To look at the sea while writing is, in itself, a double metaphor. Beyond the horizon of waters smoothed by wind, the gray sky, brushed with rain, answers me with the same white emptiness as the page on the screen. The same silent absence. The sea, like all literature, invites and shelters with the same force with which it expels and punishes. These are the island’s intermissions—its moods of weather multiplying by the second, that popular saying made flesh: four seasons in a single day.

April passed with the promise of a false summer—clear days, waters cold yet transparent. But the sun is always interrupted by sudden arrivals of cold fronts, punishing winds, disarming rain. On the island, we wait for the weather as one waits for a bus—never trusting the schedule, armed with equal measures of irritation and resignation.

I look up from the computer again, toward the sea. I hesitate. I do not know what to write. Every subject feels exhausted, worn thin, old, tired. Or perhaps it is I who grows tired of them. Like those uncomfortable silences at social gatherings, when we have nothing to say and turn instead to the weather—the broken rhythms of the sky. The cold, the rain, a sliver of sun: conversation’s easiest refuge, just after alcohol. I no longer drink, so I remain quiet. The weather irritates me. People, too, unsettle me—not from misanthropy, nor from any social aversion, but from a restless fatigue, born of a natural incomprehension and a certain Proustian reserve.

We look to others for a reason to exist. In relationships, we search for meaning. In love, for a North. In someone, a polar star to guide us—a sun that might illuminate the interior nights of being. Of life. Of each day. Work and children. The price of gasoline and the tightening grip of interest rates. Stretching money with the same anxious hope with which one plays the lottery that never comes through—but if you don’t play, it won’t come either. And it never comes. Still, you play. Just as you keep trying to stretch what cannot be stretched.

Beside me, on the nightstand, lie the 1,078 pages—750 grams—of Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, unread for thirty years, abandoned in youthful arrogance and literary tribalism. Back then, we were almost all on the side of Bret Easton Ellis—there was sex, there were drugs, and the same emptiness, but with fewer antidepressants. A book as vast and surprising as the sea before me, where the restless waves dissolve into white foam carried by the wind across a silvered surface. And just beyond, the Ilhéu rises, collapsed on its back like an ancient fossilized whale, cast lifeless upon the shore—a memory of God, for an atheist like me.

On the other side of the bed, on another nightstand, lies O Louco de Deus no Fim do Mundo, by Javier Cercas, which Rita is reading and tells me I will like—a book about the search for meaning, written in the company of Pope Francis, for an atheist like me.

Whoever has the island does not need God.

To live on an island is to see the Earth as if from space. The world contemplates itself, requiring no justification. To be is its own meaning. It is the physical perception of limits and of the enduring finitude of things. The imperfect wonder of natural manifestations. The vapor of hours condensing upon the mountains. The green of hope stretching across the eyes. The water stumbling through broken ravines. The constancy of the sea. Its infinite patience with all our dreams. The island does not enclose us; it opens outward—to the horizon, to the promise of a blank page, to walls built of stone.

The island—these nine islands, these nine bodies of time, nature, and ambition—and that tenth island made of so many scattered lives across the world, traveling between origin and destination, cannot be explained or reduced. They do not require reason. They do not require God.

The island is a ship upon which each of us navigates our solitude.

Pedro Arruda is a regular contributor to Azorean newspapers. We are thankful that he agreed to have his op-ed translated and available to our readers.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with a sense of the significant perspectives on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).

You can follow his writings in Portuguese online on: https://azoreansplendor.blogspot.com/