The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

Arriving there is what you are destined for, But do not hurry the journey at all …

Since then she had added her own name to the collection of non-English words she carried in her pockets, words which, though curious and colourful, still felt distant and unfamiliar enough to remain impenetrable, like perfect pebbles you picked up on a beach and brought home but then didn’t know what to do with.

Stories, perhaps, but I believed in them. Just as I believed in legends, and the underlying truths they tried to convey.

First-generation immigrants are a species all their own. They wear a lot of beige, grey or brown. Colours that do not stand out. Colours that whisper, never shout. There is a tendency to formality in their mannerisms, a wish to be treated with dignity.

They know, deep within, that when you save a fig tree from a storm, it is someone’s memory you are saving.

Pain, there was so much pain everywhere and in everyone. The only difference was between those who managed to hide it and those who no longer could.

a puppet whose strings had snapped onstage in the middle of a play;

I wish I could have told him that loneliness is a human invention. Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else’s starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.

Not a very sensible thing to do, I admit, to fall for someone who is not of your kind, someone who will only complicate your life, disrupt your routine and mess with your sense of stability and rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.

It is a curse, an enduring memory. When elderly Cypriot women wish ill upon someone, they don’t ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them. They don’t pray for lightning bolts, unforeseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune. They simply say, May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.

Oof

It crossed his mind that maybe one of the most telling differences between the young and the old lay in this detail. As you aged you cared less and less about what others thought of you, and only then could you be more free.

My guess is humans deliberately avoid learning more about us, maybe because they sense, at some primordial level, that what they find out might be unsettling.

a tree’s rings do not only reveal its age, but also the traumas it has endured, including wildfires, and thus, carved deep in each circle, is a near-death experience, an unhealed scar?

I believe one reason why humans find it hard to understand plants is because, in order to connect with something other than themselves and genuinely care about it, they need to interact with a face, an image that mirrors theirs as closely as possible. The more visible an animal’s eyes, the more sympathy it will receive from humankind.

Human-time is linear, a neat continuum from a past that is supposed to be over and done with towards a future deemed to be untouched, untarnished. Every day has to be a brand-new day, filled with fresh events, every love utterly different from the previous one. The human species’ appetite for novelty is insatiable and I’m not sure it does them much good. Arboreal-time is cyclical, recurrent, perennial; the past and the future breathe within this moment, and the present does not necessarily flow in one direction; instead it draws circles within circles, like the rings you find when you cut us down.

Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end?

For it is a land without borders, a lover’s body. You discover it, not at once, but step by anxious step, losing your way, your sense of direction, treading its sunlit valleys and rolling fields, finding it warm and welcoming, and then, hidden in quiet corners, running into caverns invisible and unexpected, pits where you stumble and cut yourself.

they strolled, in no rush to be anywhere.

I want you to understand a fundamental rule about love. You see, there are two kinds: the surface and the deep water. Now, Aphrodite emerged from foam, remember? Foam love is a nice feeling, but just as superficial. When it’s gone, it’s gone, nothing remains. Always aim for the kind of love that comes from the deep.’ ‘I’m not in love!’ ‘Fine, but when you are, just remember, foam love is interested in foam beauty. Sea love seeks sea beauty. And you, my heart, deserve sea love, the strong and profound and enchanting type.’

For kindness always is – direct, naive, effortless.

Wisdom consists of ten parts: nine parts of silence, one part of words.’

So yes, carobs are strong. I give them credit for that. But, unlike us figs, they are devoid of emotion. They are cold, pragmatic and lacking in soul. There is a perfectionism to them that gets on my nerves. Their seeds are almost always identical in weight and size, so uniform that in the olden times merchants used them to weigh gold – that’s where the word ‘carat’ comes from. It used to be the most important crop of this island, its main agricultural export. So you see where I’m coming from: there is a bit of a competition between carobs and figs.

Humans are strange that way, full of contradictions. It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace. Their hearts close tightly, then open at full stretch, only to clench again, like an undecided fist.

‘Look, I’m no expert on them but I think it’s plausible they plan their moves beyond their lifespan – not within one generation, but across many.’

And then they were silent once again, drifting back to the painful place they both shared but could only occupy separately.

Love is the bold affirmation of hope.

In fire-prone regions trees develop myriad ways to protect themselves from the devastation. They surround themselves with thick, flaky bark or keep their dormant buds underground. You can find pine trees with hard, resistant cones ready to release their seeds at the first prickle of intense heat. Some other trees drop their lower branches altogether, so that flames can’t easily climb up.

good advice is always annoying and bad advice never is.

Truth is a rhizome – an underground plant stem with lateral shoots. You need to dig deep to reach it and, once unearthed, you have to treat it with respect.

the bear knows seven songs and they are all about honey.’

knowing that bridges appear in our lives only when we are ready to cross them.

What we think is impossible changes with every generation.’

Throughout my long life, I have observed, again and again, this psychological pendulum that drives human nature. Every few decades they sway into a zone of unbridled optimism and insist on seeing everything through a rosy filter, only to be challenged and shaken by events and catapulted back into their habitual apathy and listless indifference.

Some day this pain will be useful to you.

realize that hands were the most honest part of a human’s body. Eyes lied. Lips lied. Faces hid themselves behind a thousand masks. But hands rarely ever did. She observed the hands of the elderly, resting demurely on their laps, withered, wrinkled, liver-spotted, bent and blue with veins, creatures with their own minds and consciences. She noticed how, every time she asked an uncomfortable question, the hands answered in their own language, fidgeting, gesturing, picking at their nails.

She chuckled nervously, and before they knew it both women were laughing so hard, with tears in their eyes, that the other customers began to look at them disapprovingly, wondering what was so funny, no one imagining it was pain they were setting free.

In the most surprising ways, the victims continued to live, because that is what nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.

‘Right, I think I said it’s possible to deduce a person’s character based on what they first notice in a tree.’