To live on such an island, in the oppression of confinement: how could this be borne? To know that one could travel only a few thousand miles in whatever direction before reaching a sea and being turned back by the edges of this bounded land. How could it be possible to live with the stultifying burden of the knowledge that this was all there was, that one would know every inch of the habitable universe, that one could go (and worse, have already been) everywhere it was possible to go in less than half a lifetime, that there was nowhere new, that everything had long been gone to, been seen, been done?
Each new morning each new sun painted a new valley and a new sky, all born of those he knew and loved but never twice the same. This morning a stand of young aspens at the bottom of the garden had surprised him with a stunning blaze of golden fire as the dawn caught their leaves from below; and now the work of the day had taken him up (as it often seemed to on a fine day) to the ridge at the head of the valley. You could sit here all day watching the sea to the west, and still not see the same view twice. Look, that puffin... And that was to neglect the ever-changing glories of the sun-washed hills at his back. Of course he knew there was another valley out past the ridge, and beyond that... But there was so much to see, so much to learn about his valley. Visitors would come now and then, but he had never been tempted to go out: a day out of the valley would be a day he would miss something. A kingfisher had been studying the stream by the bridge today, all the seriousness of a headmaster compressed into the fist of its feathers. He had paused on his way to watch the bird stand and wait, to catch its brief glittering flight and the snatch of its silver prey. He was not entirely sure, but he suspected that there was a new otter in the stream somewhere down in the bottom meadows: perhaps he would see it tonight.