'To Consider Seriously My Condition'

Soon after he is shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Venezuela and has finished salvaging everything useful from the wreckage, Robinson Crusoe builds a calendar: 

“After I had been there about ten or twelve days, it came into my thoughts that I should lose my reckoning of time for want of books, and pen and ink, and should even forget the Sabbath days; but to prevent this, I cut with my knife upon a large post, in capital letters—and making it into a great cross, I set it up on the shore where I first landed—'I came on shore here on the 30th September 1659.’”

 

Crusoe calls his new home the “Island of Despair” but he seldom indulges in that emotion. His sanity never seems in jeopardy. As best he can, he orients himself in the world and recreates his life in England as a Christian, a son, a dutiful citizen – human accommodations to the world. He makes “home.” Since I first read Defoe’s novel as a kid I’ve tested myself against Crusoe’s plight. Could I survive for twenty-seven years marooned on an island? Defoe writes in Chap. 4 of Robinson Crusoe (1719), “First Weeks on the Island”:

 

“It was by my account the 30th of September, when, in the manner as above said, I first set foot upon this horrid island; when the sun, being to us in its autumnal equinox, was almost over my head; for I reckoned myself, by observation, to be in the latitude of nine degrees twenty-two minutes north of the line.”

 

Many of us have grown abstracted from the natural world and the seasonal cycles our ancestors relied on. Here in Houston, the autumnal equinox, when the sun shines directly on the equator, arrived at 1:50 this morning. “Autumn” to my Northern-born-and-bred sensibility is a laughable misnomer. The temperature hit 96 degrees on Friday. The leaves remain as green as ever. Green anoles are frolicking and hummingbirds flit about the front garden. Later in Chap. 4, Crusoe writes:

 

“I now began to consider seriously my condition, and the circumstances I was reduced to; and I drew up the state of my affairs in writing, not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me—for I was likely to have but few heirs—as to deliver my thoughts from daily poring over them, and afflicting my mind; and as my reason began now to master my despondency, I began to comfort myself as well as I could, and to set the good against the evil, that I might have something to distinguish my case from worse; and I stated very impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered . . .”