Letter from Swan’s Island

The island’s dark tonight. The radio crackles with static, news of a blackout, the voice coming through first loud, then soft, as if a storm were moving to cut all lifelines off. My one-room cabin has a bed, a table, a chair. Living this way, I understand better that scene by an anonymous illuminator: a row of monks eating at a rough table, diagonals of light slicing across the room to fall, as if by accident, on their simple meal. The black and white tiles on the floor a symbol of the formal repetitions of the simplest life, or maybe an oblique allusion to a paradox of theology: the complementary nature of good and evil. Is evil possible here where everyone lives so individually and nature appears to be neutral toward everything but itself? Some mornings I wake too suddenly, the light on the wall brilliant and unfamiliar, and wonder for a moment, where am I? I answer myself, my disembodied voice high and far off like what I imagine saints and martyrs heard in moments of ecstasy: Swan’s Island. Lightheaded, I rise, make coffee, settling into the simple ceremony of another morning. Outside the sea birds pick the clam flats clean, fly off, returning late in the afternoon looking for more to scavenge. Good days, I swim in the quarry, sun myself on the rocks, and plan a diary. One entry: I feel this place to be a rough approximation of heaven, the heaven of the lost ...