We too were made for a greater voyage,
where nothing that was truly loved is ever lost,
and the joys of the past are lived again—without end.
Everlasting Cadence
The Ship of Theseus and the Island of Memory
Raised in a maritime city like Glasgow, one inevitably learns to look outward. Ships depart, tides shift, horizons beckon. Yet the places we travel to often shape the landscapes within us even more profoundly than the geography we leave behind.
I'm in the middle of an MA Creative Writing and in desperate need for a break. One morning I cross to the Isle of Bute aboard the MV Bute. In my hands is a book describing an ancient philosophical puzzle first recorded by Plutarch: The Ship of Theseus. According to the story, the Greek hero Theseus sailed to Crete to slay the Minotaur. After returning triumphantly to Athens, the vessel was preserved as a monument. As the years passed and the ship slowly decayed, carpenters replaced its timbers one by one until eventually every plank had been renewed.
The question arises: which vessel is truly the Ship of Theseus—the restored ship standing proudly in the harbour, or the original timbers rotting somewhere on the shore?
Our own bodies are not so different from this paradox. Red blood cells form, set off on arduous voyages through our circulatory seas, navigating what for them must seem like violent rapids and treacherous currents. They travel through nearly half a million miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries before quietly disappearing after a journey of roughly two months.
Skin cells also live brief lives. They loosen, shift, and fall away like tiny avalanches from continental plates, drifting downward in invisible currents until they vanish entirely within a day or two.
Scientists estimate that much of the human body renews itself every seven to ten years. Like Theseus’s vessel, we are continually rebuilt plank by plank. Standing on the ferry deck, contemplating the quiet industry of renewal taking place within my own body, it is difficult not to wonder what exactly remains constant within us.
I step off the ferry into sepia-coloured showers on this Sunday morning. A grey-haired man remarks to a young student beside him, “Back in the day this place was like Benidorm in July.”
But that day has long since passed. A subdued stillness hangs over the town this autumn morning. The island seems to rest in a kind of mournful silence, like a village abandoned after the Vikings have come and gone as they did in the past.
In the 1960s my father bought a small cabin in the island’s interior. Each summer he would pack our blue Comer van to the roof and transport my mother and me—along with every conceivable necessity—to what became our seasonal home: a three-by-twelve-metre wooden hut with no running water, no electricity, and no sewage.
At the time these inconveniences never occurred to me. All that mattered was escape—from playground bullies, razor gangs, and the shadowy characters who loitered in dark corners of the Govan streets among half-starved dogs and crumbling tenements.
Bute was paradise.
Half a century has passed since those bright summers. Now I walk through the town once more, paying quiet homage to the landscapes of my childhood.
There is a Portuguese word, saudade, sometimes described as a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy. The past has become something like that for me in recent years—an indulgence in gentle melancholy.
Crossing the town square, I am conscious of walking upon layers of history. Hangings were carried out here. Witch trials once echoed across these stones, and human bodies burned in medieval nights that flickered with firelight and fear. The past truly is, as someone once wrote, a foreign country—wistfully recalled, imperfectly remembered, and often misrepresented through the slow march of time.
One record in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database captured my attention:
McNicol, Janet – 15 October 1673
Prison: Tolbooth, Rothesay
Confession: 1673
Sentence: Execution – to be strangled and burned at the gallows.
One cannot help wondering why Janet McNicol, having once escaped the island, returned a year later to face such a fate. Perhaps, like many of us, she felt some invisible tether binding her to this place.
The Victorian age has left a stubborn footprint here. Even with the trams long gone from the promenade, a nineteenth-century flaneur transported into the present might feel little disorientation. The streets remain narrow, built for horse-drawn carriages. Beach shelters still face the water. Public conveniences retain their tiled mosaic floors and gravity-fed cisterns.
I find myself thinking about the countless generations who have passed through this town.
I am only passing through myself.
Yet above it all the pale October moon continues its silent watch over each wandering generation.
Turning left at Rothesay Castle—built in the thirteenth century as defence against Viking raiders—I climb the Serpentine, a steep road twisting through thirteen tight bends. One year my father attempted this ascent in the overloaded van. The engine roared uphill only to slip backwards again and again in a Sisyphean ritual before he finally admitted defeat.
Halfway up the hill I notice a Victorian letterbox embedded in the wall. The initials VR remain proudly stamped into the iron. It comforts me strangely, this small symbol of continuity linking present and past.
Later, walking across Canada Hill golf course, the honking of migrating geese interrupts my thoughts. Instinctively I recall a song I once sang accompanied on my guitar—words written by the Victorian poet Violet Jacob.
O wind, hae mercy, haud yer whisht,
For I daurna listen mair…
Like the homesick exile in Jacob’s poem—the “hameless loon”—perhaps we are all exiled from somewhere, especially from our own past.
The Japanese speak of wabi-sabi, a quiet acceptance of life’s impermanence: the bonsai tree struggling to root itself in shallow soil, shedding its leaves, withering, and eventually dying. Such transience, we are told, should be observed with a sense of gentle appreciation.
But human hearts do not surrender easily to such wisdom.
The poet Kobayashi Issa wrote after the death of his child:
The world of dew
Is the world of dew
And yet… and yet—
That hesitation—the refusal hidden in those final words—reveals the difficulty of accepting a world where everything passes away.
We are born with the capacity to live a thousand lives. Our bodies age, yet inside we remain strangely youthful. Deep within the hippocampus lie countless neurons preserving the memories of everything we have loved and lost.
These memories form a kind of inner archive—the quiet record of who we are.
Why would nature equip us with such elaborate machinery for remembrance? Memories of childhood summers, of friendships, of first loves and small moments that once seemed insignificant but now shine with unexpected clarity.
Perhaps these memories are not accidental at all.
Eventually I find the clearing I have been searching for. Only those who once belonged here would know how to reach it.
The cabins are gone.
Where once stood sixty small huts filled with families, laughter, bonfires, music, and children’s voices, there is now only open land dotted with a few Guernsey cows staring curiously in my direction.
Yet the memories remain vivid.
Here I first heard Creedence Clearwater Revival singing Up Around the Bend. Here, I carved my eternal love beside a girl whose name I can no longer remember—and who surely has forgotten mine. How fickle the prepubescent boy.
The landscape itself remains unchanged. Loch Ascog glimmers to my right; the Firth of Clyde stretches to my left. But the cabins, the families, the laughter—gone forever.
Still, they shine brightly in memory like sunlight dancing on water.
There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which describes a deep longing for something lost, something altered beyond recovery. Standing here, looking over this quiet field, it is the only word that seems adequate.
Centuries ago, the ancient prophet Job asked a question that has echoed through human history:
“If a man dies, will he live again?”
Will all our memories be sealed permanently within our coffins?
Job answered his own question with quiet hope:
“I will wait for my renewal to come.”
Like the Ship of Theseus, we are vessels continually renewed. Perhaps we too were designed for a greater voyage—one in which nothing truly loved is ever lost, and the joys of the past are lived again without end.
Postscript
“For there is hope for a tree: if it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its shoots will not fail. Though its roots grow old in the ground and its stump dies in the soil, at the scent of water it will bud and put forth shoots like a plant.”
— Job 14:7–9 (BSB)
“His flesh shall be fresher than a child’s; he shall return to the days of his youth.”
— Job 33:25 (BSB)
