Just to compare the story from "The Coconut book" with some excerpts from "Richard´s Journal" (also disponible
here).
The book from Richard Maynard, an english man living in Australia since 1960, was published in 1986.
The Coconut book is a haunting, riveting novel about a man who is shipwrecked on a barren Pacific island with only a small paperback book to write down his thoughts. Which he does, on the empty margins of each page. The book is discovered years later and an attempt is made to find the person who wrote the diary that makes up most of this book.
In the protagonist's stuggle to live, the priorities of his life are suddenly uprooted:
Within the confines of my island, ambition contracts, hopes and plans become miniscule, intruding little into tomorrow. The decision to create a flame and light a cigarette is one of the major convulsions of mind. It is the momentous event of the day...
Bit by bit, the protagonist begins to go crazy. He tries to create goals, find a meaning to his imprisonment. But Nature has other plans. At first he prayed for just a little rain. And then his prayers were answered. And answered again. And again and again...
This is a brief novel, only 174 pages long. I read it in one sitting - it won't let me go.
It's out of print, but you should look for it because it's worth the extra effort to find a copy. Check your local library if you can't find it in a bookstore. Reading The Coconut book is an intense experience that will stay with you for a long time afterwards. It's the kind of book that makes you think, "What would I do if I were abandoned on a barren island? What would I do to survive?"
And, by serendipity?, in Richard´s Journal I snipped the following description:
I retreated altogether from civilisation to a group of uninhabited islands in the tropics off the north-eastern Australian seaboard where I stayed for the best part of three months in total silence, on my own, speaking to no one at all and moving from island to island at whim. I had whittled my worldly possessions down to three sarongs, three shirts, a cooking pot and bowl, a knife and a spoon, a bank book and a pair of nail scissors ... I was homeless, itinerant, celibate, vegan, (no spices; not even salt and pepper), no drugs (no tobacco, no alcohol; not even tea or coffee), no hair cut, no shaving, no washing other than a dip in a river or the ocean. I possessed nothing else anywhere in the world and had cut all family ties ... whatever I could eliminate from my life that was an encumbrance and an attachment, I had let go of. In other words: whatever was traditionally seen as an impediment to freedom I discarded. It was there I finally discovered that it was ‘Spiritual Enlightenment’ which was at fault and that I could ‘purify’ myself via these ‘Tried and True’ means until the cows came home ... to no avail.
I was already in an Altered State Of Consciousness (this was in 1985 and my ego had dissolved in 1981) and living in what has been described as the ‘Unknown’.
To be continued ...
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