamps and I will give you light. Please, take all of me. That's why I'm here.

In a remote area on the western side of the island, near the town of Marrawah, a pod of sperm whales was stranded on the beach. One big male came to shore first. Over the next twenty-four hours, another thirty-four whales stranded themselves, including calves and pregnant mothers. Whale stranding is one of the heartbreaking mysteries of the animal world. It is little understood. At this moment no scientific reasoning mattered as we encountered the tragedy unfolding on that Tasmanian beach. I felt so helpless. All I could do was be there as the huge, gorgeous sea mammals fought pitifully to stay alive. The weather was cold, even though it was officially the Tasmanian summer, and the seas were too rough to get a boat out to help the whales. We put our arms around the dying animals, spoke to them, and looked into their eyes to share in their pain and grief. By the end of the day I was so cold that I had trouble getting my pants off over my pregnant belly. It took me half an hour of struggling in the car park to strip off my soaking-wet clothes and get into some warm, dry gear. Physically, emotionally, and even spiritually, it had been an exhausting day. I pondered what communication the baby inside me would have gotten from the event. The dying whales had sung among themselves. Steve and I spoke back and forth over their stranded bodies. What did baby Igor pick up on? Through our experiences, we were beginning to form our very own tiny wildlife warrior, even before the baby was born. Igor had only just begun his education.

I asked myself what I'd take if I was stranded on a desert island. I wouldn't bother with any records, for a start. If you've only got eight, you're going to get fed up with all of them pretty soon. They'd start to get on your nerves. So, no records. That left me with a book and a luxury object. What book would I take? . . . There's tons of books I really like, but what'd be the point? One book's not much good. Once you've read it half a dozen times you might as well throw it away. . . . That left me with a luxury object. . . . Something of no practical value. . . . I couldn't think of anything. . . . There was nothing I wanted on my desert island.

Having acknowledged that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them, the Count thought it worth considering how one was most likely to achieve this aim when one had been sentenced to a life of confinement. For Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d'If, it was thoughts of revenge that kept him clear minded. Unjustly imprisoned, he sustained himself by plotting the systematic undoing of his personal agents of villainy. For Cervantes, enslaved by pirates in Algiers, it was the promise of pages as yet unwritten that spurred him on. While for Napoleon on Elba, strolling among chickens, fending off flies, and sidestepping puddles of mud, it was visions of a triumphal return to Paris that galvanized his will to persevere. But the Count hadn't the temperament for revenge; he hadn't the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn't the fanciful ego to dream of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the Count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of PRACTICALITIES. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world's Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teacher themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island's topography, its climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

In her heart, she felt she was caught in the lull between tides. The waves had crashed over her on their journey to the land, but they had not yet receded. The ebbing tide had slithered past her on the dragon rock, silently, without waking her. In this way, her soul was still surrounded by water. She was stranded on the island, with no safe passage to shore.

Several years ago a violent storm struck Pawleys Island and the Carolina coast. Two men riding in a car during the storm wondered what they should do. One mad said, “We sure need the Gray Man to tell us whether or not we should leave.” The other man responded quickly, “Well, there he is up ahead! Why don’t you ask him?” And it was! They saw the figure of a man, dressed all in gray, his shoulders hunched up against the driving wind and rain, while he strode purposefully along the island road. They stopped the car near the man. “Sir, are you the Gray Man?” one of them asked out the window. “No!” the man exploded. His head bent against the rain. The men in the car were disappointed. One said, “I’m sorry, sir. You’re dressed all in gray and out in this storm. No offense, sir.” They started to drive on. “Look,” the man in the storm said, “I had a heart attack, and my doctor told me I had to exercise. So I’m going to exercise if it kills me!” And he plodded on. The man was wearing a dull gray, knitted warm-up suit, with the hood pulled over his head. Today we depend on the Weather Bureau for warnings, watches, and evacuation notices in the face of a threatening hurricane or coastal storm. Certainly you should heed these warnings. But if you happen to see the Gray Man—take his advice and leave quickly!

He’d left her stranded in front of three hundred wedding guests, wearing a white dress and glass slippers like some deranged Cinderella, while he caught a plane to the Cayman Islands with a knock-kneed stripper named Chrysanthemum Greene and several million dollars embezzled from the Stardust Savings and Loan.

They’re all in church,” he said and saw the flush of guilt, or of wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair—those long strands he combed back over his crown—made it stand, briefly, on end. Something done right—at least so far—this suggestion of his, whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach. Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped off the African coast, as if (he’d thought, reading the account) the continent itself had shuddered, and moved into the waters of the south seas, stirring the ocean and the air and the various inhabitants of small islands and southern shorelines, until finally it woke him this morning at dawn with the sound of the wind in the eaves, with some memory or dream of the Ardennes, and a hankering to see what the shudder of a continent did to the waters off Jones Beach.

But for now it’s goodbye to the beaches, and indeed many a celebrated island of yore now lies deep under the waves. An entire world and way of life has disappeared with these fabled places, a lifeway that went right back to the beginning of the species in south and east Africa, where the earliest humans were often intimately involved with the sea. That wet, sandy, tidal, salty, sun-flecked, beautiful beach life: all gone, along with so much else, of course; animals, plants, fish. It’s part of the mass extinction event they are still struggling to end, to escape. So much has been lost that will never come back again, that the loss of the joy of the relatively few humans who were lucky enough to live on the strand, who combed the beaches, and fished, and rode the waves, and lay in the sun – that’s nothing much to grieve for, given everything else that has been lost, all the suffering, all the hunger, all the death, all the extinctions. Most of the mammal species are gone. Still, it was a way of life much beloved, and still remembered in art and song, image and story – still legendary, still a lost golden age, vibrating at some level below thought, there in their salty blood and tears, in the long, curled waves of DNA that still break inside them all.

Good. then I will stay here until I get stranded. The water will get higher and higher and no one will be able to reach me, to save me, and I will deserve it. I will deserve to be stranded on an island all by myself.

If me and you were stranded on an island, and there wasn’t another dick in sight; I’d still fuck myself with a pine cone before I touch you.

The brain is a strange island, and some of us get stranded there all alone.

While Sybele was stranded on Cobala Island, she discovered a meteorite emitting violet rays that could potentially destroy almost anything on their way. Once Sybele left the island, she converted the meteorite into weapons and embarked on a mission to face the enemies who kidnapped her parents. Her survival was at stake, but her ingenuity helped her overcome the obstacles...

stranding the six seamen on the little island. They passed a wretched night

To this day, I prefer to believe that inside every television there lives a community of versatile, thumb-size actors trained to portray everything from a thoughtful newscaster to the wife of a millionaire stranded on a desert island. Fickle gnomes control the weather, and an air conditioner is powered by a team of squirrels, their cheeks packed with ice cubes.

The way the experts typically see it is that fat storage works as a kind of long-term savings account—like a retirement account that you can dip into only in dire need. The idea is that your body takes excess calories and stashes them away as fat, and they remain in the fat tissue until you someday find yourself sufficiently underfed (because you’re now dieting or exercising or perhaps stranded on a desert island) that this fat is mobilized. You then use it for fuel. But it has been known since the 1930s that this conception is not even remotely accurate.

The August 2023 Maui wildfires stranded thousands of vacationers.

When these weary travelers arrived at an icy river, they expected to find it frozen solid. Instead, a large section of icy water swirled in the middle of the river. With “one poor hatchet,” Washington remembered, he and Gist devoted an entire day to hacking out a rude raft to float them across. Midway across the river, it became wedged in an ice floe, stuck so fast that Washington “expected every moment our raft would sink and we perish.” He tried to free the craft by pushing a pole against the river bottom: “I put out my setting pole to try to stop the raft that the ice might pass by, when the rapidity of the stream threw it with so much violence against the pole that it jerked me into ten feet [of ] water.” Bobbing breathlessly in the current, Washington latched onto one log of the raft and heaved himself onto its surface. Unable to get ashore, he and Gist lay stranded on an island in the river. Although Washington had been submerged in the icy water, it was Gist who suffered frostbite in his toes and fingers. The pair withstood the elements on the island all night. By the next morning, the river having congealed into a sheet of ice, they were able to scramble across to safety. Clearly, to have survived these mishaps, Washington must have been a physical prodigy, made of seemingly indestructible stuff.

I delivered the drinks and finished my shift, again wondering if I could possibly win the lottery and never return. But that kind of luck wasn’t in the cards. I knew I’d forever be stranded on the Island of Misfit Toys.

As Michele lifted one bare-toed foot over the side she squealed. A crab had escaped from one of the pots and was scurrying around the bottom of the boat. "Super choice," she said to Brian. "Stranded on a pirate island or eaten alive by a crab.

You’re like… a spy. A paratrooper they drop behind enemy lines to subvert or effect some outcome the grid wants. In a way, you’re stranded here, like a sailor left on a remote island with a hostile indigenous species. You want off this rock and away from us just as bad as we want rid of you.

Many tourists were stranded at the kahului airport during the August 2023 Maui wildfires.

Stefansson and his hunting party remained stranded on Spy Island for about a week.

friends certainly, but desperately so, like three men stranded on the same island.

Everyone in town seemed to take turns with one another, as if stranded on a private fuck island … Old with young, rich with poor, drunk with sober, beautiful with grotesque. She'd heard Hudson described as a college town without a college, or summer camp for adults, but it seemed more like a small community of expats.

From where I lay, I listened to the low, resonant, steady rap-rap-rap, stone laid on stone, rising like a column to support the vault of heaven. Those who believe in such things say the sound represents the footsteps of a lost soul treading across the Bridge of Siraat, thinner than a strand of hair, sharper than a sword, straddling precariously the void between this world and the next. At every step, the soul jettisons yet another one of its innumerable burdens, until finally it lets go of everything, including all the pain stored within.

Paradise Isle by Stewart Stafford In superstitious guidance, I discovered your shallows, Ingénues' on naked dunes, Edenites of Paradise Isle. Tragedy and chance are but pirates; One welcome, both shocking rogues, Am I a castaway or a sleepwalker? Let motivations as explorers gather. Leaving footprints only we can see, The wet sand, a camouflage ally, We quit the beach and head inland, As crabs in shade to the waterline crawl. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

The story of the Eridania Basin and the possible scientific promise it holds was pieced together by using the results from different instruments on different spacecraft over many years, spanning several scientific disciplines: geology, chemistry, spectroscopy, laser altitude ranging and photography. The estimate of the age of the surface required the Apollo lunar rock samples from 50 years ago, and radiometric dating techniques which require an understanding of nuclear physics. The estimate of the age of the surface requires a model of the entire Solar System in order to interpret the measured crater density, which illustrates another important idea. The Solar System is a system; no planet is an island; no planet can be understood in isolation, just as the structure of any one living thing on Earth cannot be understood in isolation. Organisms are a product of evolution by natural selection, the interaction of the expression of genetic mutations and mixing with other organisms, in the ecosystem and the wider environment. The planets formed in a chaotic maelstrom from motions as random as the impact of a cosmic ray on a strand of primordial DNA, and whatever worlds emerged from the chaos have had their histories shaped profoundly by their mutual interactions throughout their evolution; the Late Heavy Bombardment is a beautiful example.

the first to do so. Maybe the universe . . . has slept in ignorance of itself these aeons until suddenly in a few years mankind’s curiosity . . . has opened its cosmic eyes and the universe has seen itself for the first time. Maybe we are the brains of this outfit. . . . We are like Robinson Crusoe, stranded on a cosmic island, not knowing whether or not we are alone until we can see the footprints in the sand. —Paul Hodge, Concepts of Contemporary Astronomy (1979)

Lissy McIntyre sat on the side of the old sailing ship as it rounded the point into Butterfly Bay, curly, sun-streaked strands of auburn hair pushed across her face by the breeze. She imagined the reaction of her history colleagues at the university if they could see Dr. McIntyre in backpacker mode. The days spent basking in the warmth around the pool at Hamilton Island over the last week had made her almost forget it was winter back home on the New England tablelands of Australia.

Moses was stuck on the backside of the desert for years, unaware of God’s future for him (Ex. 3:1). Naomi was trapped in Moab after the deaths of her husband and sons (Ruth 1:5). Elijah was stuck in the wilderness, feeling sorry for himself after his failure to bring about the revival he’d hoped for Israel (1 Kings 19:10). Ezekiel was stranded in Babylon at age thirty, frustrated he couldn’t enter his priestly service in Jerusalem at the temple (Ezek. 1:1). Peter was caught in a dark, depressive cycle on the Saturday before Easter (Matt. 26:75). Thomas was cast into faithless despondency when he missed the Savior’s appearance on Easter Sunday (John 20:24). Paul was stuck in Troas where a great door of evangelism was open for him, but he had no peace of mind because of anxiety about problems in the Corinthian church (2 Cor. 2:12–13). The apostle John was exiled on the Island of Patmos, lonely and unable to continue his ministry—or so he thought (Rev. 1:9).

If I ever got stranded on a desert island I'd be pretty much screwed. I'd probably curl up in the fetal position and just cry.

Between the inner and outer beaches, a strand of woods thrived: palms, palmettos, mahogany, figs, and calabash. Coconut palms and fig trees dropped enough fruit to feed the wildlife that swooped by in droves. It was so easy to catch a fish with your bare hands, Tristan and I had made a game of it during our weeks of lovemaking on the warm, supple sand. It truly was paradise.

stranded. New Yorkers have learned to cope with life’s worst vicissitudes, and this nil admirari attitude, they say, is one reason why New York considers itself a city of survivors. Only the fittest make it here. The unfit, having tried and failed, go home to Peoria, where they do just fine. The notion that New York is a community of success is perhaps the greatest source of the New Yorker’s immense self-pride. We are not talking here of Harlem, or of the Bronx, or Queens, or Brooklyn or Staten Island. These remain, Rand-McNally notwithstanding, foreign places. New York—the New York that counts—consists only of the lower two thirds of Manhattan Island, and some might limit the New York territory to an even smaller strip

One thing her trip taught, and that is apparent to scientists studying the pronghorn, is the vital importance of “connectivity.” It is a lesson being learned, and preached, by innovative environmental thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region’s threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It’s true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphrasing Lord Bryce, the best idea our country ever had, and it’s also true that at this point we have put aside more than 100 million acres of land, a tremendous accomplishment that we should be proud of. But what we are now learning is that parks are not enough. By themselves they are islands—particularly isolated and small islands—the sort of islands where many conservation biologists say species go to die. That would change if the parks were connected, and connecting the parks, and other wild lands, is the mission of an old friend of Ed Abbey’s, Dave Foreman. Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, eventually soured on the politics of the organization he helped create. In recent years he has focused his energy on his Wildlands Project, whose mission is the creation of a great wilderness corridor from Canada to Mexico, a corridor that takes into account the wider ranges of our larger predators. Parks alone can strand animals, and leave species vulnerable, unless connected by what Foreman calls “linkages.” He believes that if we can connect the remaining wild scraps of land, we can return the West to being the home of a true wilderness. He calls the process “rewilding.” Why go to all this effort? Because dozens of so-called protected species, stranded on their eco-islands, are dying out. And because when they are gone they will not return. A few more shopping malls, another highway or gas patch, and there is no more path for the pronghorn. But there is an even more profound reason for trying to return wildness to the West. “We finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution,” writes Foreman. Wilderness is where change happens.

contingent of soldiers with you.” Almost opening his mouth in protest, Killian seemed to think the better of it. “Yes, Madam.” He glanced quickly at Talis and the others. “Shouldn’t our guests come as well? The priests should cleanse them of…of any defilement that may have possessed them on their long voyage.” The Madam frowned. “I suppose that is true. The priests must perform their rites. Go on, now.” Talis wondered what kind of rites they practiced here on the island. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. He glanced at Rikar who shook his head slightly in a gesture of disapproval. They followed the twins out of the palace with a group of soldiers leading them north along the gardens until they turned east along the wall. Talis snuck a look at the looming outer walls. So close to freedom, if only the Madam hadn’t sent so many soldiers to mind them. But he couldn’t leave without finding his sword. The way opened up to a park surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Inside, they reached a stand of mangroves. Small wooden temples dotted the interior, with hundreds of strands of white rope stretched from branch to temple roof. White flags with ancient script in gold ink adorned the ropes. Talis recognized some of the characters: death, mountains, volcano, sky, chaos.  “Lieutenant,” Killian said. “Summon the priests, then be on your way. We can manage things ourselves from here on.

Wolves avoid people whenever possible. The number of attacks by wolves on humans is low. Most of the ones people hear about are undocumented stories from ancient times. There have been two cases in North America where individuals were killed by a wolf pack, but there’s conflicting evidence on even these two. Wolves have an amazing lack of interest in attacking people. Moose On the Loose Sandy Sisti My relationship with a moose cow and her calf began on May 21 when I stopped to photograph the pair. The calf was less than one day old. The moose cow had ventured to a secluded area to give birth. Her little calf was born on a small island in the middle of the Shoshone River, just twelve miles outside of Yellowstone’s East Entrance. Choosing such an isolated place isn’t unusual, since moose often give birth on islands in an effort to keep their helpless calves safe for the first few days of their lives. Unfortunately the extremely warm weather in 2014 caused the mountain snows to melt rapidly, flooding parts of the Shoshone River. While watching the pair, I couldn’t help but notice that the rising water was swallowing up their tiny island. Only a few bare patches were left where the moose could bed down. At the same time the flooding was stranding the cow and her newborn calf. The young fellow could barely stand and when he was able to get to his feet a few times a day to nurse, it was obviously quite an effort. I worried that this drama would end badly, so on that very first day I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t spend any more time with the cow and her calf for fear of the heartbreak I would feel if tragedy struck. I stuck to my vow for four days, although I would always quickly glance over at the mother and calf each time I drove past. The pair was stuck on a small bit of land far from the opposite shore. I couldn’t imagine how the little calf could ever make it across the rushing floodwaters to freedom and to an area where his mother could graze. For those first few days, the calf didn’t move much. He spent most of his time sleeping alongside his mother or standing to nurse as the river continued to rise. When the calf was five days old, I was surprised to see him up and about as I drove past on my way home from Yellowstone. Although he wasn’t yet steady on his feet, he was able to follow his mother around their island as she grazed. I spent six hours watching the pair that day and from that moment on I knew I could no longer keep my vow to not get emotionally involved. I grew attached to the little family and became very concerned that the calf would never be able to safely swim across the river to the mainland. A friend of mine had already contacted Wyoming Game and Fish and informed them of the situation. He was told that nature must be allowed to run its course. So all I could do was watch and wait. By Day Six of the calf’s life the moose cow had eaten all of

His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the Count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, its climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

Imagine you find yourself stranded on a deserted island with nothing but a copy of the Bible. You have no experience with Christianity whatsoever, and all you know about the Church will come from your reading of the Bible. How would you imagine a church to function? Seriously. Close your eyes for two minutes and try to picture “Church” as you would know it. Now think about your current church experience. Is it even close? Can you live with that?

Sarai bumped her knee against Adrianna's getting her attention. "What did you dream of being when you grew up?" Her question surprised Adrianna. "Dead and stranded on a mythical island.

Imagine you find yourself stranded on a deserted island with nothing but a copy of the Bible. You have no experience with Christianity whatsoever, and all you know about the Church will come from your reading of the Bible. How would you imagine a church to function?

So you have found yourself on the very edge of the Commonwealth, away from familiar sights and comforting languages, stranded on a sorcerous island and surrounded by unwelcoming faces speaking a savage tongue that seems to have avoided the passing of time and ignored progress.

Hanna. Her middle child. The difficult one. The tiring one. The one she wouldn’t want to be stranded on a desert island with. And a terrible thought shot through her, so fast she barely registered it. It should be you missing and Ellie eating beans on toast.