Up there on the thinning ice, during those weeks in Greenland, I recognized this ‘thick speech’. I would struggle often to stop language from sticking in my throat. The black-inked words in my notebooks seemed sluggish, tar-slow. Writing lost its point, clotted into purposelessness, there in an ice world that was both unhomely and untimely. Often it felt easier to say nothing; or rather, to observe but not to try to understand. I had an Anthropocene ox on my Holocene tongue.
