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I know the genealogies of their ships. HMS Terror and Erebus, the vessels in which James Clark Ross charted the coast of Antarctica in the 1840s—you’ll find a Mount Terror and a Mount Erebus there still, volcanoes on Ross Island—which disappeared, along with Sir John Franklin’s entire expedition, in 1845. Fram, the ship from which Roald Amundsen set out for the South Pole in 1910, which was first designed for Fridtjof Nansen’s mad, brilliant scheme to embed himself in Arctic sea ice.
If you stood the white peak of Denali next to Mount Everest on level ground, Denali would tower over it, thousands of feet higher; Everest is taller only because it rests on an elevated plateau.
I HAVE CONQUERED THE MYSTERIES OF FLIGHT, I hollered inwardly, across the valleys of my emotions. LET THE AIR ITSELF BOW DOWN BEFORE ME.
I make a note to check whether it would be possible to gauge the hierarchy of race officials based on the food-chain status of the dead animals whose faces are on their hats, but though this feels like a searing reportorial lead at the moment, the results of my follow-up investigation will prove disappointing.
I’ve been YouTubing pretty diligently,
Something about the prickly briskness of his movements as he tends to his dogs suggests both a high-school chemistry teacher and a bird building a nest.
What the pound-sign-percent-asterisk-dollar-sign was the guy thinking?
You walk down the sidewalk in Manhattan and maybe you know on some level that every single person you pass is a constellation of memory and perception as huge and unique as whatever’s inside you, but there’s no way to really appreciate that on a case-by-case basis; you’d lose your mind. You get anesthetized, living among crowds, to the implications of faces. The terra incognita of every gaze, Saul Bellow calls it. Whereas if you walk up to a remote Alaskan, I mean just buying a bag of chips in the village store, a lot of the time the response you get is this sort of HELLO, VAST AND TERRIFYING
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“Introduced” is a strong word. He walked up to me and said, “Well, who are you?” Not in an unfriendly way. Just in a way that said he was eighty-two and still handled deep Alaska wilderness on a daily basis and maybe shouldn’t have to smile extra just because he met some kid who knew how to order pizza with an app.
He’d come to Alaska forty-plus years ago to work oil but gave it up because it meant spending months away from “her,” not specifying who that was. My heart felt like a helium balloon when he said that. Just reporting.
Nugget never gave us a peep of trouble, as Jay put it; Bernard could be sitting at dinner visualizing a button in his Cub and it would pong off in a spume of fire.
This was it—the actual end of America. Sure, we had borders with other countries. We had nothing close to this. Every way you could think of that sentence was true.
And it hit me that that was exactly the point of the Iditarod, why it was so important to Alaska. When everything can vanish, you make a sport out of not vanishing. You submit yourself to the forces that could erase you from the earth, and then you turn up at the end, not erased. I’d had it wrong before, when I’d seen the dog teams as saints on the cusp of a religious vision. It was the opposite. Visionaries are trying to escape into something larger. Mushers are heading into something larger that they have to escape. They’re going into the vision to show that they can come out of it again.
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The protagonist runs toward her, but he trips in the crowd. As he’s jostled, his head falls back, and he sees the Milky Way in the night sky. The book ends there, with no resolution. It’s left to the reader to discover how the pieces fit together, why Kawabata thought he had said everything he needed to say. Why he decided not to give away more than this. The first time you read a story like this, maybe, you feel cheated, because you read stories to find out what happens, not to be dismissed on the cusp of finding out. Later, however, you might find that the silence itself comes to mean
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Have you ever opened a browser window and realized that in the second between clicking the icon and seeing your cursor flash in the address bar, you’ve lost all sense of what you opened it for? I felt that way looking out of real windows.
I was in crisis and I was evading it. I was in trouble and instead of confronting the trouble I was pulling the curtains closed on the part of my mind that wanted to name it out loud. To name anything out loud seemed unbearable to me that winter. To name anything out loud meant having to make choices, to be definite; I found it easier to trail off in the middle of any sentence that seemed likely to reach a point. Easier to stay within the margins of a safe semi-oblivion, around whose edges things kept erasing themselves.
What the others are doing in the ring is fighting. Hakuho is composing little poems of battle.
Just then the spider that lives in my brain twanged a thread, and I remembered a theory I’d read somewhere,
It’s the radioactive core of the wildest conspiracy theory in American history; in Roswell, they put it on the government letterhead.
The TV was on mute, tuned to some news channel: Hillary Clinton’s face looked out over ominous chyrons.
Imagine Donald Duck trying to mimic a dial-up modem; it’s like that.
It’s mostly ruins now because Route 66, probably the most important and certainly the most celebrated segment in the history of the American highway system, the road that stitched together Chicago and Los Angeles, making the southwestern desert traversable by car, a road that could plausibly be said to represent the final critical attainment of American westward expansion, the culmination of something that started with Lewis and Clark—Route 66 was decommissioned in 1985, a casualty of the modern interstate.
I mean, sure, in this day and age we live with our fingertips fused to an archive that holds everything that’s ever happened, and one mistyped web search takes you to a streaming clip of the actual assassination of Julius Caesar. Still. Ruins are not so common in America that encountering one is ever a familiar experience.
As for our late-breaking U.S. culture itself, you sometimes have the sense that we’re rolling up the historical carpet behind us as we go, that when we finally vanish, we’ll leave behind nothing but garbage dumps and videos whose codecs won’t play.
What overwhelms is not the meaninglessness of the universe but the coexistence of an apparent meaninglessness with the astonishing interconnectedness of everything.
What was missing from these scenes? Correct: anything resembling actual Native American culture. Also anything resembling actual Native Americans.
There are fewer protective layers between you and American history. That is: You know that a history of invasion, displacement, and (let’s use the word) genocide permeates almost every place you go in this country. But most of the time, you are encouraged toward distraction and repression by everything around you, all the noise and glitter of contemporary culture—here’s Dunkin’ Donuts; there’s the Guggenheim Museum; is that corgi in a muumuu? Here, none of that operates. On Route 66, you are even subtly coaxed into thinking about the destruction of ancient cultures, of culture itself, by the
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Beyond the signs, there was nothing. More desert. I walked up to the line and looked over. After days of strange profusion, it was almost a relief to see something so inaccessible to knowledge, such a complete refusal to be anything but an absence. The thought I had was that I had finally reached the frontier, that when we ran out of west in America we locked the idea of it away in places like this, blanks on the map that could never be charted, behind borders we could approach but never cross. Where who knows what monsters might exist. And sure, I thought about flying saucers. But mostly I
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He is romantic: He believes that imagination, embodied in art, offers an escape from what is degraded and alienating in a society that wants to make us machines.
Technical perfection is not the highest aim of art; art needs human vitality, which is why paintings by children can be riveting and why animation done with computers makes him feel physically sick.
This, he felt, was what art should be: not entertainment, not instruction, but something that spoke to the highest possibilities of the human spirit.
Skyscrapers shoot up, senseless clumps of them, as though rubles were drifting over the city like dandelion fuzz and apartment towers sprouted wherever they took root. Construction contracts make Putin’s cronies rich. Boutiques keep the populace docile. It makes him shake with rage.
the only things Yuri Borisovich is afraid of are the things that might really help him.”
Many things seem real but aren’t; other things, like art, seem made-up but are in fact the only sources of truth.
If civilization is fallen, if the imagination of the artist offers our only model of a better world, then not to compromise is the artist’s first duty; a vision adulterated by outside influence is a vision infected by the malady it means to cure. But what if the refusal to compromise results in a masterpiece that cannot be finished? What if the prerequisite for producing great art makes a great artwork impossible to produce?
This is what art is for, this is what it can do: It can show people that fellow feeling runs deeper than the arbitrary distinctions that raise one person over another.
He thinks that perhaps the way to turn animation into the kind of art he values is not to make it self-consciously “adult,” not to make it political or place it in explicit dialogue with avant-garde aesthetic movements, but instead to intensify what it traditionally is: uncomplicated, lovely, with access to strong, direct feeling. He imagines a film that is technically marvelous, that is beautiful, but that places the most sophisticated techniques in the service of a haiku-like simplicity. What if it were possible to make films that could be loved by adults and children alike, because they
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He remembers the sound of the easels rattling, the clinking of the watercolor brushes in their saucers. It is good, he thinks, to have memories like these. He keeps them among his sources of enchantment—along with bright light, and sugared bread, and a talking cat whose shadow he can almost see.
You will not see a tiger that does not choose to be seen. Maybe a professional guide can spot one, or one of the forest villagers who live around the reserves; for a regular human with untrained, human senses, there’s no chance. The way a tiger arrives is, there is nothing there. Then a tiger is there.
Outside one of the exits from Bandhavgarh, the densely forested jungle reserve in central India, there is a sun-faded sign. It shows a picture of a tiger, and next to the tiger the sign reads: PERHAPS YOU MAY NOT HAVE SEEN ME, BUT PLEASE DON’T BE DISAPPOINTED. I HAVE SEEN YOU.
It was a mistake to think you could imagine nature as something distinct from the part of nature that was human activity, for the same reason it would be bizarre to invent a separate category for all of existence minus squid or silkworms.
Yet I realized that in coming here to look at tigers, what I had wanted was to see the wilderness, to be close to the thing itself, and instead I had a strange sense that I was still at home streaming nature videos on YouTube. Except on YouTube the wilderness might have felt more like itself, might have been more recognizably a wilderness, than here in the physical jungle, where you could not help but see everything—the breakfast sandwiches, the access roads, the villages, the confusion—a nature video would have artificially kept out.
here in the eco-lodge our terminology was that of London and Delhi and Los Angeles; we were closer in every important respect to Paris than to the village a few hundred yards away. In Paris, Hermès had dedicated part of the previous year’s collection to the big-cat organization Panthera, founded by the billionaire investor Thomas S. Kaplan, whose foundation’s website credits him with a “strong passion for wildlife conservation.” This was the language we spoke. We, too, felt a strong passion for wildlife conservation. We, too, wished to preserve nature for the next generation. We saw this as a
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had grown up among the Kumaoni villagers and felt close to them, but with them he was inescapably a white man, a sahib, separated by complex codes of privilege and obligation. Among native Britons, by contrast, he was looked down upon for not being British enough. He was “country bottled,” as the saying went. Colonial societies produce these baffling hierarchies. Were you born in London? Then you aren’t one of us.
For the first time in the history of the world a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen.
To uphold the empire meant hunting man-eaters, but upholding the empire also meant there would be more man-eaters to hunt. Critics of twenty-first-century conservation movements have a term, “conservation colonialism,” to describe the way in which the overwhelmingly urban and international conservation paradigm, however well-meaning, unwittingly replicates the processes of colonial degradation. I had read Corbett’s books, and I found the parallels unnerving. If Corbett, whose bravery and sacrifice were genuine, had ultimately been a servant of the vicious system into which he was born, which
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find it rather a pleasure to see collective human intelligence solving the problems collective human intelligence creates.
That human intelligence could solve the problems human intelligence created was precisely the notion I was growing to disbelieve. For the moment, doubt seemed to press less hard.
No one lies awake at night longing to be transported to a convincing imaginative extrapolation of early-nineties social themes, or if they do I have yet to find their chat rooms.
When you’re a skinny thirteen-year-old who’s nervous a third of the time and bored another third, the idea of roaming the constellations with Captain Picard, whom adventure follows like a shadow and who always knows what to do, is bound to have a powerful appeal.
