— clement: of weather, mild; of a person, merciful — jeté: in ballet, a step in which the dancer springs from one leg and lands on the other (or something a palamino pony does) — sere: dry or withered (as a desert) — coruscating: sparkling, brilliant (as sunlight on water) — numinous: having a strong religious or spiritual quality (as William Blake’s metaphor, the entire world is rendered for us in a single grain of sand.) — serigraphed: printed using a silkscreen — ineluctable: unable to be resisted or avoided — austral: of the Southern Hemisphere — flânerie: aimless idle behaviour, as in observing flotsam and jetsam — prelapsarian: before the Fall of Man, innocent and unspoiled — beryl: a transparent pale green, blue, or yellow mineral… like moonlight — verdigris: the bright blue-green patina that forms on oxidised copper, and that colors the sea seen from shore — portolano: a book of sailing directions with charts of harbours and coasts…. or the metaphorical guide for humans to navigate our future world — limned: depicted or described in pictures or words… or evoked in music — crepuscular: resembling or relating to twilight — palisade: a defensive fence of wooden stakes or iron railings; a line of high cliffs, as an ice wall of Greenland — xeric: containing little moisture, very dry, as a polar desert — ecotone: where one environment meets another; promote biological events like evolutionary change in certain animals — tombolo: two land masses connected by a narrow isthmus (eg. Skraeling Island) — meretricious: apparently attractive but having no real value or integrity; relating to a prostitute, or our environmentally-disastrous decisions — eschatology: the branch of theology dealing with death, destiny, the final journey of the soul (such as a Thule hunter encountering a trapped polar bear) — motet: a vocal composition in polyphonic style on a text of some sort; a short piece of sacred choral music; or the “exuberant peeps of satisfied hatchlings and the squawks of those whose lives are ending” on Isla Genovesa — lugubriously: looking or sounding sad & dismal, or moving like a hammerhead shark — harmattan: a very dry, dusty easterly or northeasterly wind on the West African coast, occurring from December to February — adumbration: represented in outline; a foreshadowing — vade mecum: a handbook, as a reference to regional life — rete mirable: a complex of arteries and veins lying close together, like the crisscrossing branches of an acacia tree — deckled: rough, like a torn sheet of paper? or the coloured edge of a lake — hummocky: with knolls, hillocks, or mounds; a little hilly — fin-de-siècle: relating to the end of the 19th century, as the “morality play” of Australian iron mining operations — rufous: reddish-brown colored, like a mala (hare-wallaby, see below) — salubrious: healthy, pleasant, as a day of fair weather — katabatic: gravity-driven, as in a wind from the south in Antarctica — breccia: rock with angular fragments cemented together, as in a lunar breccia, a piece of moon on Earth — felsenmeer: “a sea of shattered rich that has fallen over many millennia from heights thousands of feet above,” as the dark granite rubble on an Antarctic valley floor — epontic: ice-associated (ex. epontic algae) — levigation: the reduction to a fine powder or smooth paste… or the fission of integrated communities — ventifacts: things made by the wind, as the modernist rock sculptures in Antarctica shaped by katabatic winds — anchorite: a hermit or religious recluse— as one for whom the geography at the Southern Pole was made for
Introduction
- Past that lies a horizon of water. A blank page.
- He understands that this foaming storm surf has arrived on the beach from someplace else.
- One motivation to write the book was to create a narrative that would engage a reader intent on discovering a trajectory in her or his own life, a coherent and meaningful story, at a ting in our cultural and biological history when it has become an attractive option to lose faith in the meaning of our lives.
- …the protean and stage-like expanse of that sea…
- …opposite the arc of the moon’s course, an immeasurable, glittering field of undimmed stars.
- We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.
- …the failure to live of to be loved explains the burden of mental pain people endure.
- …and wind to choreograph the movements of the clouds..
- Quoting Don Walsh, descender of the Mariana Trench: “To explore is to travel without a hypothesis.” Surprise, appreciation of the unknown informs you emphatically that the way you imagined the world is not the way it is.
Cape Foulweather, Coast of Oregon, Eastern Shore of the North Pacific Ocean, Western North America
- …chiaroscuro faces of the inland mountains… filamentous networks of roads…
- The idea that our society needs people both indigenously rooted and internationally aware
- Cites John Luther Adam’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean as an example of music’s remarkable capacity to revitalise one’s expectations… I concur.
Skraeling Island, Mouth of Alexandra Fjord, East Coast of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada
- …the percolation of meltwater from the glacier’s cold lip…, described as:
- a cascading stream of water only a few inches deep, turquoise against the white ice, a white so intense I can’t continue looking at it.
- …the ribbon of water seems almost to turn over on itself, like a Möbius strip.
- …a maze of rivulets…
- Navajo idea of beauty: a high level of coherence existing everlastingly in the world, renewed by integrating ourselves with a world over which we have no control.
- When a boundary becomes a horizon, [t]he unknown future calls out to the present and to the remembered past, and in that moment of expansion, the imagined future seems attainable.
Puerto Ayora, Isla Santa Cruz, Archipiélago de Colón, Eastern Equatorial Pacific
- …the geography that preoccupies Hawking, the depthless black with its pulsing crystal dots.
- …the dark ocean, which sighs now and then in lazy susurrations against the rocks…
- the arrangement of space here and the scheme of simple colors—the broad turquoise lagoon, the deep blue of a high-pressure sky, the long pink line of distant flamingos in front of a wall of green mangrove trees—
- Of the Galapagos coasts… In every corner of the world there was such resplendent life, unexpected, integrated, anonymous.
- Quoting Australian philosopher Val Plumwood: …humanity’s task now is to “resituate non-humans in the ethical and to resituate humans in the ecological.
Jackal Camp, Turkwel River Basin, Western Lake Turkana Uplands, Eastern Equatorial Africa
- Dr. Misia Landau -> much scientific and popular writing by paleo anthropologists is grounded more on a “deep narrative structure” — casting all humanity’s ancestors as evolutionary dead-ends along the path to the ideal of man — than the true ambiguity and objectivity of fossil records.
- The bird’s outermost tail feathers, like streamers, trace the bird’s passage through the air like Japanese calligraphy brushes.
Port Arthur, State of Tasmania, Northern Shore of the Southern Ocean, Southeastern Australia —> Botany Bay, State is New South Wales, Western Shore of the South Pacific
- On exploring the rivers at the bottom of gorges: …the brightness of [the sun’s] incident light ricocheting off walls of two-billion-year-old rock, walls in every shade of purple one might catalog, from damson to heliotrope, from hyacinth to raisin, each purple changing hue as the hours passed and as the sun’s reflected rays became direct, creating a harsher light.
- Merely stepping into some realms — Alexandra Fjord lowland, Roca Redonda, Victoria Falls in the moonlight, the Great Barrier Reef reminds one that no matter how steep the spiral of despair might become, beauty without design, without restraint was all around, reminds one of the possibilities, of the things you too rarely thought of.
- What a scene: after a storm passes, the sun broke through the trailing clouds, a double rainbow seeming to span a dozen miles of the desert, and at the same moment, more than a hundred kangaroos bounding north and west across the plain… The sight of it was so exhilarating the three of us in the cab nodded an affirmation to one another. Whatever was wild and lyrical in the timeless world, we were in the middle of it now. For some reason we all felt compelled to shake hands.
- The mala: a small marsupial- a ‘rufous hare-wallaby,’ AKA spinifex rat, AKA Lagorchestes hirsitus. Experienced population collapse both because of competition with ‘invasive’ rabbits and predation by foxes, etc., and because Aboriginal people leaving their land due to drought, forced removal, eliminated land-management practices like controlled burns that served them well. (It’s actually so cute!?)
- Words from Peruvian poet César Vallejo, from poem “El pan nuestro,” written when he was 24:
And in the cold hours, when the earth
smells of human dust
and it is so sad,
I want to knock on every door
and beg forgiveness of whoever’s there,
and bake bits of fresh bread for him,
here, in the oven if my heart… - The fair weather of the past few days was holding—salubrious might have been the word—behemoth cumulus clouds with flat bottoms and rounded shoulders in a cerulean sky, holding faint shadows in their thick folds.
- …basking on our backs in sunlight on the great lawn there, the rain-softened ground. A Greek chorus of lorikeets, of turquoise and king parrots, of cockatoos and galahs, sailed back and forth above us, beautiful, dazzling, streaming colors, the birds babbling and calling sharply, as if they had not yet gotten the word that we were all civilised now.
Graves Nunataks, Queen Maud Mountains, Northern Edge of the Polar Plateau, Antarctica —> Port Famine Road, Brunswick Peninsula, Shore of the Strait of Magellan, Southern Chile
- In a few minutes the never-setting sun will break through all but the last layer of cloud cover. It will hang there, burning in the sky like a molten club, nineteen degrees above the horizon.
- Traveling and working in Antarctica, I’m residing in the only place on Earth without an aboriginal history, a place with only the fewest threads of modern human history. An old piece in Gondwana. Inspiring, not empty. Almost everything one sees here is new. The familiar but very misleading separation between __human_ history and _natural_ history has no footing here._
- On diving at a spot where an ice shelf abuts the sea ice in McMurdo Sound: It was like swimming through the interior of a drowned cathedral, gliding above the aisles and the nave, peering into the grottoes of side chapels, floating past the choir stalls, and rising into the domes of the ceiling bays… bathed as [the irregular geometry of the ice shelf front] was in late evening sunlight from the northwest, I felt like I was standing in the apse at Chartres, gazing up into groined vaults between the capitals of the columns, complexly curved surfaces lit by the cathedral’a clerestory window. In Antarctica there was no end to the wonder.
- At the head of the Koettlitz Glacier, where the ice of the lime ice cap crowns slightly as it flows over a shoulder of bedrock, the low light of the sun was passing through the glacier’s interior. For a few moments it seemed that this part of the glacier was lit from within. The sun burned there like a lightbulb shining through a parchment shade.
- Glacial ice fizzes and pops as it melts, releasing Earth’s atmosphere of many thousands of years ago as it burns.
- Possible explanations for mummified seals found on dry plains = water skies, which seals generally look for to find open water, since, in an ice-coveted landscape, a dark patch appearing in an overcast sky reveals a place below where the light is reflecting poorly off open water, compared to the reflection of daylight off a surface of snow or ice. However, McMurdo Sound also has a second set of dark patches, those above the snow-free dry valleys, which can trap them far from the sea.
- Below us all is ice, radiant under a uniform fall of direct sunlight. The frozen sea is all gray and white — the grays of fog, of smoke; the whites of gypsum. The “alleluia plain” of sunlit sea ice here carries heterogenous patches and narrow lines of dark charcoal, with dabs of light brown within the dark patches. (Those be penguins!)
- …I can see tints of green and turquoise in the barrier face of the ice shelf, phantom colors, some of them. The changing angle of the sun lifts these pastels out of the ice and then releases them.
- Of the view of the Southern Pole from the Skylab: …the crusted plain of wind-wrinkled snow. Where the waist of the sky met the white plain, the air was lit by a belt the color of lapis lazuli. High above it, past succeeding shades of light blue, over the shoulders of the sky, hung a few wisps of mare’s tail cirrus, parallel to one another.
- Some days I watched as pearly opalescence bathed an entire cloud. The interior of an abalone shell, mounted in the sky. (Abalone, an edible mollusk of the warm seas lined with mother-of-pearl)
- Beyond those far shores was the immensity of the southern horizon. The land of Tierra del Fuego and the waters beyond, where I could see them, folded over the edge of Earth here like a waterfall.