In the moment of seeing it time stopped. There seemed no interval between the point of abandonment and this promise of rescue. The same wide bay, the straight line of the horizon, the high cliffs and wheeling birds. Nothing had happened between then and now. Only the inchoate process of his mind. Uncommunicated. Lost. He had been nothing to anyone. A shadow of self.

That is an amazing little paragraph in a book I am reading called Selkirk's Island by Diana Souhami. It is about "The True and Strange Advenutres of the Real Robinson Crusoe"...a sailor from the early 1700's named Alexander Selkirk. The author researched all this history, and even lived on The Island for a few months, to put together a narrative story of what happened to Selkirk. I love how she decribes how he felt when he saw the ship that was to rescue him 4 years and 4 months after being marooned and surviving alone on a tropical island. Read it again now that you know.