Islands of Insight, 17 Oct 2003
What prompts sixty thousand people per year to visit an isolated group of barren, arid, volcanic islands? They tramp dusty trails, peer into bushes and caves, suffer equatorial sun and strange animals almost without a murmur of complaint. A few, like Paul Quarrington are seeking some answers. Sometimes it's The Answer that's sought. These pilgrims are trailing the man who conceived the best idea anyone, any time, ever had. They retrace the footsteps of Charles Robert Darwin, who visited the Galapagos Islands, then returned home to think about what he'd seen. What Darwin saw and thought led to the first understanding of how life, the universe and everything, actually works.
Quarrington visited the Islands with his daughter Carson, seven years old, and his father, "ten times that age". Quarrington, in an illustrious account, sought what Darwin found - a Great Insight. In keeping with that quest, his narrative is highly personalized and introspective. That is, after all, what "insight" is - looking inward. He recounts his boyhood adoption of divine Special Creation of the universe. Over the years, however, he came to understand how unsatisfying divine creation is in explaining life. As with those thousands of others, he came to see a pilgrimage to the islands as a likely source of enlightenment.
He admits the symbolism of visiting the Galapagos with three generations. The account explains his travails as both a son and a parent. Where does "natural selection" fit in his dealings with his father and his daughter? He examines his own life, what he knows of his father's and how confesses to how adroitly Carson manipulates him. Through it all, Quarrington gives snippets of Darwin's life and thinking, that of natural selection's critics and how many questions have been pondered and answered. In order to accomplish this, he relies on a bevy of writers listed in a five-page bibliography. That's an enterprising effort for a writer listed as a "humourist". Yet, the humour, rich with ironies, is in full flower in this lucid account. Between the science, the charming [and sometimes not so charming] wit, he has provided a singularly readable account of one man's wrestling with the attempt to find something divine, where divinity has no place. It's a book reflecting what many have experienced, although likely with less success.
In the end, Quarrington does achieve an insight. Perhaps even an Insight. While it's doubtlessly his own, unique in a way that may keep only its conceiver satisfied. Still, he accomplishes it after strenuous effort. He achieves it very early one morning in his kitchen, sipping a single malt and expressing contentment at what he has wrought. That's not a bad environment for gaining Insight. If he attains well-being from what he's wrought, who are we to dismiss it? He's made the effort, laid out his own path, and, like those pilgrims following Darwin's trail, perhaps we can follow Quarrington's example. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
