The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

legends are there to tell us what history has forgotten.

A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference. Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.

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.

While religions clash to have the final say, and nationalisms teach a sense of superiority and exclusiveness, superstitions on either side of the border coexist in rare harmony.

that is what nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.

The ancients believed there was a pole that ran through the universe, joining the underworld to earth and heaven, and at the centre of this pole towered, mighty and magnificent, the great cosmic tree. Its branches held up the sun, the moon, the stars and the constellations, and its roots reached all the way down into the abyss.

There was something childlike in the way grown-ups had a need for stories. They held a naive belief that by telling an inspiring anecdote – the right fable at the right time – they could lift their children’s moods, motivate them to great achievements and simply change reality. There was no point in telling them that life was more complicated than that and words less magical than they presumed.