Jonathan Miles

And I guess the novelist in me started wondering what that would feel like on the individual scale.

right how would a single human being let's say you know one who's had a rifle in his hands reconcile that you know when when is killing righteous who gets to decide the musician and painter terry allen once said the shortest distance between two questions is art so about 20 years later i started writing

Well, Adi is, like most of us, unfamiliar with the act of voluntarily taking a life, right?

He's an urbanite.

He's an apartment dweller.

He's a habité of jazz clubs and classrooms.

He's never even had a pet.

The non-human world is completely alien to him.

you know, he finds himself a stranger in a strange land.

As to his motivation, you know, he is initially attracted by the idea of this job, before he knows what it entails, that is advertising five weeks of remote solo work on an island.

I think he thinks of it as kind of a potentially, you know, monkish refuge.

Where he can heal.

But I also think he's attracted to the idea of salvation, of saving something.

Without spoiling what has happened in his past, he was unable to save the person he lost.

And I think he wants to try to save something.

Yeah, I mean, he is not technically marooned, but I think you could say he's metaphorically marooned by life.

You know, he's marooned himself.

on this island.

And I think, you know, there's a reason that desert islands are such fixtures in the popular imagination.

You know, we're terrified of them, and yet we're so drawn to them, attracted to them.