Dreams become simpler: Tove Jansson and The Island

There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island.

Sometimes deliberate people look for their island and conquer it, and sometimes the dream of the island can be a passive symbol for what is one step beyond reach. The island—at last, privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences.

Sheltered and isolated by the water that is at the same time an open possibility.

A possibility one never considers.

Going around the beach on one’s island has something of the circle’s satisfying finality.

The beach—the narrow border between land and sea, fickle and treacherous, shaped with heedless violence and strewn with peculiar objects that the sea has smoothed, giving them their softness and strength.

There’s nothing as red as a bank of seaweed backlit in the afternoon. Soft stones and bristly grass.

Shattered craggy chaos—with unexpectedly smooth sandy floors and the untouched miniature landscapes mirrored in the blackness of basins.

Seen from the sea, the island has a sad protective color; it’s small and indifferent. Stone, for the most part, and a tuft of crooked forest. No tall mountains, no dock.

After sunset it becomes a black silhouette, a sloppy speck in the drama of fine cobalt, Naples yellow, and cerulean blue. The horizon vanishes, and close to the water, sea ducks and teals fly in silent, resolute lines. The gulls have turned in for the night and sit motionless on the surrounding islets with their heads all turned the same way.

One goes around the island. Nobody can come, nobody needs to travel, one is completely calm. The clocks have stopped a long time ago, and it’s been a long time since one wore shoes. The feet find their own way, they are confident and self-sufficient, they have become sensitive like hands and they notice, quickly and joyfully, the sand and the moss, the seaweed, the mountain. One’s clothes are soft and light, long ago faded, like one’s hair—it looks like arrowgrass and never gets in one’s face.

Everything concerning oneself has been evened out, neutralized, deprived of any particular interest. One is one’s own companion, someone who seldom speaks and never asks questions; a person one can live with.

Everything is turned outward in calm contemplation of familiar things whose uninterrupted transformations create a remarkable feeling of comfort and suspense.

The mutating sea, the beach that rises and sinks and changes shape, everything that grows and dies and grows again in a new and surprising place, the way in which trees and shrubs withstand the storm, decay takes its natural course on everything one has built, and the pleasure of recognition and repetition.

After being alone for a long time, one starts to listen differently, to perceive the organic and the unexpected all around, to brush against all the incomprehensible beauty of the material.

Old self-absorbed thoughts rush out on new tracks or shrink and die. Dreams become simpler and one wakes up with a smile.

Read Part Two: Danger Comes

From: “The Island,”  by Tove Jannson originally published in 1961 in a travel magazine, Turistliv i Finland. Translated by Hernan Diaz https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/13/tove-janssons-the-island/