Monkfish
Review by Linda Lappin
In An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life, Michael McGregor, writer, university professor, inveterate traveler, former fire fighter and Rick Steeves’ tour guide, celebrates the role islands and solitude have played in his creative process and spiritual growth over four decades.
Combining memoir and philosophical reflection, the book opens with a buzz as he recounts his first solo jaunt at age twenty-seven to the island of Patmos, determined to write a novel, an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter in tow. He has prepared himself for a transformative experience by shaving off his beard in a ritual act of self-renewal.
It’s midwinter 1985. There’s no public internet, social media, smartphones or FaceTime. Communication with back home consisted mainly of letters sent care of American Express and rare, expensive collect calls. Cut loose and cut off, young travelers back then were on their own. Settling into a vacation rental with no heat for two months, McGregor subjects himself to a rigid writing routine, interrupting his schedule with solitary walks in the glorious landscape where St. John envisioned the Apocalypse, casual meetings with monks and shepherds who don’t speak English, humble meals consumed alone. He becomes acquainted at once with both the exhilarating aspects of being truly alone and the frightening ones. He also experiences the fertile, hallucinatory mental state that sometimes arises when we are focused intensely on creative work with little outside interaction– plunged deep into our unknown interior.
“Night is when my beliefs face challenges and when there is no belief at all, just existence in a dark space, a passing moment, the room behind my eyes where everything seems illusory,” he writes. “But night is also where the line between remembering and imagining blurs, where thoughts bleed into dreams.”
Early on, McGregor confides that he takes a trusting view of the universe – that things will always somehow work out–and on this first trip to Patmos he will make a serendipitous encounter with Robert Lax, experimental poet and confidante to Thomas Merton, long time resident of Patmos. The two will remain in touch until Lax’s death, and McGregor will produce an excellent biography dedicated to his friend: Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. (Fordham University Press, 2015.) The shadow of his mentor looms large in An Island to Myself: Lax’s search for a crystalline awareness of the present in our every act and word made a profound, lifelong impact on the young writer’s mind.
We never learn what McGregor’s novel was about or whether it was ever published, yet those two months of semi-monastic living on Patmos proved to be an act of manifestation for McGregor’s future success as writer, traveler, and mature individual. Later chapters deal with the many ways solitude, writing, islands, and spirituality intertwine in the different phases of his life: youth, marriage, teaching career, pilgrimage, grief, sudden illness, and diverse returns to Patmos.
Throughout his memoir, McGregor ponders the same questions that haunted him during his first island retreat: How to balance solitude and creativity with the need for intimacy and community. How to access the dreamlike state where all memories are preserved in real time. How to nourish the inner being within us, the “I-not-I” which gifts us with the miracle of presence. Readings from Robert Lax, Thomas Merton, Epicetus, Victor Hugo, Henry David Thoreau, Anne Frank, Victor Frankl, Thich Nhat Hanh and many more offer insights but no maps or recipes are provided. Seekers must go it alone in the dark to find the answers for themselves.
Nothing is harder to find these days than quality time with oneself. We are always trying to run away from ourselves, chasing a million distractions. Yet the solitude we crave and, perhaps, dread, is right within our reach, within a moment’s capture. In An Island to Myself, Michael McGregor, in luminous, evocative prose, reminds us why it’s worth our while to embrace the present and seize the day. Maybe even on the island of our choice.
