Everyone is an Island

Last week, Bernard Barryte, the Curator of European Art at Stanford's Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, showed me splendid collection of Bronze Age Cypriot Art housed in the crypt beneath the museum. It was mostly pottery and figurines. Islands are hubs that store up traces of immigrant cultures. With luck, we can decipher each cultural layer and reintegrate them into a historical montage. Each of us, like an island, is a montage of ancestral influences, a kaleidoscope of genetic signals from all over the world. Contrary to John Donne's dictum that "No man is an island", I believe that everyone is an island--islands that form nodes of interpersonal, ancestral and cultural streams of influence.