ABSTRACT
On an island off the coast of North Carolina, a place called Ocracoke, a man or a woman can isolate himself or herself from the events of the world. It is very secluded, a thin strip of sand and grassy marshes, part of the Outer Banks, which form a barrier between the ocean and the mainland. There are of course many such places in the world, and it is not this specific island which matters to this story. Rather what matters here is the fact that this place, like, I suppose, almost any other island of seclusion, can so easily be tied back into the network of the world. Through those thin wires which stretch from pole to pole outside my house, wires whose fragility is marked by their movements in the wind, the world outside my island can enter my front door. Those wires generate an invisible electric web which knits together our entire globe, creating in McLuhan’s phrase, a ‘global village’,1 so that here on this island at night, when there is only the sound of the wind across the marsh and the starlight of the black sky, one can soften the isolation and believe that one is not alone.
