Making for Paper Island
I took myself out on a walk yesterday, and the city center was packed with tourists. We live close to some of Copenhagen’s most iconic locations, and it is a mark of acute privilege that we do. We’re not three-day visitors but rather three-year residents, Lord willing, and that reality gives me some breathing room to take this place in without having to draw on the usual methods of tourism, with its selfie sticks and awkward, heavily curated poses. I snaked briskly through those crowds of people trying to capture the city’s beauty with their cameras and, importantly, to curate themselves as being here.
I am doing the same thing in words, trying to be here, taking in what I can, and I cast no stone at them. The world of words is just as beguiling as that of images. I can just as much curate a fantasy world here with words as any one of us can with a camera.
As for me, I prefer to come to a page, and it’s in writing — both the getting some words down and then the sifting them out — that I discover a place and find others and myself within it. It’s a much slower form of sense-making and seeing, and I need it to be. I find that the pace of walking and the pace of writing are essential to my being human. Yesterday, I needed to unwind, unfurl, and freely explore.
I didn’t know where I was heading, which was fine by me. We’ve been saying a lot recently that we have to risk getting lost to find out where we are. One has to set out, and loosen one’s grip on the map, taking on a posture of discovery. One has to ask questions, start awkward conversations, and just try things.
So, yesterday, I crossed a pedestrian bridge that I’ve never taken before, and made my way to a quiet spot on a wooden platform — a wooden-planked strand, or beach, on the opposite side of the harbor. I sat there, watching boats come and go, observing the bustle of bikes and pedestrians, and taking in the birds as they swooped by. (Lord, help me develop an interest in gulls!) The setting’s branded signage registered the word “Paper” in my mind: Papirøen. Through the wonders and immediacy of the World Wide Web, I learned that I was sitting on an artificial island built several hundred years ago. Since the late 1950s, this island was nicknamed “Paper Island,” for its warehouses of paper, although it also housed coal. (Agreed: Coal Island just isn’t nearly as charming.) Now, a decade after being redesigned as a destination for housing tourists, it features hotels with branding that tries to satisfy the ache for authenticity that we all instinctively crave, whether we are conscious of it or not.
I didn’t know that I was making for Paper Island, which is not precisely where I was sitting yesterday, but rather, an imaginative destination, with a terrain in which my mind can roam and play. I certainly think we need more of these enclaves in the world — places where any of us, old and young alike, can explore and discover at a humanizing pace, no matter where we are on earth. One doesn’t need to be in Denmark to get to Paper Island. I cannot capture it with a camera because it is a place of imagining, but I can hoist my sail any time — run a blank piece of paper up a pen-shaped mast — and head there when winds of life pick up.