We set off for Antarctica at once. The edge of the world. Here chaos was sculptress, castles of nature-hewn ice, ice walls, ice towers, serving nothing except the infinite glare of sun and frozen surface. We forget, I think, how the countryside we think of as “wild” has been reshaped so many times by life, how the jungle’s false chaos is really a scripted mesh of symmetry, leaf matching leaf, child parent, every life-form acting out its role as strictly as the dancer spinning on a music box. Life’s symmetry has had no hand in this Antarctic, nor adaptation, cycle, food chain. All there is as
...more
