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The Arctic, Lopez observes, has ‘the classic lines of a desert landscape: spare, balanced, extended, and quiet’ (one notes with admiration the adjectival balance – short-long-long-short – of that second phrase).
crystallography of frazil ice, or the thermodynamics of polar-bear hair,
Science finesses the real into greater marvellousness, while lacking total explanatory power.
To exercise a care of attention towards a place – as towards a person – is to achieve a sympathetic intimacy with it.
the formal divisions of Western philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic—which pose, in order, the following questions. What is real? What can we understand? How should we behave? What is beautiful? What are the patterns we can rely upon?
He talked about why one went out to paint like that. It was a conversation with the land, he said.
on Banks Island, at two in the morning, I saw a herd of muskoxen moving across a shallow slope of green grass in strong light, through air as bright as if it had just been washed in a summer rain,
The darker side of the human spirit is not refined away by civilization. It is not something we are done with.
But you must insist on time to walk away from the plane, which daily enters and leaves the Arctic like some sort of bullet.
“Maybe we have lived only to be here now.”
A few years ago there were three birch trees in an atrium in the building’s lobby. In September their leaves turned yellow and curled over. Then they just hung there, because the air in the enclosure was too still. No wind. Fall came when a man from building maintenance went in and shook the trees.
Hall, a small businessman and obsessed visionary, endured hardship in the Arctic with almost neurotic indifference. In 1862 he took down the story of Frobisher’s visits to Baffin Island from resident Eskimos who had kept the details perfectly in order in oral tradition for 275 years.
One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.
