Exisle

In this era of placeless places and hurried schedules, islands, like certain epochs we seize from the past to satisfy our personal need for a sense of stability and continuity, provide us with something that our busy mainland lives cannot. The very quality of boundedness and remoteness makes them particularly appealing places to deposit those visions and yearnings we no longer have room for in our everyday continental existence...

But it is small islands that loom largest in contemporary consciousness. They are the objects of our most intense desires and the locus of our greatest fears about environmental degradation, even species extinction. We feel extraordinarily free there, but also trapped. Associated with pleasure, islands also habour pain, for they can just as easily be prisons as refuges. Isles remind us of our isolation as individuals while sustaining visions of community; and though unparalleled as places of solitude, they are also among the few places we feel cosmically connected.

– John R. Gillis