In our first story, mystery, competition, and experiment are all tied to islands. This despite the often warped ideas we hold of islands in general: ancestral eco-paradises, idyllic, primordial worlds, with their vibrant, violent, indomitable flora, and civilization nowhere near. Islands have long enticed us as realms of escape, a chance to get back to the simple life. They’re lands that lend themselves to forgetting.
In our story, however, islands are the opposite: homes to complex society, often at the vanguard, sophisticated centers of creation and experimentation. Bustling hubs of inhabitants laboring to leave their trace. No time for kicking back. In our story, islands are nodes of invention and aspiration, affirmations of identity. The islands in this chapter are the seedbed of a profound human desire, one that perhaps lives in all of us: the urge to prove that we’re unique.
This seems to be an essential ingredient in the scripts native to islands. Diversity accompanied—almost without fail—by enigma. In the world today there remain close to a dozen scripts that we still can’t read or comprehend. They are indecipherable. And in this book we’ll explore nearly all of them, from the Voynich Manuscript to the writing system developed in the Indus Valley, island-hopping our way around the world. And that’s no mere turn of phrase, since nearly half of these undeciphered scripts were formed on islands: Cyprus, Crete, Easter Island. What is it that binds these (as of yet) uncracked codes from far-flung lands? Mere chance? Or is there, at root, some logical explanation?
Mystery and creativity, secrecy and innovation, diversity and competition. But we’re still missing that third element: on islands, too, writing is an attempt, an experiment. And in the relentless avalanche of history, this attempt—at least in the long run—often comes to nothing. As we’ll learn, it’s almost as if there’s something incomplete about the soul of islands, something sketched, unfinished. The creative flair flickers and goes out. Very few island scripts end in success. Neither for themselves, since they vanish, nor for us, still unable to penetrate their enigmas.
And yet every single one of these scripts possessed a tenacious will to exist, to resist. Where they often went wrong was in remaining local, refusing to seek vital nourishment elsewhere, to roam into distant territories. Their obstinate urge to live stretched no farther than their sea-lapped shores.
Perhaps the only way to survive, when you’re on a perfect Eden, is to walk away from it.