Change, Presence, and the Imperative of Self-Renewal: Existential Lessons from Islands

“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote in his timeless ode to our shared human experience. And yet each of us is a chance event islanded in time; in each of us there is an island of solitude so private and remote that it renders even love — this best means we have of reaching across the abyss between us — a mere row-boat launched into the turbulent waters of time and chance from another island just as remote.

Perhaps because we live with such inner islandness, islands became our earliest theor...