Something indefinable – a balance of exotic remoteness, cultural marginality, and artistic intellect – beckons many to Key West, where, until recently, the Sunday New York Times often arrived on Monday and local phone numbers contained only five digits.
This begins to get at it…
It’s similar to what I wrote about Bali. Key West isn’t the coldly enigmatic world Elizabeth Bishop describes when she’s in Canada. Up there she shivers on frigid and foggy northern islands whose people live hidden away, and where we can’t see anything. “An ancient chill,” she writes, “is rippling the dark brooks.”
Down here in Key West, where Bishop also lived, the world doesn’t disdain the transient warm fragility of you. It doesn’t dismiss you as a mere human being in the glacial scheme of things.
Because there’s nothing glacial about it. All’s in motion, and all’s clear here: A fresh breeze is rippling the light fronds.
A fully visible world where people are out and about, living their lives in the sun, makes people part of nature, and makes the world, therefore, unenigmatic. In some senses, at least. We are, when we’re here, so obviously part of the scheme of things.