"The MIT physicist and award-winning novelist Alan Lightman also leverages grand gestures. In his case, he retreats each summer to a "tiny island" in Maine to think deeply and recharge. At least as of 2000, when he described this gesture in an interview, the island not only lacked Internet, but didn't even have phone service. As he then justified: "It's really about two and a half months that I'll feel like I can recover some silence in my life... which is so hard to find."