‘No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
everyman is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as a manor of thy friends
Or of thine own were.
Any mans death diminishes me.
because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.’

I was looking for this poem of John Donne’s, having found that I had his biography but not his poems, when I came upon Julianne Sandberg’s Substack post which contained the words.

I had remembered the quote, ‘no man is an island’, however I had forgotten that the poem ends, ‘for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee’. From one poem, two famous quotes, both of which point out a fundamental truth about life.

Julianne Sandberg’s post was mostly concerned with the latter part of the poem, ‘For whom the bell tolls’; I was initially interested in the first part.

‘No man is an island, Entire of itself’ is such a profound statement. It is also something that modern society seems to have forgotten.

Laurence van der Post, in his books about the lost world of the Kalahari, talks about the African Bushmen and the fundamental connection they had with the land they lived in. These people had a deep understanding of the interconnectivity of all life. Their relationship with the land, the animals and even the sky itself; their knowledge of the seasons and their ancient lore of legends, myths and tales of the animals, stars and the land and the spirits therein, show that they intrinsically knew they were an interrelated part of the universe.

Much more recently, my own father ran night classes on how to use a sextant to navigate a ship. A sextant is a mechanical tool to make accurate observations of the sun and the stars to plot one’s journey. Nowadays computers do these computations for us. Long before the sextant was invented, mariners would cross the seas purely on their knowledge of the stars, the sun, wind and wildlife. Today, how many of us can even identify ‘The Three Sisters’ or ‘The Plough’, two very basic star patterns?

Similarly, as a child my parents and grandparents would take me along the verges and know which fruit, berries and nuts etc, were safe to eat. How many of us nowadays can identify any flowers, nuts, berries or trees, never mind know what is safe to eat?

However, I digress. ‘No man is an island unto himself’. Nature is interconnected. The moon exerts gravitational pull on the earth, effecting the tides on the earth. The sun also effects the earths tides and water systems; indeed, the sun is essential for life on our planet, however if we get too much of it this will put an end to our existence. The sun even has an impact on the wind, and the amount of water in the air. We are very much at the mercy of forces far bigger than ourselves; something the Kalahari people understood only too well.

When my children were very small, we used to run our dogs along the Greenway, in Kenilworth, which is now part of the HS2 track. Lovely as it was, and although we enjoyed the walk and the dogs enjoyed their run, there was a sinister downside. On either side of the path were fields of some type of corn/ wheat, and a few times a year, the smell of chemicals was overpowering. This was when they were spraying the crops to get rid of insects which might affect the magnitude of the harvest. The fields, and the Greenway, were devoid of life, there were no caterpillars, bees or butterflies, nor the noise of grasshoppers. Bees are essential to the planet, for they are involved in the fertilisation of plants; without this very important behaviour, our food production is put in jeopardy. Farming practices are decreasing their numbers to a concerning degree. Also, I confess that at this point I was converted to the importance of organic flour! If the plants were so often sprayed with insecticide, what are we eating! This again reveals how interconnected everything is.

Farming practices effect our health, and the world, in so many different ways. What goes into the ground as food for the plants, comes out of the ground as food for us. If we deplete the ground of nutrients, with over-intensive farming, then we also deplete our own nutrients, for the fruit and veg will be deficient in the minerals that we need to survive and thrive. If we add into the waterways and the earth poisons from our factories and sewers, then the fish, animals and plants will consume these in one way or another, and we, when we consume them, will consume the poisons also. Everything is connected even if we do not see it. ‘No man is an island unto himself’, how he lives effects how others live and die.

A plant produces a berry, a bird eats it and then passes it somewhere else, and a new plant is born. An animal dies in the wild and thus feeds so many other animals, and what goes into the ground is used by plants as food and they grow. A carelessly dropped tissue on the ground has its own cycle, everything is interconnected in some way or other.

This interconnectedness works is the same way socially. Every smile, gesture, action we make or don’t make has an effect, not just on the person or situation we think it does. An unthinking cross word to one person could be the thing that sends a person home sad, who then presents an unhappy face to the partner at home, who then finds it harder to be patient with the children, which stresses the baby which doesn’t sleep which means the person goes back to work more tired, and probably more grumpy and/or ineffectual, the next day… And so on. Just like the children’s story of the old woman who swallowed the fly, and then swallowed the spider to catch the fly etc etc.

This is not to say we should develop a guilt complex. Just that we should be aware. No man is an island. Not even the old woman who lives alone and sees no one from one end of the day to the next. Over time she will deteriorate mentally and physically until the time comes when she will come to the notice in one way or another to the rest of society. This is not to talk about the effect on her environment while she is on her own in the house that is deteriorating around her.

The Kalahari people talk about hearing the stars sing, something that most of us can’t, or don’t, do; however, we can and do read non-verbal, accurately and inaccurately, so even the non-verbal and the verbal from those we do not know affect us. Visual and auditory displays and information affect us and then we pass the effect of this on to the places and people we encounter. Most of us do not know the names of our neighbours, sometimes not even their faces. Despite this, in one way or another, those we know, and the other faceless people we come across will affect us, and we will affect them. My granny always used to say that we should always pass a smile on, for if we smile at someone it takes a lot of effort for that person not to smile back! Or as Dolly Parton famously said, ‘If you see someone without a smile give them one of yours!’

It is as if life were one big tapestry; where a stitch is loose, or in the wrong place, it skews the whole structure, for as Donne says, ‘no man is an island unto himself.’ We are all interconnected.

As a Christian this idea is brought home very strongly to us by St John. In his gospel he talks about the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who would be sent after Jesus was resurrected and this Spirit would dwell in us and connect us to him and to God. In John 14:20, we read, ‘At that day ye shall know that I am in my father and ye in me, and I in you’. In addition to, or as part of, the interconnectedness of everything in the universe, there is a special interconnectedness between those people, past and present, who have the Holy Spirit. We are all connected to each other for all time. All the discussion as to which earthly church or denomination, and who can take communion with who, and who doesn’t like or want to spend time with people in different churches or denominations just doesn’t work, if ‘I am in my father and ye in me and I in you’. We are totally interconnected for all time. For that same Holy Spirit which is in me is in you too!

Finally, as Donne says so wisely:

‘Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.’

Donne is bringing back to remembrance our interconnectedness. We are connected because we are inextricably linked to each other and the world and universe we live in, even if we don’t know, and have never met each other. Each of our actions causes another reaction which we may not notice ourselves but will be felt somewhere. Our pains and joys and sorrows, will on some level effect each other and the world we live in. We are bound together also by the fact that because of our humanity the bell will toll for us, both directly and indirectly.

At secondary school English lessons, we had to learn by heart some of the War Poets and one poem that always stays with me, despite my being a Scot, is one by Rupert Brooke. It is called The Soldier:

‘If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam.
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds: dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness;
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

I always loved this poem even though it was sad and about a brave young man worrying about dying in a foreign land; because it showed the gratitude and appreciation for what his country and his upbringing had given him. It also showed the interconnectedness of life, for even in death his life would be ongoing, there would be a part of him and his upbringing forever in this foreign land, just as there would be a part of him forever in the people and places he had interacted with in life, and in the life beyond.

Modernity, as it rushes blindly headlong through life, forgets the words of these two poets and the wisdom of the Kalahari people at their peril.

‘No man is an island.
Entire of itself;
every man Is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as a manor of thy friend’s
Or thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls:
It tolls for thee.’