Island

An island is a refuge, a place distanced from crowds and noisy civilization. It might represent a lost paradise, or the center of the personality where "My soul and my conscious, that is what my Self is, and I am part of it like an island in the midst of the waves, like a star in the sky" (Julien, 214). An island can also be a place of lonliness and isolation. However, with solitude, it can represent stability and the challenge of the undiscovered.

Islands carry many literary references: Melville - peace and joy, but posed with the unknown; Baudelaire - order and beauty; Conrad - illusion of apartness; Yeats - retreat from worldly chaos, disorder; Thomas - isolation in immortality; Huxley - a way of perceiving human connections ("island universes" - Doors of Perception).


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