Crusoe himself was based on the true-life account of a Scottish sailor, yes. Maybe. No one’s sure to what extent. Anyhow, over the centuries, Crusoe’s place in our cultural consciousness has continued to shift. We’ve sort of willed ourselves into forgetting that he’s a character rendered whole by an author. He has come now to exist in a kind of limbo: We don’t believe he was a historical person—but we don’t believe he’s entirely fictional, either.

One thing he was, though, was our first realistic portrayal of the radical individualist. In Defoe’s story, Crusoe gets shipwrecked on a desert island with only a pocketknife and a little tobacco in his pipe. Things look grim until he pulls himself together and works to make a heaven of this hell. Via rational thought and elbow grease, Crusoe discovers that his unfathomable depths contain: an architect, an astronomer, a baker, a carpenter, a potter, a farmer, a tailor, and an umbrella-maker. He builds a fenced-in redoubt, plants crops and a privacy hedge. He glazes pots, bakes bread, stitches clothes from animal skins. He wrights a ship with a sail and a parasol. And, most incessantly, he accounts for and makes use of every single thing he comes across, people included.

Robinson Crusoe values people not as human beings, but as objects that might be of some utility to him now or down the line. For example, the Moorish boy who helps him escape from a pre-island bit of slavery? Crusoe turns around and sells him into slavery. He comes to regret the sale, but only because it would’ve been nice to have an extra set of hands around. (“Now I wished for my boy Xury, and the long-boat with shoulder-of-mutton sail ...”) The first word he teaches to Friday, the native companion he recruits? “Master.”

Crusoe is free and accountable to no one, preferring his hard new liberty to the easy yoke of society. He claims to find God on the island—but, just in case, he takes care to learn how to wrest his own good from himself. “I was lord of the whole manor,” he says, “or if I pleased I could call my self king or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of. There were no rivals; I had no competitor.” Depending on your mien, that might sound like paradise. Or, on the other hand, the wet-dream somniloquy of a tyrant or monopolist.

Regardless, Robinson Crusoe remains one of our most influential dead white men. For better and for worse. As James Joyce said of him, “The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.” He’s who’s behind the Boy Scouts, libertarianism, and 300 years’ worth of solitary, self-reliant heroes. He was wise to our condition, this isolato, and the story he invented for himself out of his freedom still reads like a survival guide, a crash course in modern existence.

My dream is to create a healing center here, Dave said to his customer as he turned the dinghy up a muddy creek. For corporate people. The time-poor; not the mob. He angled the motor out of the shallow water, and the two of them slid underneath an arch of mangroves threaded together like prayerful hands. I think the mob’s just looking for a quick fix. Do you think those people are equipped to heal themselves?

A wince rippled across the customer’s face. He threw out a line weighted with wire leader and a realistic six-inch lure, holding it loosely in his right hand while it trailed behind the boat. Dave went on: It all starts with the individual, you see. People need to restore themselves. But they need to have the infrastructure to do so. That’s where I come in. I’ll have ’em come here, and then I’ll give ’em an umbrella and an esky of champagne before buggering off. A club atmosphere, hey? Have the Google blokes visit. He was thinking of charging what he’d heard was the going rate for these sorts of things, four thousand—Australian—per day.

Dave made little slashing gestures over the jungle to show his customer where he intended to level trails for the elderly and less-abled. This’ll be private, word-of-mouth, he said. Right now I’m building a network of therapists and wellness birds who’ll refer patients. A nice way to cop a flow. Here, a funicular would run. There, a meditation pavilion. Up higher: wind turbines. Dave pointed out six treehouse units that only he could see. It’ll be on a ninety-nine-year sublease, with some of the KuukuYa’u as employees, he said. That’s what the guests’ll want, anyway. After ninety-nine years, they should be ready to take over.

The wind blew in regular glugs, as if somewhere someone had unbunged the day. I just need five hundred thousand dollars to deal myself back into the game. Shit, I used to pump that in a fucking day, mate.

The customer sat there nodding and emoting, and puppeteering the fishing line so that it kept clear of mangrove roots. But really, he was considering how, the week before he left for Resto, he went five consecutive days without talking to another human being. A few drops of rain began to pop against the tin hull, and he wondered if he would ever find a companion as companionable as his detachment.

What we need first, though, is girls, Dave continued, punting the dinghy out of the creek and into deep water. Some nice sheilas would be good. Some nice female partners who aren’t bitches. Though I figure that’s hard to find. He tugged the engine’s pullcord.

Dave had been thinking a lot about Oriental birds. They’d probably do right-o on the island. I’m so far out of the loop, mate, he shouted. I need to go to love school! He’d tried online dating. Five years ago, a female WWOOFer set up a profile for him. There was a tremendous response—but from depressives and alcoholics. He tried all those damn websites.

Something hit the line, hard, yanking the customer’s right arm behind him. Then it went slack again.

I got this TV bird coming, Dave said. She’s rather prominent, I reckon. Knows a lot about the wellness industry. And she just split up from her hubby! She has kids, which I’m not certain how that will work out.

He circled the reefs that had grown around the scuttled trawlers. No, he said, there’s nothing wrong with a bird coming and trying before she buys. Have a nice seafood dinner. Who would you invite to dinner if you could? I would take the Dalai Lama and Obama, for the peace, love, and understanding, and then I’d have Osama, for the opposite. Not including the bird, obviously.

They fished for another hour, unaware that they were towing empty monofilament, the wire leader and the whole lure having been bit off a ways back.

All desert-island stories are in some sense about waiting. Waiting for rescue; waiting for madness; waiting day in, day out for time to be transcended. By this point in his stay, the customer was waiting for Dave to shut the fuck up.

Dave’s babbling was impersonal and often senseless, like nature. It was always going and just loud enough to hear, like an Orwellian radio, or self-consciousness. Tense-wise, it was never simply present but always progressive. The customer’s eyes were going a little cross from so much sustained contact. And all that polite smiling and contorted pseudo-concern—his face was exhausted. Sometimes, he brought an empty coffee cup to his lips and pretended to tip back the dregs, just to give himself a moment’s relief.

While oystering, while gathering palm fronds, stacking coconuts, spinning fishing lines—while siphoning gas—Dave kept on keeping on. He’d soliloquize about Australia’s 10 percent goods-and-services tax. The relative value of Canadian economic geologists. Laser nuclear power. Corn subsidies. The prices of: Kenyan cattle, land in California’s Central Valley, the water necessary to grow rice. He speculated on the fortunes to be made in table compressors, stone cutting, olive oil, ski lodges based out of ancient castles (of which there were many for sale, don’t worry), opal.

At first, his customer had tried to redirect the monologic torrent. But Dave was inexorable; he just steady beat on like the sun. His ceaseless reasoning debilitated. It melted whatever steering queries or transitional declaratives the customer had in mind. Over time, he became stupefied, able only to answer Yeah or Right, the conversational equivalent of rubbing away eye floaters.

One afternoon, he thought to get away by taking a rusty pitching wedge and sneaking off to a patch of fallen plums at the edge of the clearing. Violet pulp splacked his face and bare chest each time he teed off; the rain washed him clean. After a dozen cathartic strokes, he looked up, and there was Dave, his logorrheic caddy, yippy-yapping about: trickle-down economics and the importance of job creators (There being nothing wrong with making money!). Carlos Slim and the state of the Australian telecom industry (A bloody fucking monopoly!). How one gets only two or three opportunities in one’s life to make serious money (The idea being a hop-on, hop-off bus, like Ken Kesey’s, but for backpackers in America).

The customer waited less and less hopefully for a connection to develop between himself and the man. He was beginning to feel stronger swirls of dread, as though he had skipped forward along one possible branch of a personalized Choose Your Own Adventure and needed to work out how he got there. So, he went on the offensive. He asked Dave about the first time he confronted the deep water of real, prolonged silence. He wondered whether what happened inside Dave’s headspace was anything like the unpacking of luggage. He wanted to know: In renouncing the world, did Dave discover a pure and gentle sympathy with all other men? Did the island lead him to understand that true solitude is not mere separateness, but rather a discipline that tends only toward uni—

Right, no. You don’t come here to reconnect with no hoo-doo. I want to point you in the direction of fixing yourself. Get you to look inside, get down to the nitty-gritty. With both hands, Dave pantomimed an hourglass figure around his customer. You know, I could never understand song lyrics until I came out here? I like myself way more now than I ever did.

Dave had wanted to come ashore because a package was waiting for him at the inn. Getting to it took several hours, as first he and his customer had to borrow a truck from a bush family, and then they had to fix the tire that blew out on the way there. When Dave had finally retrieved the padded mailer, he pulled it open slowly, with his fingertips. Inside were discs containing an hour-long television special the BBC had filmed about him some months back. Dave was going into Lockhart River to give copies to everyone he knew.

About 800 KuukuYa’u lived there, though that number fluctuated seasonally. They made up one of the most isolated and economically disadvantaged communities in Australia. Lockhart River is a twelve-hour dirt-road drive from Cairns, the nearest city, and a four-hour drive from Weipa, the nearest town. The unemployment rate there was around 20 percent, three times the national average. The community was almost entirely dependent upon government aid. They had gone so far as to ban alcohol six years earlier, an emergency measure, because their life expectancy had fallen to an age two decades younger than that of white Australia.

It took a decade for them to trust me, to stop calling me “white cunt,” Dave said, pulling the loaner truck onto the gray beach outside of town. The sky there was like a lint trap, the sea rough and opaque. Now I see myself as an agent of the KuukuYa’u.

He and his customer tore into prepackaged meat pies purchased from Lockhart’s exorbitant general store. The pies and occasionally some fresh veg were all that Dave allowed himself there; his real supplies—canned goods, flour, cooking oil, natural gas—he bought in Cairns during his annual trip. He had to have that tucker shipped to the island via barge, a great drain on the $10,000 pension he made do on.

We’ve got to get these government blokes out of here, Dave said, his mustache baubled with gravy. There’s ten saviors for every one they’re trying to save. Lockhart River’ll save themselves when they’re ready.

Erika had put in five years working for the government in Lockhart, and what had that got her? Government was always tossing this money about, building new facilities. But the people? Erika had been a literacy aide, and a volunteer culinary instructor, and still they made her live in a back room at the employment bureau. She didn’t even have her own fucking bathroom! A sheila without a bathroom. What a bloody waste of potential. Dave wouldn’t have treated his employees that way 30 damn years ago.

All these yobbos, but did you know government don’t have a full-time drug and alcohol counselor here in Lockhart? Dave asked. He was going to use the money from Erika’s estate to fund one.

He put the loaner into gear and showed off Lockhart’s sole restaurant and then its arts center, where two English bird-watchers recognized him from the BBC program. The town proper reminded the customer of the depressed agricultural villages ringing Lake Okeechobee, only much direr: There were brightly colored shotgun homes, hit-or-miss lawn care, a lot of stripped-down cars, and too many feral dogs fighting in the street over bones that were three feet long.

They left the truck and walked into an open-air pavilion behind the church, where a well-attended shire council meeting was just concluding. Adults milled; kids and dogs schooled like fish. Dave had working knowledge of everyone present and a rapport with most. A few locals answered his personal questions cheerlessly; a few others tolerated him like pupils do a hammy administrator. Still more begged for homebrew. But many were plain happy to see him, calling him “old fella,” a sign of respect. They were so accustomed to white men coming and going, implementing things and then flying away, that Dave’s continued presence proved him to be true blue, dinky di.

Dave grabbed a couple complimentary plates of sausages and buttered bread and took a seat at the long councilmen’s table next to his good friend Paul Piva, a genial South Sea Islander fit to bursting with muscle.

How we met was Paul’d come to the island to sneak a beer and have some fishing, Dave said. They hit it off immediately, owing to Paul’s latent entrepreneurial instincts. He followed Dave’s advice, and now he ran a small business renting salvaged cars to the myriad government employees who flew into Lockhart every week.

I tried to get him to run for mayor once, Dave said. Now I’m trying to teach him whitefella law. I don’t want any whitefella thinking he can come in here and take advantage of Paul just because he’s a blackfella.

Years ago, Dave had made sure Paul was there on the island the one time its leaseholders tried and failed to evict him in person. The fucking wankers, Paul said of them, flashing a wide smile of kerneled teeth. The fucking ding-a-lings. Damn right Paul would dong anyone who tried to get rid of his friend. But he didn’t think he’d need to; he was convinced Dave would be coming up with the money to buy back his share. The climate’s no bloody good, Paul said, so alls Dave has to do is hand them $500,000, and they’ll fucking jump.

That fucking island, Paul continued, rolling up the hem of his polo shirt to rub the oak dome of his stomach. Fuck, it’s a goldmine for us! The jobs! If I thought Dave’s plan was bullshit, mate, I’d tell you straight up.

After the meeting, having distributed copies of the BBC documentary around Lockhart, Dave and his customer snuck into a KuukuYa’u ceremony put on for white benefactors and executive out-of-towners. Along the dreary beachfront, children danced in grass skirts while singing a sad hymn about the devil disguising himself as a crocodile and stealing a baby in the night.

With his tongue, Dave joggled the edge of his loose left canine while eyeing the business-types. No doubt it was terrible how the KuukuYa’u got addicted to things, he explained. Grog, government money. Smoke-o, even. They had been a nomadic people, you see, not accustomed to surplus. More than your regular yob, the KuukuYa’u were going to eat or drink or take whatever was on hand until it—or they—were gone.

But if there was one thing that had carried over from Dave’s days on the mainland, it was finding a niche and filling it first. Business abhors a vacuum, after all. He leaned in to his customer, whispering, Don’t you reckon these blokes would love to have a shout and a session? But they can’t here in Lockhart. That ain’t civilization. It just ain’t. No, I plan on rebuilding the canteen. Have it be a club-type atmosphere, but strict. Anybody who comes in to crack the shits will be tossed. Paul’s against it. But she’ll be right, mate.

Robinson Crusoe is no longer required reading, but that’s only because it doesn’t need to be. The desert-island story has so permeated our culture that it has become its own meta-genre: the Robinsonade. There’s Cast Away and “Survivor” and “LOST,” obviously, but also Life of Pi, The Hunger Games, and any one of the 700 movies that came out this summer that had to do with what comes after Armageddon. If it touches on isolation, tabulae rasae, or close encounters of a new kind, or if it has a character commenting on society from the outside—it’s a Robinsonade. The island need only be metaphorical. It’s all about the lone protagonist ad-libbing his life.

So, no, we don’t make kids read Robinson Crusoe. Instead we’ve got them reading the domestic version, Walden.

Unlike Crusoe, Henry David Thoreau did the American thing and chose to live apart from the world. He erranded into the wilderness voluntarily, hoping there to find a purer, more deliberate way of being.

He was a huge admirer of Crusoe. There are allusions to him everywhere in Thoreau’s writing—from the notched stick Thoreau measures time by, to the umbrella he sometimes carries, to his long, addled digression in Walden on hats made out of skin. In his letters, Thoreau compared himself with Crusoe a lot, and unfavorably. Crusoe had “the callous palms of the laborer,” which were “conversant with the finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart.” Crusoe could philosophize and carpenter a coffin for the dudes he shot. Thoreau wanted to be a hero in that mold.

Thus did he borrow an axe, go into his pal Emerson’s backyard, and clear a space for the repurposed cabin he bought from an Irish laborer. He detailed in a journal how he dug his cellar, maintained his hearth, and struggled with weeds and poor soil in his garden. Just like his man Robinson, Thoreau kept track of himself via credentialing lists, commonsense routines, and economic pursuits. He walked in the woods and went for some swims. He labored after a conspicuous authenticity.

But he certainly was no recluse. The road from Concord to Lincoln was a field away from him. He could hear the Fitchburg Railroad when it steamed on by. Almost every day, he went into town. On weekends, the children of Concord picnicked around his pond. Sundays, his mom dropped off goodie baskets.

And after two years in the woods, Thoreau wrote a really strange book about it. Walden is many things: diary, sermon, nature travelogue, proto-boho fantasy about dropping out. But what ties it all together is the man himself. Thoreau is the book’s true subject. If Robinson Crusoe is the manual of rugged individualism, Walden then is the apotheosis of the wannabe- rugged individual.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau wrote at his book’s beginning. He would know—he was having a midlife crisis 125 years before the baby-boomers made it a thing. Via Walden, he became the early popularizer of that most American of notions, the one which proclaims that, to be happy, we need to be someplace other than where we are. A place more authentic, where we’ll finally be free to turn into ourselves, use our innate powers to create. Not a new Eden, mind you, but a new and better Adam.

“Let him step to the music which he hears,” Thoreau wrote, “however measured or far away.” This isn’t an advocacy for solitude; more like the warm dream of a private religion.

The customer left the red cave of his closed eyes, reluctantly. It was morning, and he had yet to sleep well. Each night, the wind played the island like a bad one-man band, and every few hours Quassi went tear-assing into the darkness, barking like mad.

He could not wait to wake up in a place that was not this place. Which was exactly how he wound up here.

Dave was seated at his desk, Miranda splayed in front of it. He was calling friends and business partners, former and potential, talking up the BBC program among other things. His customer sat apart and watched Dave work. He saw that, whether in person or on the phone, Dave’s aspect never changed. His eyes locked on, but to some middle distance, neither here nor there. He seemed unable to see but rather was projecting something, like a camera obscura.

Mate, I’m telling you, he said into the receiver, you can’t rob from the rich to pay for the poor. All that does is make more poor! ... Well, the potential is in the untapped market of Chinese WWOOFers. ... No, America loves to help people. But they’re not helping themselves.

Each call restarted his spiel, Dave like a human infomercial on the hour. When he got good and humming, he had the cadence and sly humor of a carnival barker-cum-revivalist. Our utter financial collapse is like the pregnant schoolgirl, he said. Eventually that baby’s gonna come! After a few hours of such inveigling, he grabbed his iPad and joined his customer at the driftwood table.

What’s my current password? Dave asked, poking at a commodities report he ordered online. You know, precious-metal market psychology has been absolutely smashed by the banks ...

The customer heard a crunching noise. He looked to Quassi, who was lying at his feet. Quassi was eyeing Locky, who was sprawled a ways off. Between his paws writhed a blue and yellow songbird. He nosed it once, twice, and then bit off its broken right wing. The good left one flapped erratically, to the rhythm of the bird’s heartbeat.

... The smart corporates recognize the value of that, Dave was saying. Something about optimism and Google. I was through the looking glass here.

This time, when I came to, I made some snide comments about data mining and the NSA. I made up even more egregious privacy breaches for Google to perpetrate, just to shake Dave’s faith in corporate futurism. I was done with biding my time, with hoping—like some son at the home with his demented father—for a flicker of cognizance.

But, anyway, do you think they’d like to come here? The Google blokes? he asked, exaggeratedly flipping between financial forecasts on his iPad. Do you think they’d come to an island to get restored? Onto the table in front of my folded hands dropped two mosquitoes, flushed and coupling. Well, of course, they would have to do the restoring themselves, Dave added.

Here’s one way I often find myself passing the time in my apartment: I turn on the Home Shopping Network, I lie supine on the carpet, and I listen as people try to sell me on stuff. It’s like my every day, only a screen removed. I close my eyes and let the song and dance wash over me. I feel tickled; feel this wriggling, duodenal bliss that’s akin to having unscratched bug bites all over. The pleasure is anticipatory. I know that, when I’m good and ready, I can do here what I cannot outside—I can shut it all off.

That and a bath are my consolations. But they’re also symptomatic of a larger issue: After four hours anywhere, with anyone, I get mortified. I become obsessed with a perpetual elsewhere. If I can’t duck out—I dissociate. Not like a guy with a mental disorder. I know I’m in here. But the persona doing the shit-eating is just that, a front. A decoy. The real me is watching from without. Gauging. The me who thinks and feels and is remains elsewhere.

Of course, to my mind, this decoy’s doing a bang-up job of advertising how I wish I felt. Mr. Golem B. Kool, all revivifying smiles and conspiratorial winks. But the reality of it, I’m sure, is different. To others, I must appear as frightened, condemnatory, and doomed as a plague nurse in one of those birdy masks.

... A classic give-and-take, Dave was saying, rain plunking into overflowing jugs. I’m in a situation where I need the media to help me. It’s a fair trade: I give you a story, you give me publicity. At this point, I wouldn’t even mind a reality TV show if they brought some nice girls with them.

I will admit I hadn’t counted on Dave being such a dratted social butterfly. Alone on an island was where I figured a man would have found peace. Meaning, he’d be happy, but he’d never have a good time. That, or he’d be a crazy person anxious to brain me with a conch in the night. But Dave’s guestbook offered proof to the contrary in both cases. It was fat with the signatures of hundreds of visitors. And not just the WWOOFers or the KuukuYa’u, but French luxury yachters, recreational divers, sport fishermen—Russell freaking Crowe stopped by on his honeymoon, apparently. Almost every one of their entries reads the same, something like: “Utopia at last!” “A piece of heaven.” “NO REASON FOR THE STRESS!!” “It was the perfect remedy to life!”

Was it, though? You might not be able to be a castaway in the original sense anymore, but neither can you half-ass the experience. You don’t just buy a round-trip ticket to peace of mind and post pictures to Facebook later, another consumptive merit badge. If only.

I returned my attention to Dave. He was saying: I feel safe here on the island if it all goes down. Which I think it will. It’s that I’m off the drug of money. Some blokes think gold’s the answer, but gold . . . it’s as safe as houses. Whereas silver, old sixpences and shit—it’s a byproduct. Useful in electronics. Sometimes, you know, there’s more value in the byproduct than the product. The sheilas understand it, silver. I nodded as absently as the palms in the gale. Who runs the family budget? The sheilas. And they hide silver around the house, don’t they? I knew this one old bird who filled half a dozen forty-four-gallon drums with the stuff and buried them in the yard. I admire her immensely, I do.

Ain’t a damned thing therapeutic about this place. Womb-like it is not—far more purgatorial than that. And Dave, bless him, the more he droned on and on about the enlightened man’s need for a spot to sit still and wand a metal detector over his soul, the more certain I became that no matter where I go to find myself—be it a South Pacific hovel isle; teak-floored villa with curtains a-billow; or the stained carpet in my uptown cesshole—I’ll keep unearthing this gem: I am shipwrecked with a self I both fear for and loathe.

So. How did those guys escape Alcatraz, again?

Is it that I say nuts to the faux-biblical jargon of authenticity, with its consumerist undertow and accessorized cant of separation and lost harmony? Instead I should just try to wrap my head around the infinite extent of my relations and thank God I am like other men? Then I could allow myself to be swallowed by this seemingly commonplace epiphany, so much so that I become borderless, like a fish swimming at night?

Seriously. I’m asking. Which, Jesus, do you know how hard that is?

Is it that I’m not allowed off this rock until something has died?

Nobody’s gonna restore themselves, I told Dave. But I doubt they had it in them in the first place.

During the darkest hour before sunrise, the customer turned on his flashlight and left his bed, having yet to explore the island at night. Quassi took up after him with the weary compassion of all bedside attendants. The wind sounded like fire, like whoof, flames chasing oxygen.

Mosquitoes were landing on his bare arms and legs, but the customer waited a couple of beats before waving them off. He considered how the lifespan of a bug bite is exactly like that of a star: First they’re big, warm, and nebulous; then they collapse into hot little pinpricks. He swept his path to the beach with the beam of his flashlight.

When he reached the top of a dune leading down to the water, he heard Quassi’s growl go gnarly. The dog shot past him, running for the surf. The customer scribbled his mote of light over fizzy spume, trying frantically to locate what had spooked them both.

Two eyes shined greenly. Then they extinguished themselves. Next there came a snort, and some thing sliding sliding sliding into the breakers. At this point, I think, I began to appreciate that whatever it is I would like to find, it lies beyond or under all my attempts to find it. I said, Holy shit.

Kent Russell is a writer living in New York. His last piece for the magazine, "The Boys of Lancaster," was about Amish baseball.