The other day, my professor used the word “island.” I can’t stop thinking about it.
Let me take you back to 1:42 p.m. on a slightly overcast Tuesday. Last week. The Physics building. To no one’s surprise, I am once more quietly zoning out in my developmental psychology class. A very qualified man is attempting to teach me about language development in children. My mind is responding to this generous act with aimless poetry.
The professor’s multisyllabic words seem like riverbed stones seen through clear, flowing water: each one distinct, but also part of a rounded, pebbly whole. The stones blur into each other through the water’s distortion. Grey and black and reddish. You can never look at just one river stone. You can never throw just one river stone. You can never just…Wait, why am I thinking of river stones again? Shouldn’t I be, like, taking notes or something?
“Shh.” My idiot mind responds. “Life is long and this is chair is comfortable. Keep thinking of river stones.”
My fold-out lecture hall seat supports me. My eyes see a PowerPoint appropriately adorned with 14-point Helvetica and neatly labeled graphs. My mind sees river stones. My head leans back. My mouth slides slightly ajar. I hear flowing water. I am comfortably adrift.
Then, he says it. My professor uses the word “island.” Maybe it’s the coffee. Maybe I have an affinity for islands. Maybe there wasn’t any reason for it at all. The result is the same. I’m pulled bodily out of my reverie and into the sharp realm of wakefulness. The word island shines out from its peers like sparkling quartz amongst dull water-blurred river stones. I don’t remember the context in which the word was used. I do remember the things it made me think of. Connotations flew out from the word like a multistage firework. Here are my impressions of the word island.
Islands are part of who I am. My friend owns a baseball hat that has written across its front in cursive “you deserve an island.” I liked it so much that I borrowed it from her. For at least a month, in quite a literal sense, I wore the word “island.” I wore it on my head, no less, like a crown. If our clothing becomes in some small part who we are, then I had chosen, in a limited sense, to include the word island in who I was.
Islands are associated with the rich. There’s a whole HGTV show about people shopping for their ideal island. Deciding that you wanted to own an island always seemed profoundly entitled to me. You look at a part of the world and decide you want it to be yours. Additionally, you declare that your part of the world, your bit of the land, must be separated from everyone else’s by ocean. We can’t have the masses’ plebeian soil touch our own sanctified turf, now can we?
Islands are associated with the profoundly poor. It’s practically its own genre: the castaway, shipwrecked, must survive using only their wits and what they can scavenge from nature. Robinson Crusoe, Lost. To be on an island is to be separated from the comfort, the trappings of civilization. To be on an island is to be the opposite of entitled. You have surrendered yourself to the world.
Islands are associated with humankind’s tranquility. You can picture the scene: it’s embedded in our collective consciousness. Two lawn chairs sit nestled into pure white sand. A palm tree gently sways. The sky roars with color: red orange, milky pink. The soothing sound of the surf mingles with the far-off laughter of children, with the clinking of ice in a drink with an umbrella, with the whisper of the breeze through the yellowed pages of a well-thumbed paperback. Relaxation manifest.
Islands are associated with nature’s rage. Hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes. The island is especially prone to natural disaster. Alone, isolated among the waves, every brutal whim of mother nature is felt more intensely. Islands are born out of eruptions of angry red molten stone. Islands die in the tearing of ruthless blue water over painful millennia. Islands are elemental. Raw.
All of these things and more are implied each time we use the word island. All these connotations, all these ideas, are summoned by the simple utterance of a word. When my professor said island so casually, it felt like being offhandedly given a glass of water, then taking a sip to discover that the glass was a firehose all along. Every word we use is far, far more that the sans-serif definition that a quick Google search will offer. Every word is packed to the brim with meaning. Often those meanings are shared. Often we each have different meanings. Often the two mingle.
Whatever the case, using words is profoundly not a trivial act. When we speak or write or sing, we aren’t just making vacuous noise. We are slinging around firehoses that yield not water, but instead pure, raw thought.
We should aim well.
Mihir Bellamkonda is a Trinity first-year. His column, “small questions,” runs on alternate Mondays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
Mihir Bellamkonda is a Trinity junior and a Managing Editor of the Editorial page. His column, "small questions," runs on alternate Tuesdays.