Book Review - The Island Within
Author: Richard Nelson
Category: Philosophy, Memoir
Quiver Score: 4.25/5
Normally, if I am contemplating writing a book review, I bear that in mind as I read the book, my attention calibrated for impactful sentences, pen in hand to underline them. Other times, when I finish reading a book, I feel inspired to write about it. Rarely does a book call out to me from the past for a review, and yet The Island Within by Richard Nelson did just that.
On the surface this book does not fit the profile of the books that I normally review: those that are written to inspire personal transformation and inner healing, or feature an individual wholly devoted to life’s purpose. Originally published more than three decades ago, The Island Within is categorized under natural history, anthropology, hunting, and philosophy – not a natural fit – yet from deep within those strictures arise the poetic and mindful reflections of a consummate author, one who finds learning with every interaction and transfers wisdom with the ease of a sage. “I’ve undertaken a course of study,” writes Nelson, “with the island as my teacher.”
With The Island Within, Nelson has crafted a flawless narrative that has no beginning and no end, and perhaps, to the unmindful, no meaning. One’s attention could drift as Nelson describes another turbulent trip on his boat or his silent, rapt attempts to track a deer. To those who remain anchored, however, emerges buried treasure from every line. I kept being drawn back in, not as an addiction, but, as I would later be able to put into words, as therapy. I eventually came to realize that, when in a state of presence, reading this book was healing.
Unlike self-help books, The Island Within has no call-to-action to the reader, makes no attempt to alter what is, or what is believed to be. If anything, Nelson seems to have written it as a love story to the remote, desolate Alaskan island that had embraced him for so many years. “Perfect blackness releases me into the free and boundless night, to roam in dreams throughout an everlasting, untrammeled, forest; a forest that gives me breath and shelters me; a forest that envelops me with shining, consecrated webs and binds me here forever.” He shares with the reader not a history of his journeys on the island that had fully enchanted him, but a journey of his story, all told in the present moment as he intentionally wanders through cedar forests and muskegs, along rocky beaches and mountains, and camps in his tent or ramshackle shelters that indicate he is not the only human who has found solace on the island. Mostly he is accompanied only by his dog, Shungnak, but occasionally, when the conditions are right for a surf, by a human companion. Surfing an unknown, wild, frigid coast during a storm surge is dangerous at the best of times, and nearly suicidal alone.
Despite his career as a writer, his coastal home from where he stamped words to pages, and his family there, the assiduous seduction of Nelson by the island was enough to lure him there again and again, even when pending storms forewarned against it. It was there where he fully experienced life in near perfect harmony, often while spiritually seeking the ineffable. “The questions I had before remained unanswered, but I’ve also learned much, and in a way possible only through experience – that the hunter lives on a tenuous edge, that the power in his relationship to the world lies outside of himself, and that cleverness, skill, and stealth are meaningless without harmony.” And through his eloquent words he seduces the reader into his narrative, calls upon their spirit, and leaves them feeling in near perfect harmony.
The eternal moment is something that Nelson captures like few other writers, invoking in the reader curiosity of the power and magic of the present and the intrepidness to explore the island within. “So I end the day as I started it, trying to fathom the abundance of living things…Then I stop trying to measure the measureless and concentrate on what my eyes can see.” The Island Within is a rare, beautiful, intrepid journey of the soul, one I encourage everyone to explore.
