APRIL 27, 2020 – Earlier this month (See 4/5, 4/6 posts) I wrote about the classic, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. I mentioned that Don Simón Rodriguez, the boyhood tutor of Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, had said of Defoe’s classic, “Everything you need to know is in this book.”
I’m now three-quarters into the account of a man marooned on a tropical island. If six weeks is a long time to be marooned in my corner of Minnesota, it’s nothing compared to 26 years on a nameless island amidst the big, blue sea.
Late yesterday a brief storm forced me off our porch and into the house. I figured I’d wait it out by watching another episode of the Netflix series, Bolívar, my source for the aforementioned acclaim of Robinson Crusoe. Apparently, too many others had the same idea—about Netflix, not necessarily Bolívar: I couldn’t get Netflix to launch. As rain pelted the windows, I searched Xfinity channels to see what might be showing at 3:35 p.m. on a Sunday.
To my surprise I stumbled onto “Crusoe” in the menu of listings As in Robinson? I asked myself. I selected channel 225 and tuned in just as the unlucky—or lucky; all his shipmates had perished—man was guiding his jerry-rigged raft full of salvaged supplies from the shipwreck to the surf-beaten shore.
I watched for another 10 minutes, as Crusoe was shown chopping down coconut trees and building a vessel—then inadvertently smashing it to pieces in the course of launching it down a cleverly designed ramp. Two things then happened: 1. The rain stopped outside our house and sunbeams rained inside; and 2. I realized what a fool’s errand it was to have conceived, produced, and distributed a film based on a book that was all about what coursed deeply—but entirely silently—through the mind of a man marooned alone for more than a quarter century.
You see, Robinson Crusoe might delight the imagination of a 10-year old. It did exactly that when I was 10, and according to the tallest of my three highly literate bros-in-law, when he was 10—and maybe when the Crusoe film folks all were 10. But the essence of Defoe’s classic was revealed to me by a single line in the script of an obscure tutor in that Netflix series, Bolívar.
After yesterday’s rainstorm, I turned off Crusoe and re-entered the porch to continue reading Robinson Crusoe. The language is all of 300 years old, but the contemplations of the man in the title role are as salient today as they were in 1719 and as they were 300 years or 3,000 years before that. And just as timeless: such wisdom as “appreciate what you have,” “however bad you’ve got it, some have it worse,” and “a seaman’s chest loaded with loot does you no good when your needs can’t be bought.”
If you’re feeling marooned from hope and fulfillment, read Robinson Crusoe. Rodriguez was right. All you need to know is in that book.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
