I HAVE A friend who used to be a sort of self-governing urban monk – strictly non-denominational. His own view was that it’s unnecessary to take oneself off to distant, isolated lands in search of peace or a heightened sense of reverence. His own favoured location was a traffic island in the middle of one of Edinburgh’s busiest junctions. He was in the habit of sitting there in meditation among the exhaust fumes. One day the police moved him on. They said he must be up to no good.
The primitive forms of the word island include illond, yllond, yland, hylan and ile-land. The prefixes vary, but are all of Germanic origin meaning water, or watery place – suited as much to describe a peninsula as a piece of land surrounded on all sides by water. Coverdale’s Bible, refracted into early modern English from the Hebrew, ascribed the word Ilondes to the entire Mediterranean coastline as populated by Gentiles. It was intended to take in those lands of Asia Minor, Greece and North Africa into which teemed the descendants of Japheth, as in this verse of Isaiah: Let them give glory unto the LORD, and declare his praise in the islands.
The Oxford English Dictionary asserts that by the seventeenth century the prefixes ‘i’, ‘hy’, ‘ile’, were ‘erroneously’ conflated with the French and Italianate ‘isle’, and by the 1600s the bastard word ‘island’ was becoming routine. In 1586 Sir Philip Sidney wrote of an Arcadian iland within the lake; by 1598 Hakluyt could write Godred . . . tooke possession of the South part of the Island.
The distinction is academic; that a peninsula may stand service as an island seems to me fair enough.
A year or so after Barra, approaching the winter solstice, I was assigned a fortnight away from my schedule of hospital work. A disintegrating love affair had sickened me, and none of my friends were free to travel. Between bouts of incapacitating sadness I made plans to travel to Greece.
The Athos peninsula is home to a complex of monasteries where, for a millennium, Orthodox Christians have gone on pilgrimage. I am not an Orthodox Christian, but had read that they’d welcome me nevertheless.
To reach the peninsula I’d be obliged to fly to Athens, take a night train north to Thessaloniki, then apply in the city office for a pilgrim’s permit that would be valid at most for a week. With two weeks of leave, there was no hurry – there were even a few days to spare before it was necessary to depart for Athens.
North Ronaldsay
On a whim I drove to Thurso, on the Arctic coast of Scotland, and took a ferry through dense solstice darkness to Orkney, an archipelago of forty or so islands, with the intention of reaching the remotest of them – North Ronaldsay. At that latitude, at that time of year, there were about five hours of light each day. There were only ten other passengers on the ferry. I walked off into freezing darkness, and my first view of Orkney was of the land between the towns of Stromness and Kirkwall. It was mid-morning, and the light was beginning to gather. Even in that semidarkness the landscape was soothing, not at all like Shetland or nearby Sutherland: a maze of silver inlets set between gently rolling peninsulas. So green, even in December. Kirkwall seemed like every small harbour town at first glance: a few little streets, a wide harbour perfumed by fish oil and diesel.
I was to reach North Ronaldsay by plane, as I’d missed the island’s once-a-week ferry. The taxi driver who took me to the airport told me he could live on every island in Orkney but that one. It is just too isolated, he said.
The plane had room for only eight passengers. I was given a seat behind the pilot with a cockpit view as the propellers roared and the plane jerked skywards as if tugged on marionette strings. Beneath me, perspective resolved into a living map, the heaving sea breaking along the coastlines of each island of the archipelago.
In the half-light of three circumpolar winter ‘days’ I walked circuits of North Ronaldsay (circumference: thirteen miles) until it was time to leave for Greece. Sixty people lived there alongside a couple of thousand sheep of a breed so primitive they are thought to have arrived on the island during the Iron Age. They have evolved to subsist on seaweed rather than grass – a talent almost unique, and shared with a single species of iguana resident in one of the Galapagos Islands. The only sounds were of wind and sea, the plane once a day, a tractor at about the same regularity and, near the guest house, the rotation of wind generators. Seals along the shore would belly-flop away from my approach; occasionally a young one, or one I had inadvertently cut off from the water, would turn and hiss at me. The seabirds were unusually fearless.
Given the abundance of sheep and of seals in North Ronaldsay I reasoned that, if marooned there, I’d hardly starve. On Juan Fernandez the original Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, killed sea lions with relative ease:
Observing that though their Jaws and Tails were so terrible, yet the Animals being mighty slow in working themselves round, he had nothing to do but place himself exactly opposite to their middle, and as close to them as possible, and he despatched them with his Hatchet at will.
RICHARD STEELE
On the twilit morning of my fourth day in North Ronaldsay I boarded the little aeroplane again, and flew over the mosaic of Orkney’s northern isles to Kirkwall. To the north, through patches in the cloud, I thought I could discern a dull green glow in the sky – a ‘quiet arc’ of auroral light. From Kirkwall I took an empty bus to the port town of Stromness in the west of Orkney’s Mainland, to join the ferry that would return me to the Scottish mainland. It was a six-hour drive to Edinburgh, where I’d catch my flight to Athens.
The sleeper from Athens threw me out onto the streets of Thessaloniki at 6.20 a.m. Before I could apply for a permit to visit Athos I needed a letter of introduction from the British consulate – a hutch of an office located partway up a concrete high-rise.
On its steps, facing towards the Mediterranean, waiting for the office to open, I read a memoir by a man who’d wintered alone in the high Arctic, North to the Night by Alvah Simon. He nearly lost his mind, yet his need to retreat into that isolation, and for that clear, polar air, was like his need for oxygen. From time to time I’d glance up at the Aegean’s glitter glare, my mind spinning over an unmappable white wilderness.
The consul confirmed that I was not a criminal; I took her signed assurance to a pilgrims’ office where three suavely efficient men behind stacks of buff-coloured files issued me with a diamonitirion, or permit for Athos. I’d sail there the next morning from Ouranoupoli, the ‘City of Heaven’.
The shoreline at the City of Heaven felt rich and fertile after Orkney’s blasted winter beaches. Even on the highest, stillest hillside, there was evidence of human industry.
The mountain itself was a conical fairy-tale peak, rising from the tip of a sinuous peninsula. A wasp’s waist of land connected the peninsula to the mainland, interrupted by the remains of an ancient canal named for an emperor of Persia, but the roads were inaccessible – the only way in was by boat.
From the boat I watched dolphins leap ahead of the bow, and avoided the chatter and cigarette smoke of monks returning from furlough in the city. On arrival at the administrative hub, Karyes, the monks fled into waiting jeeps. Though I raised my thumb and asked around for a lift to the Great Lavra monastery, none offered. I was left standing in the dust with Francesco, a spry Italian convert to Orthodoxy, who informed me he was now on his tenth visit to the peninsula. Hitching a lift was unlikely, he said, and I should instead accompany him on foot to the nearby monastery of Iviron.
I became Orthodox after reading The Way of a Pilgrim, he said, a book about a Russian serf’s spiritual awakening that was discovered earlier last century buried in a library in a monastery on Athos. Its fame in English translation was broadened by the approval of J.D. Salinger, who has one of his characters, a young woman called Franny, follow its advice to pray without ceasing.
It’s a good read, Francesco said, as long as you ignore all that Slavic sentimentality. As part of his wanderings, the pilgrim journeys to a monastery on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea.
So here I am at the present time, stealing off to the solitary ascetic retreat in the Solovetsky Monastery in the White Sea . . . about which I have heard on good authority that it is a most suitable place for the contemplative life.
THE WAY OF A PILGRIM
The love affair I’d left behind still felt as close as the pulse in my throat. Several times a day squalls of sorrow, or anxiety, or regret, would throw me off balance. I resolved to commit those gusts of emotion to the paper of an ever-lengthening letter, to corral them in ink instead of letting them shriek around my head. When I get back, I thought, I’ll post it to her.
St Peter’s Island
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famous for his belief that human beings are born free, but everywhere live in chains, held a passionate belief in the therapeutic value of being able to wander freely. His last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, was based on a series of ten walks in which he meditated on his life, his mistakes and the many roads to wisdom. Happiness, he says, had come to him most powerfully when he sought refuge for two months on the lake-island of St Peter in Switzerland.
The happiness Rousseau felt on St Peter’s isle was a consequence of the simplicity of his life there: he had few of his possessions, an abundance of leisure and the conversation of just a handful of others. He used an Italian phrase to describe this kind of happiness: there was a deep joy in far niente – ‘doing nothing’ – a joy that came more easily on an island that provided some distance from distraction. The island curtailed the possibilities of engaging with others, and the connections he felt were all the deeper and more satisfying as a result.
I know men will be careful not to give me back such a sweet refuge when they did not want to leave me there, Rousseau wrote of the island. But at least they will not prevent me from transporting myself there each day on the wings of my imagination.
Athos
Like a fortress, the monastery of Iviron lay banked into the hillside, high and grey, its tiny windows were archers’ slots. The building was a thousand years old; its cobbled track felt rutted with history. It led to a wide courtyard, enclosed by open, iron-cased doors. I was greeted in the Archontariki, the pilgrims’ reception, by a quiet monk with an Australian accent who exchanged pleasantries, in English, about my hospital work. He offered me Turkish delight – claimed as a cultural tradition of both Greeks and Turks, and a reminder that for much of the last five hundred years the Athos peninsula was under Ottoman rule.
The office of vespers was about to begin. I was expected to attend but was asked, as an unbeliever, to stand outside the church. A fat monk told me to turn my back so that I couldn’t see the others at prayer. For two hours I stood in the half-light, listening to the monks’ chants and responses. Dinner was a bowl of rice with cauliflower stew; the candles in the dormitory were extinguished at 7 p.m.
It’s said that for a thousand years there have been no women permitted on Athos. There’s no radio or television, prayer is obligatory between three and five times a day. The monks eat simple food. They have no money.
Herman Melville noted the same in the Marquesas:
No foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour; no poor relations . . . no destitute widows . . . no beggars; no debtors’ prison, no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word – no money!
In an essay by Kathleen Jamie I read of her relief at being released from distractions and responsibilities to simply watch the sea. And with the monks of Athos I began to wonder if being bathed day after day, year after year, in the sounds and light of the sea, had the power to evoke kindness. But being so isolated, the monks had fewer opportunities to practise compassion than if they’d stayed in their home communities.
The idea of holiness clings to the Shiants, as to other islands. Remoteness from the world looks like a closeness to God and intriguingly, it turns out that the association of islands and holiness predates anything Christian.
ADAM NICOLSON
In the courtyard of the Great Lavra monastery cement mixers were going, chainsaws were buzzing at firewood, hammers were being struck on stone. There was the sound of a generator off beyond the solar panels. Vegetable gardens had been staked out to the west, as well as greenhouses. On a bench there I met Dimitri, who’d left a job in Lausanne to return to Greece, do his military service, and find God.
He told me about a doctor he knew who’d found work as an emergency physician in Italy. This doctor had felt exhausted and sick after every shift, and wondered if he was absorbing all the pain and suffering of his patients. He decided to stop thinking with his intellect, and allow his decisions to emerge in some indefinable way from the heart. If his heart didn’t offer a preference between two paths then he would decline to make the decision.
He quit his job in Italy, returned to Greece and found work in a quiet island practice. Ever since, Dimitri said, this man had enjoyed something close to enlightenment. He felt in perfect harmony with his life and with the world around him, he added.
I skirted the Athos mountainside along a thin, ancient track. In places it had worn into a holloway two metres deep. The leaves were autumnal, and there was a thick, luscious silence broken only by the sound of bees, falling water and, close to some of the smaller retreats, donkey bells.
As I sat overlooking an Aegean panorama, scribbling at my letter, an old monk leading a donkey passed me, fat and happy, muttering in Greek. He insisted on tying my rucksack to his donkey, motioning for me to walk ahead of him. He had thick untied boots and wild hair; several frayed army jackets flapped in layers at his breast. For an hour I walked ahead of him through the forests, feeling grateful for losing the weight of my pack, walking slowly for the sake of the donkey. At a spring I filled my mug and offered it to the monk; he grinned and downed the mugful in one, droplets shining in his beard.
I was relieved when he and his donkey turned away down a track, because it meant I could stop again as I pleased, and sit in solitude once more.
Sometimes the monks of Athos seemed like members of a subdued boys’ club, and I wondered that they could dedicate their lives to such relinquishing, such denial, of family life. At those moments their impractical, flowing robes and ceremonial hats appeared ridiculous, as did all their absurd chanting and bell-ringing. Then the apparent peace of such a life overwhelmed me.
To approach these humorous and kindly men, the monks of Mount Athos, in a temper of psychological understanding, it is necessary to forswear, if only temporarily, the sting of these prejudices. Let the humanist realise, atheist though he be, that the religious seeks, after all, only the same as himself by other roads.
ROBERT BYRON
On the walls of the next monastery to welcome me, Gregoriou, I sat watching the incandescent sea, feeling the strength of the sun’s heat. The anguished letter was spending less and less time out of my backpack. My additions to it were getting shorter.
Inside the pilgrims’ quarters I found an empty storage room with mattresses and blankets, a radiator and a window. The room was situated directly over the boathouse runway. My sleep was suffused with the drawl of shingle and the melodies of water in motion.
I was taken to see the one monk in the monastery who spoke English. Father Damianos was ironing bed sheets in a high room looking out over the bay. He appeared younger than his forty years. Expressions flitted swiftly over his face as he spoke. He was a Cypriot from south London, with blue eyes between his Orthodox cap and thick black beard. He made me coffee, and as he pressed bed sheets, we talked.
He’d been travelling the world through his early thirties, he said, searching for something without knowing what. His brother suggested they coincide in Greece, and together they determined, on a whim, to visit Athos. The first monastery the men came to was Gregoriou. They stayed first for a week to get used to the new rhythm. His brother left. Damianos extended his stay to a month, then four months. Then he became a novice.
After three years in Gregoriou, Damianos felt he had to go back into the world, to confirm his knowledge of what he’d be giving up were he to commit to monastic life. He visited a Catholic monastery in the south of England where he met an Anglican nun sent there by her psychologist following a nervous breakdown. That a nun should seek the attentions of a clinical psychologist for what amounted to a spiritual crisis demonstrated, he insisted, the incongruities inherent in the Western tradition, and he returned to Gregoriou and took his vows. That encounter had been four years previously. He had yet to visit any other monasteries on Athos.
He was convinced that death is the culmination of our lives, and in some ways is our life’s reason. That it is only a door.
I saw only two dawns at the Athonite ascetics’ retreat of St Anne – each arrived as the two-hour ceremony of matins came to a close. Sunlight approached in great arches from the horizon, bridging the night. After a breakfast of bread and olives I sat in the blue light; sounds were again of donkey bells, waterfalls, birds singing. The chapels clinging to the mountainside, the forest, the glittering sea, all proffered the palpable presence of . . .
. . . of what? I couldn’t define how it felt, but only that ease of mind was in its gift.
But it was clear that, as in Iona, my redemption lay elsewhere.
In Athens I reread the lengthening letter and, with a great sense of liberation, dropped it into a municipal bin.
The poet Nancy Campbell describes a winter she spent in the small Greenlandic island of Upernavik, north of the Arctic Circle. There’s a settlement there of a thousand or so people, a museum and a shop. There are many icebergs, and occasional polar bears. Once every month a Frenchman whose name and history no one knew would arrive by boat from an even more remote island, where he lived alone. He would stock up wordlessly on a few essentials in the village store, before getting into his boat and motoring off into the labyrinth of islands and icebergs.
I heard similar stories on my own journeys along Greenland’s coast, and wondered at the silence of that life, the clock of the waves beating time upon the shores of the Davis Strait. At what might have happened to this Frenchman to make such solitude necessary. His monthly visits to the shop, at least, sustained some kind of connection to the current of mankind. I wondered if he’d be missed when he stopped coming.
I wondered too if that Frenchman in Greenland, so steeped in his isolation, knew of John Donne’s phrase No man is an island, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. If he knew of the philanthropy expressed in the line Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind – a sentiment that could stand as a maxim for the practice of medicine.
Juan Fernandez
At the beginning of his isolation on Juan Fernandez Island Alexander Selkirk was harassed day and night by rats. To fend them off he tamed some semi-feral cats by offering them milk from the wild goats that he had captured, lamed and trapped in enclosures. On his return to Britain he reported that throughout his time on the island his greatest terror was that he’d die alone, and his body would be gnawed by rats and cats alike.
Athos
On Mount Athos I asked an old monk if he’d ever tried living in the desert.
No, he replied. In the Bible it says it’s not good for a man to be alone. And then he grinned.
The Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius didn’t think it wise to go searching for peace beyond the confines of the self. Nowhere can man find a quieter, or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul, he said. Of Athos, he wrote: Asia, Europe, are but nooks in the universe, the ocean a drop – Mount Athos a clod – time a point in eternity, alike little, fleeting, perishable.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.
JOHN DONNE
Forty years or so after Selkirk was marooned, four Russians were beached on Edge Island, in the Svalbard archipelago of the high Arctic. They survived for six years using arrowheads made of nails found in driftwood, and eating their prey raw. To counter scurvy in a land without vegetables they drank the blood of reindeer and foxes. One of their number who baulked at the drinking of blood died of that disease.
On their return to civilisation the three surviving men had lost their appetite for both alcohol and bread.
From the little settlement of Longyearbyen, the capital of the Svalbard archipelago, I once sailed on a Russian icebreaker to see Spitsbergen’s northern coast and Moffen Island – a flat disc of shingle, the last stop before the North Pole, and home to innumerable walruses and birds.
A little further along the coast was the place where Christiane Ritter, an Austrian painter, lived for a year in a trapper’s hut between 1934 and 1935. In her book, A Woman in the Polar Night, she wrote: We are seized by an uncontrollable longing for remote places. We want to go further and further into the Arctic lands, the islands in the ice, the frozen earth which is still lying there as on the day that God created it. Europe, and everything that binds us to Europe, is forgotten.
The passage of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations that mentions Athos goes on to reflect on the nature of isolation and connectedness. Bethink thee how all things are united, it says, part and parcel of, and connected with each other, whether through community of purpose, or similarity of form.
Isolation, from this perspective, is an illusion.
