We need some music.

It’s one of my favourite pieces, though at only 25 minutes long not something I listen to when writing. Max Richter is my go-to when I need something to hide the background noise of life for an hour or more of typing and musing.

Nor is Rachmaninoff’s 1909 tone poem the subject of this post (but do open it in another tab and listen while you read) and nor is this painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin, also, and not uncoincidentally, titled Isle of the Dead or, in German Die Toteninsel.

Böcklin, born in 1827, was a Swiss ‘symbolist artist’ and Die Toteninsel is by far his best-known work. He painted five versions between 1880 and 1886, and his son, Carlo, completed a sixth version in 1901 after Böcklin’s death. Of the six versions, five survive today in galleries from St Petersburg to New York but the fourth version was destroyed during an air-raid on Berlin in World War Two.

Böcklin has faded from public memory, but this painting was extraordinarily popular in the early decades of the last century. According to Nabokov, its reproduction hung in every household in Berlin, Hitler owned one of the originals, Freud hung a reproduction in his office, and Lenin, morbidly, hung one over his bed. And, of course, it proved influential on arts in other mediums, most notably inspiring Rachmaninoff’s tone poem.

But now we get nearer to my true subject. Rachmaninoff’s magnificent music was inspired by a black and white print of the painting (which precise version he saw appears to be unrecorded) he saw in Paris in 1907, but on subsequently seeing the original he was unimpressed and remarked that it would probably not have inspired him to compose.

Inspiration (and its fickleness) is my true subject, as, I suspect, it will be in many of these Cornerstone pieces. Rachmaninoff wrote ‘Isle of the Dead’ because the image he saw was a black and white reproduction. Had it been in colour, or had he not seen it at all, or seen it in a different context, this piece of music would not exist, I would not be writing about it, and you would not be reading what I have written.

Chance, coincidence, life’s constant rolling of the dice, is so terrifying that we do best not to think on it too much. In late 2011 I stopped on the way home from work to buy a newspaper and the few minutes it cost led, a short while later, to a woman losing her life when my bicycle, her van, and a tractor tried to occupy the same few yards of road. A few months later, now jobless and idly listening to Radio 4, I heard an interview with the principal of Ruskin College and knew I must apply there. I won a place at Ruskin with a bursary and then spent a further four years in Oxfordshire. This Iron Race exists because I was without an internet connection following a house move and relied on a video rental shop for entertainment and saw ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban.’ That story will be another Cornerstone piece.

So, chance can equally bring inspiration and horrible memories, but what inspired Böcklin’s painting? The answer, inevitably, is death.

Look at the painting. A boat approaches an island. Tall rocks with mortuary recesses crowd about a cypress grove. On the boat a shrouded white figure stands in the bows before a garlanded coffin and at the stern an oarsman guides the boat to the stage.

Listen again to the beginning of Rachmaninoff’s tone poem, to that slow beat, in time with the human heartbeat, or an oarsman drawing his boat towards to the rocky shore. If you know your myths, this instantly reminds you of Charon crossing the River Styx, but Bocklin’s inspiration was almost certainly far more personal.

The exact geographic source for Böcklin’s island is uncertain. The Greek island of Pontikonisi is a possibility, as it the Montenegrin island of Saint George, but the emotional source was the English Cemetery in Florence where the first three versions were painted and where Böcklin’s infant daughter Maria was buried. Have I really connected the death of a child one-hundred and fifty years ago, Böcklin’s painting, its monochrome reproduction, and Rachmaninoff’s tone poem, in these words now in your head? I believe I have.

Underlying Böcklin’s painting and Rachmaninoff’s tone poem is one word; a word that appears again and again in my books: that word is island.

Saltus takes place entirely on two unnamed Greek islands. Much of This Iron Race is set on the Isle of Skye, though Raasay, Iona, and even the Isle of Wight feature, and I am certain, if MacGregor obliges me, other islands, real and imaginary, will appear at their proper time.

But whence come these islands, whether of life, death, poverty, or forgetfulness? Both C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn-Treader and the 1960’s television version of Robinson Crusoe play a part, though they were themselves updates on the island-ness of Homer’s Odyssey and the Irish Immram stories. I can also distinctly recall tears at aged eleven in the Loire when my mum’s promise that we would be camping on an island turned out to be no remote and romantic strand but something large enough for a modest town. Tears were often my response when the world failed to live up to my imagination.

Perhaps my favourite place in the world, albeit based only on a few days’ stay in 1984, is an island: Barra, or Barraigh, in the Outer Hebrides. Traces of Barraigh also linger in This Iron Race, but perhaps that, too, is a Cornerstone for another day.