French Isle of Amsterdam
Flora and fauna
The island has Phylica arborea trees, which are also found on Tristan da Cunha.
The island is home to the Amsterdam Albatross, which breeds only on the Plateau des Tourbières on Île Amsterdam. The island is also home to other rare species, such as the Great Skua, the Antarctic Tern, the Gentoo penguin, the Subantarctic Fur Seal and the Elephant seal.
The only existing herd of completely wild cattle also lives on the island.
François Auguste Péron (1775 - 1810) was a French naturalist and explorer. He is credited with the first use of the term anthropology.
This island was discovered by the Spanish explorer Juan Sebastián Elcano on March 18, 1522, along his first world circumnavigation. Elcano did not name the island, however.
Having found the island unnamed, the Dutch captain Anthonie van Diemen named it Nieuw Amsterdam (Dutch for New Amsterdam) after his ship in 1633.
French Captain François Péron, was marooned three years on this island. Péron had been on the French ship Emélie, which wrecked on New Amsterdam in 1792. He was rescued and taken to Australia in 1795. Peron's Memoires, in which he describes his survival alone on New Amsterdam, were published in a limited edition and are now an expensive collectors' item.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele_Amsterdam
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Pondering "New Amsterdam" (a show on Fox)
"John Amsterdam is annoying to those around him - he seems to know everything. But there's good reason he's a walking encyclopedia.
He's lived in New Amsterdam since the time of the Lenape Native Americans. Instead of being cursed by gypsies, and is without a soul, Amsterdam is rewarded with immortality for saving a girl from certain death."
He "can't stop the world from moving, time from passing, people from aging and dying - as he remains constant."
"But one constant with Amsterdam is his yearning for love . . . " "By searching for his one true love, he searches for an end to his immortality . . ." "Amsterdam's immortality will end when he finds his one true love and the partners give themselves to each other."
The "PR on love is that it is timeless - time stops . . . "
" . . . The truth may be that love, the time before it happens and the time after it ends, is what seems to have no end. In those moments is the essential human immortality where we seem invincible . . . " or " . . . when we feel our humanity most keenly."
Why is there always an end? Finding those flaws in our loved one - that mortal aspect of humanity that brings us back down from that immortal coil - thinking then, love has passed us by once again?
My question is: What is John Amsterdam really looking for? Is true love, after all, a fairy tale? Is the equation:
Love + consummation of love = true love?
Or is it:
Love - consummation of love = true love?
I don't know. But if this last equation were practiced, would we lovers then have real true love forever, as if in a timeless cocoon of immortality, never changing, and ever present?
The French Isle of Amsterdam appears from space as a lonely isle, but what must have Peron discovered, surviving those 3 years alone, besides being the first to use the word anthropology?
Reference material:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/idolchatter/2008/03/is-change-the-only-constant-po.html
