Glacial Errata, No. 19

[I’m finally reading Barry Lopez’s last book, Embrace Fearlessly the Flaming World. Here are five passages from one of my all-time favorite books, Arctic Dreams, along with some pictures I took of Svalbard from last summer.]

One

“As I traveled, I came to believe that people’s desires and aspirations were as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone and tundra. And, too, that the land existed quite apart from these.”

Two

“In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound. The land is like poetry; it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.” 

Three

“What they saw that January day, we now know, was not the sun but only a solar mirage—the sun was still five degrees below the horizon, its rays bent towards them by a refractive condition in the atmosphere. Such images, now called Novaya Zemlya images, are common in the Arctic.  They serve as a caution against precise description and expectation, a reminder that the universe is oddly hinged.”

Four

“Watching animals slows you down.”

Five

“The literature of arctic exploration is frequently offered as a record of resolute will before the menacing fortifications of the landscape. It is more profitable I think to disregard this notion—that the land is an adversary bent on human defeat, that the people who came and went were heroes or failures in this. It is better to contemplate the record of human longing to achieve something significant, to be free of some of the grim weight of life. That weight was ignorance, poverty of spirit, indolence, and the threat of anonymity and destitution. This harsh landscape becomes the focus of a desire to separate oneself from those things and overcome them. In these arctic narratives, then, are the threats of dreams that serve us all.”