#the indenture expired and did not include children for one thing)

[annoyinglandmagazine]

FINE, you get another go at the time machine and the ability to prevent one birth (or commit a murder up to you), don't worry about the butterfly effect, we want the butterfly effect that's part of the point. Your actions will prevent them from ever rising to prominence. Original poll here There may be a face off poll at the end. Hitler still isn't an option because we'd all chose to kill him.

Am gonna go Pontius Pilate and say my hands are cleaned of this one. All of the below are nominees.

[newcatwords]

notes on "islands of the mind" by john gillis (ch. 4)

Ch. 4: "Searching the seas for Island Edens and Utopias"

65: "Paradise islands stood for what Europeans most feared losing in the new age of conquest and colonization; utopian islands represented what they most hoped to gain in the brave new early modern world. As Henri Baudet put it so felicitously, images of paradise symbolized the "no longer," while utopia presented a dream of the "not yet." As islands of the mind, not to be confused with real places, paradise and utopian islands represented the purest expressions of European longings for the next four hundred years." (quotes from "Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man" by Henri Baudet)

[my question at this point in the book: why do europeans seem to have such a hard time dealing with islands as they really are, apart from what they project onto them?]

"As long as Europeans lacked the scientific instruments to chart the seas with precision, their [legendary islands] existence could be doubted, but never disproven."

67: "However, earthly paradise is almost always found in an "elsewhere," either in some very remote place or in some remote time, an "elsewhen."" Here there's a footnote for "Mapping Eden: Cartographies of Earthly Paradise" by Alexandro Scafi in Mappings 1999 and History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition by Jean Delumeau "Paradise has been located in all kinds of times and places, but all have one thing in common: inaccessibility."

[this part is just asserted, but it's an interesting idea:] "The idea of paradise had not existed before the neolithic agricultural revolution and the urban civilizations it produced. Hunter-gatherer societies do not produce visions of paradise because the do not exhaust the bounty of nature itself. It was only when settled agrarian peoples used up the forests and lands that the idea of paradise emerged to represent what had been lost."

"The vision of paradise migrated to ever more remote places, first to mountains and later to islands, where it was possible to imagine an abundance of flora and fauna beyond the destructive grasp of mankind."

68: "The Greeks did not begin to project paradisical visions onto islands until they had denuded their own mainland landscapes." Here there's a footnote to Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism by Richard Grove

69: "The Portuguese were so certain they had rediscovered Eden in the Azores that they named the first children born there Adam and Eve."

70: "No longer located in some distant time or place, the search for Eden became "the partner of the other more obviously economic projects of early colonialism," Richard Grove writes. But paradise found quickly turned into paradise lost when the isles that seemed so deisrable on first contact were found to harbor deadly diseases, environmental disasters (including extinctions), and hostile local populations that Europeans were not prepared for. However, because this experience so closely paralleled the story of the Fall in biblical Eden, it only reinforced the sense of loss and the longing that was at the root of European Expansion in the first place. Each lost Eden reinvigorated the quest for paradise elsewhere. In seas filled with an endless supply of unknown islands, it seemed that the search would never run out of new possibilities. It was only when the Atlantic had been thoroughly explored that the quest turned to the Pacific, where it finally exhausted itself in the nineteenth century. Yet the search for island paradise never really expired; it has taken on new life for the benefit of the modern tourist trade." [the Richard Grove quote is from Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism]

"Each tropical island encountered seemed at first to fit the description of paradise. Glipsed at a distance from ships, they all seemed to match the visions that Europeans had brought with them across the Atlantic. At first sight the islands seemed so fecund as to free men forever from toil. They were also the object of the sexual fantasies of the males who first spotted them."

"Since Homer's time, islands had been colonized by patriarchal fantasies, imagined to be populated by beautiful females intent on seducing male wayfarers."

71: "By the seventeenth century, islands that earlier explorers had identified as paradisical had taken on a different aspect. They had become integrated into the rapidly expanding circuits of commercial capitalism, their space and time coordinated with that of the continents. They were all too accessible and vulnerable to the corruptions of the world. Paradise found turned out to be paradise lost; and ever since then, the Atlantic islands have been haunted by experiences of exploitation, bloodshed, and extinction."

72: "Europeans were quick to exploit and then abandon islands, but slaves, indentured servants, and prisoners, who constituted the vast majority of the Caribbean's inhabitants, had no choice but to endure the increasingly difficult conditions there. Images of hell, already associated with islands in ancient and Christian imagery, were readily available to those seeking to describe their experiences with ecological devastation. The same isles that had been locations for paradise were now stand-ins for hell."

"Ambivalence best expresses the early modern atittude toward islands. The same islands were often described in wholly opposite terms. William Strachey described Bermuda as "the Devils Islands...feared and avoyded of all sea travellers live, above any place in the world," but in the next sentence he talked of them as God's "meanes of our deliverance."" [reference here to The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America by Leo Marx] [this reminds me a lot of euro attitudes towards the native people encountered in the "new world" - seen as both innocent and savage. also reminds me of the way that patriarchy paints women - both innocent and wicked. the theme is that for the one doing the defining of the other, you can project anything and everything onto them. whatever the image projected, the other always loses and is always deserving of whatever harm is heaped on them.]

"By the eighteenth century, paradise was less likely to be something found than created. The old idea of paradise as manmade garden, as hortus conclusus, was revived. As the rapacious plantation economy turned Caribbean isles into moral and ecological wastelands, the paradisical element still present there was preserved by fencing or walling off the land and enclosing nature's bounty. Plantation owners who could afford to return home took the flora and fauna with them, creating botanical gardens and hothouse paradises in Europe itself. Zooes were similarly designed to bring paradise to Europe. "Europe brought home to Europe the stock of the world's diversity. The new things arrived in waves, with increasing speed, from the middle of the sixteenth century," notes Richard Drayton. "In a hundred years, there was no way back to Eden, no means of reinaugurating a Golden Age."" [reference here to Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the 'Improvement' of the World by Richard Drayton]

next part of the chapter is about utopias:

73: "The renaissance and Reformation unintentionally broke the spell of tradition and opened up a small space within which to consider alternative ways of organizing society. Utopian thinking existed in the ancient world, but was overshadowed by Christian milleniarianism and peasant arcadianism in the Middle Ages. When it reemerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it took a distinctly new form."

"From the beginning, this new utopian mode of thought fastened on islands."

75: "In both pagan and Christian thinking, utopia differed from paradise insofar as it was imagined as a city rather than a garden. While it contained certain paradisical elements, the early modern utopia was not the product of nostalgia for something that had once been, but a longing for something yet to be. Furthermore, it was not God-ordained or natural, but manmade. Paradise was associated with origins, with the simplicity of a life free of laws and rules. Its order was inherent, the result of innocence uncorrupted by the advances of civilization, including knowledge itself. Utopia, on the other hand, was the product of civilization, of the application of knowledge and effort. it is invariably imagined as a city rather than a garden, the product of man rather than nature."

76: "[Sir Thomas] More's utopian island exists in its own unique distant present that sets it apart from both ancient and medieval dream worlds. His vision is contemporaneous, existing somewhere in terra incognita of the yet-to-be explored oceans. It is this location on an unknown island that gives it credibility and accounts for its appeal to early modern readers, who found the nowheres as believable as somewheres. Neither before nor after were utopias to be so highly spatialized, a condition that can be explained by the fact that at this historical moment terra incognita offered so much latitude for utopian thinking."

"In the early modern period, each time the horizons of Western culture moved, utopias proliferated, but always just beyond those frontiers. Perhaps this was because in the process of exploration, between the opening up of new territories and their actual mapping, a kind of third space was created that was somewhere but nowhere, accessible to the imagination before it was colonized by real time (history) and real space (geography). As we have already seen, islands had long been perceived as thresholds. Their status as liminal space, somewhere between land and water, made them particularly attractive to both religious and utopian thinkers."

77: "It was much easier for Christian Europeans to imagine utopia at a distance than closer to home. There it is not surprising that when modern utopian thought emerged in the sixteenth century, it expressed itself in the form of travel tales. Thomas More renewed an ancient narrative form that, as Louis Marin summarizes it, begins with "a departure and a journey, most of the time by sea, most of the time interrupted by a storm, a catastrophy which is the sublime way to open a neutral space, one which is absolutely different." Until the nineteenth century, virtually every utopia took the form of the voyage tale, relying on an unmapped place, usually an unknown island that existed in some unchronicled time, to present a vision of society startling, yet conceivable." [the quote is from Louis Marin's "The Frontiers of Utopia" from Utopias and Millenium, ed. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann, 1993)

78: "The classical utopias of the early modern period all rely on the fiction of the odyssey, building on a tradition going back to the Greeks, but also enriched by the medieval legends and fictions of spiritual journeys undertaken not so much to discover or to colonize, but to recover and bring back deeper truths, personal or collective. These pilgrimages invariably involved danger and difficulty, often across waters to islands or other inaccessible places. All spiritual journeys are, writes Eric leed, "roundtrips, rather than exiles or migrations." According to Victor Turner, they are rites of passage "going to a far place to understand a familiar place better." The purpose of religious pilgrimage had been to behold more clearly sacred truths that will never reveal themselves closer to home. The purpose of the secular utopian voyage was similar, namely to grasp social truths obscured in the here and now." [quotes from Eric Leed's The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. Turner quote is from Simon Coleman and Jake Elsner's Pilgrimage Past and Present: Sacred Travel and Sacred Space in World Religions]

"The narrative of the journey to utopia removes the reader from his or her milieu to a strange but vaguely recognizable place. Not only the time but the space of the ordinary world has been left behind. The island provides the perfect setting because it is detached from all historical as well as geographical connections, allowing the reader, as in a dream, to enter fully into its imagined reality."

79: "More's Utopia was itself an artificial island, created when King Utopos opened up a channel in a peninsula. And not just any island would serve this purpose. Utopian isles are shaped to fit the predetermined dimensions. All were imagined to have a symmetry rarely encountered in nature.

The islands' natural boundaries were never sufficient in and of themselves. The island of More's utopia is fortified, and there is but one access point."

"Early modern utopias appealed to a strife-torn society yearning for harmony and stability. Utopian islands offered what Frank Manuel aptly describes as "calm felicity," the dream of a world where neither the encroachments of time nor space are visible." [there is no reference here, but the bibliography includes "Toward a Psychological History of Utopia" by Frank E. Manuel in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. F. Manual, 1965, and Utopian Thought in the Modern World by Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie F. Manuel.]