Horyzont

by Barry Lopez, Jarosław Mikos (Translator)

Barry Lopez – okrzyknięty jednym z największych myślicieli Ameryki – w swojej wizjonerskiej, a zarazem niezwykle osobistej książce oprowadza po sześciu regionach świata: zachodnim Oregonie i dalekiej Arktyce, Galapagos i kenijskiej pustyni, Zatoce Botanicznej w Australii i lodowych szelfach Antarktydy.

Podczas tych podróży bada długą historię ludzkich eksploracji, między innymi prehistorycznych ludów, które wędrowały po wyspie Skraeling w północnej Kanadzie, oraz opowiada o kolonialistach, którzy splądrowali Afrykę Środkową, o Angliku epoki oświecenia, który żeglował po Pacyfiku, o emisariuszu rdzennych Amerykanów, który trafił do odizolowanej Japonii, i dzisiejszych ekoturystach w tropikach.

Podczas podróży i poprzez przyjaźnie, które nawiązywał po drodze – z naukowcami, archeologami, artystami i lokalnymi mieszkańcami – Lopez szuka sensu i celu w szwankującym świecie.

Horyzont to odkrywcze, epickie dzieło, które przepełniają zarazem troska i zawód, ale też nadzieja – to książka, która pozwala spojrzeć na świat inaczej.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, Nature, Science, Memoir, Environment, History

584 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2019

About the author

Barry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.

Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.

Reviews

[Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

2020 Best Books of the Year [#11 of 11]

It is every person's moral imperative to read this book.

Our ancesters offer us historical meaning, but they give us no indication of the future. And what is true for us is true for every other animal: no matter our impressive history, every day we advance figuratively into evolutionary darkness. And, because we are inescapably biological, we have no protection against extinction.

-

Whether the world we've made is not a good one for our progeny - asking ourselves about the specific identity of the horsemen gathering on our horizon and what measures we need to take to protect ourselves - requires a highly unusual kind of discourse, a worldwide conversation in which the voices of government and those with an economic stake in any particular outcome are asked, I think, to listen, not speak.

-

The ongoing refusal of some governments and many politicians and business leaders to take global climate disruption seriously is part of a movement in some first-world countries to denounce any form of "politically inconvenient" science. The ongoing resilience of this obdurate denial, of course, is an indication of the deteriorating state of public education in these countries.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is every person's moral imperative to read this book”--Hannah Greendale, Goodreads reviewer

I agree.

My academic mentor, Jay Robinson, gave me Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams in the late eighties. He knew I was interested in environmental studies, but I was a student of literacy learning, the teaching of English. What does such a book have to do with English studies? The answer is: Everything. Language, social justice, democracy, the future of the planet, linking Western "development" to ethnocentrism and colonialism. As with his Of Wolves and Men, Lopez tries to get us to do that simple indigenous injunction: Walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins. Or ignore cultural and epistemological and spiritual differences to your peril. One chapter focuses on indigenous versus "southerner" (white) maps of the region. How do locals see and value their own land?

Horizon was published in 2019; I knew it to be Lopez’s magnum opus, so I set out to slow read it, even as the world burned. Lopez (RIP, 12/25/20) was both a “nature” journalist--plumbing the relationship between human culture and landscape--and a fiction writer, invited by countless scientific groups to accompany them on travels. Horizon has many facets; it is a deeply personal memoir--“We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there”--and a chronicle of his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to the ice shelves of Antarctica.

“To travel, after all, is to change one’s skin”--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“I tried to get out of myself, to enter the country”--Barry Lopez

“The young man [Lopez] visiting the archeological site on Skraeling Island is the same fellow who at the end of the book encounters a stranger on the road to Port Famine, but also not.”

Lopez over his life traveled to more than seventy countries, but in this book takes us to the farthest and most "desolate" reaches of the world, where few of us will ever go. And his guides along the way are explorers of the past of whom many of us know, and have been his inspiration: Darwin, Shackleton, Perry, Captain Cook, Ranald MacDonald--couriers of the marvelous, the thrilling, of understanding the world. Explorers of the past, the present, the future, most of them problematic for various reasons, too. This book is a work of archaeology and anthropology, of cultural biology, a celebration of the marvels of the natural world--”diversity is an ineluctable component of every time to establish order”--and an acknowledgement that we are also living in a time when we seem to be “killing and consuming every last living thing.”

“We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.”

My blood ran cold as I read in his simple introduction, depicting a time when he sits by a pool with his grandkids and ruminates: “What is going to happen to us now, in a time of militant factions, of daily violence? . . . I wish each stranger around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.” What. Is. Coming.

This book is not an environmental alarm bell, as many climate change books are, as they should be: WAKE UP! This book is more reflective about man’s capacity to explore, to want to know, not ignoring colonialism, rapacious greed leading to endless wars. This book is a kind of elegy, as he takes for granted the environmental catastrophe we are just beginning to really experience. It’s a call--without much optimism--to create a different way, not just more recycling or even electric cars, a kind of incrementalist seventies approach, but a wholesale rethinking of the way we exist on this planet, a sustainable one:

“Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.”

Lopez is watching the same tragically sad climate change conferences, opportunities for photo-ops for ignorant politicians bought out by Big Oil and other businesses meeting with the leaders of increasingly desperate island nations:

“The ongoing refusal of some governments and many politicians and business leaders to take global climate disruption seriously is part of a movement in some first-world countries to denounce any form of ‘politically inconvenient’ science. The ongoing resilience of this obdurate denial, of course, is an indication of the deteriorating state of public education in these countries.”

“As the decades passed for me, I began to think that the path many of us now share, a path of self-realization and self-aggrandizement, might eventually leave us stranded, having arrived at the end of exploitation, but with most of us standing there empty-handed. And what is it that we have found through the injustice of exploitation that these Magdalenians at Altamira did not already possess?”

If the human race were inclined to do it, where might Lopez have us turn? To some common ground amid so many differences and friction:

“. . . what most of us are looking for is the opportunity to express, without embarrassment or judgment or retaliation, our capacity to love.”

He wants us to reestablish a loving, cooperative relationship with the natural world and each other, while knowing hate and violence often over natural resources has always been with us. He wants us to look back to the past--as in archaeology, to see how ancestors survived, or not, and why--the present--what we are doing right and doing wrong, today, and to think of the future, how to avoid catastrophe as so many civilizations before us succumbed to.

He wants us to return to valuing wisdom:

“One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in. A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.”

Lopez always brings books with him when he travels, wherever he goes, as we all do, and he upholds the arts--the key to critical empathy--and the ways they help us appreciate the necessity of beauty, joy, to critique--as a key part of the foundation for survival. Stories, often at the heart of the artistic enterprise, are central for him in the hope for survival:

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”

Conversations across differences--a thing we are particularly bad about now--sharing our stories across differences, are crucial, too:

“Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.”

He is not naive; he knows we are in dire trouble:

“How are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?”

But of Earth, he says, and hopeful striving:

“Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.”

“I always sense that more room to maneuver exists. What halts us is simply a failure of imagination.”

In such a big book--a reflective memoir, but also an often exciting travel book--what we are left with is a series of images, talismanic symbols--an old colonial coin, Lopez storm-watching near his home at Cape Foulweather, an old man walking on a road in Port Famine. And always, astonishing portraits of animals and birds and landscapes all across this beautiful planet.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

My recurring thought while reading: How can I be the next Barry Lopez? To travel to remote places, to deeply immerse myself in local understandings of a place, to be invited on Antarctic expeditions and archaeological fieldwork sites in Kenya. To be this widely curious and well-read, to reach the depth of reflection witnessed herein and then to communicate it lucidly. If I may send some wishes out into the universe, I am tempted to start here.

And another one: Why do these books always seem to be written by white men? Barry Lopez, Wade Davis, David Quammen, Robert Macfarlane... When Lopez steps off a river barge in rural China and opts for the dank, unlit stairwell, I think - maybe that path is not as safe for the likes of me. But it also strikes me as an excuse, and if anyone knows of a female author of this style and breadth, do share. Is it the publishing industry, is it the world, is it... anyway, let's change that.

The wandering meditations of a modern-day elder, this tome may not be for everyone, but it was for me. One to savour slowly.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me start at the end. Or the bottom. Antarctica, to be precise. I learned or re-learned that there is no longitude at the South Pole, that its lone coordinate is 90° South. From there, every direction is north. It's also where all the Earth's 24 time zones converge.* Which I had fun thinking about. Did you know that it never really snows at the South Pole? And that glacial ice fizzes and pops as it melts? Antarctica is also probably the only place on earth where you can get an unadulterated sip of water from a stream. Which Barry Lopez tells us about, seemingly as he puts lips to water. He also tells us how he took a quick bath in said stream. Which may: a) constitute too much information; b) compromise the formerly unadulterated nature of that water; and c) explain why I found this book both brilliant and annoying.

Oh, I loved the places Lopez took me to: in addition to Antarctica, we traveled to Ellesmere Island, the Galapagos, Equatorial Africa, Australia, the French Polynesia, and even Oregon and Southern California, home ports for Lopez in his present and his long-ago past.

And I loved what I learned about the cultures, the geography, the science. I loved, too, the purchase Lopez has with the language and perhaps his own argot, with water that is either gin-clear or sun-shot and mucus that is glycerin-like. When he resorts to simile, sharks are like swans milling on a city park pond and they form a kind of "wall" which slides into the distance like a shoji screen. I didn't say he necessarily made things clearer.**

Lopez likes to provoke though. Sometimes, I'd close the book, think on something he wrote, and wind up agreeing with him. Like when he said this:

At the core of Darwin's idea about evolution is a very simple observation: every living thing has parents.

Yet some of his glib statements I found to be silly, like: the failure to love or be loved explains most of the mental pain people endure. Or: Empathy for each other's predicaments, it seems to me, is the starting point for any system of justice.

And he goes beyond silly, in my opinion.

He lumps corporate officials and the bombardier aboard the Enola Gay with the World Trade Center terrorists. And he asks: In which Western nations does a determination to address the mental, spiritual, and physical health of children override indifference toward their fate? Which nations do the reverse? I'm open; but name one and explain how. And why is the question limited to Western nations?

Here's more:

Empathy and compassion would seem to be requisite components in the development of any new politics that aimed to place human welfare, for example, above material profit in a restructuring of national priorities, or in the redesign of domestic economies.

The author does not define empathy or compassion let alone human welfare, nor does he get any more specific about the intricacies of his economic plan and how it will feed the people who need empathy. He gives no thresholds nor dosages. Who gets to legislate this? Who gets to enforce this? And does he just mean you-know-who, or will he don local apparel and explain all this to the Boko Haram raiders? I don't want to sound anti-compassion, but statements like that annoy me.

Lopez is a fabulous writer and I admire the respect he has for cultures and nature. But he can be a little weird. For example, when he starts to think about genocide or environmental catastrophe, he will swim as far as he can into the ocean until it becomes problematic for him to get back safely. (Or so he says, because he always seems to make it back.) At one point he is outraged by two bumptious, overweight Americans who express an interest in adolescent Thai girls. We can all agree with him, of course. But then he remembered a story about a West African man who was ritually scarred (men in the village biting his back into a crescent-shaped scar) for molesting a girl, and this put me back on track.

There was a time in Arctic Dreams where he wrote about seeing a dead female polar bear with her vulva kind of exposed. He dwelt on that a little longer than I thought healthy. Here, he writes about smelling rot and pollination and how, given the desolation of surrounding cliffs and the empty expanse of polar desert beyond, the soft wash of the redolent air across my face is stimulating to the point of being erotic. But I begrudge no one their fetishes. Just, you know, get your own tent.

Lopez can be self-congratulatory and strikingly inconsistent. He begins the book, for example, by describing each of the curios or souvenirs he has acquired in his travels, but later he goes into great detail about his efforts to leave everything as he finds it in his scientific work.

I know I sound annoyed, and maybe to you I sound disagreeable or wrong. And yet I gave it four-stars, you are thinking. Yes. Because this opened up vistas, Horizons maybe, and not just between the lines of Longitude and Latitude, but also in my own mind. It's good to be challenged and to accept that there may well be a better way.

At one point in the book, Lopez goes to lunch with Mary Leakey. Okay, I'm envious. It's a good, quick story of their conversation and I let myself imagine that it was me on that veranda with her afterwards.

She gazed at me through the blue haze of her cigar smoke with a bemused look, as though I did not really understand how the world worked.


_______________
* In that way that books have a way of climbing over each other, at least in my reading life, just moments before I began this review I read in my current read, Timefulness, that Antarctica has "No Official Time" and was thus a place with no minutes or hours, wholly exempt from the tyranny of a schedule. In another coincidence, I read here: I imagine the giant squid, hunted a mile deep by a sperm whale. . . . That was the same day I was reading Who Would Win? Whale vs. Giant Squid. I won't tell you who won - I'm no plot-spoiler - but I can tell you this is a great series for 4 to 8 year old young'uns. I was worried that these might be too graphic, especially when the king cobra bites the komodo dragon, but my 6 year-old grandson can't get enough of them and guards them like baseball cards.

**Other Lopez-speak: chert flakes, ocherous cliffs, glaucous gulls, parasitic jaegers, a glacial moraine of coarse gravel, the genetic variables in the joinery of haploid cells, fluxless sunlight, clinker plains in the lowlands, and wallowing in drip pools beneath scalesia trees festooned with epiphytes.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barry Lopez has written several good books, and I think he has written three great ones -- "Of Wolves and Men," "Arctic Dreams," and now "Horizon." He is now in his seventies, and has been forthcoming about being ill. (Sadly Lopez has died since I wrote this) This book does have a sense of urgency, that he needed to get things down while there was still time, although it is a very Barry Lopez kind of urgency -- careful, thoughtful, planned.

On one easy level, it is a travel book. Lopez has been to lots of places that are difficult to get to. He has worked with people studying the landscape, the history and the people of these regions. He has learned the science and the geography; he has read the books; he has talked with both the important and the unknown people. He writes well, even beautifully, about all of this, and that would certainly be enough to keep most of us reading with interest.

But there are some overriding concerns and ideas that he keeps coming back to, whether he is in Australia or Africa or Antarctica. Except for the last one, of course, he stresses the need for local knowledge, for how those of us from outside need to learn from the indigenous people of places still at the edge of our pervasive civilization. His second concern is the desperate need to understand and protect environments and the creatures that live on them. Again, he has studied the science and he often has a very clear sense of what we do not know.

But the point that is strongest in this book, near the end of his writing life, is the sense that after all that observation, all that study, we must recognize and cherish the mystery of these places, our uncertainty. Near the end of the book, Lopez writes, "We go on professing confidently what we know, armed with a secular faith in all that is reasonable, even though we sense that mystery is the real condition in which we live, not certainty." It might even be his version of Keats' "negative capability," even though he never says that. It is this sense of mystery that gives this book, perhaps all of his books, that particular vision that is so clearly his.

[Karen·]

An incorrigible Romantic, our Baz.

"I had a theology professor once," I said to John, "who told us that religion was not about being certain but about living with uncertainty. It was about being comfortable with doubt, and maintaining the continuity of one's reverence for a profound mystery."

So this is Mr. Lopez finding awe and wonder in nature and elevating his feelings to something that validates his existence.

The urge to make an exclusive claim runs deep in a culture like mine, where individuals fear more and more a loss of identity, the onset of anonymity.

At least his project is tempered by self-knowledge.

I think, probably, what irritates me most is how he takes himself so damned seriously.

[Dax · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a negative review that called this book overly self-serious. Fair, but this is Lopez's culminating work after decades of travel and study. He's a philosopher, a naturalist and a searcher. Oh, and he's a hell of a writer. This is not as beautiful of a work as 'Arctic Dreams', but it is a wonderful capstone to an impressive career. If you're new to Lopez, read Dreams first, but this is excellent.

[Trin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not at all to my personal taste. It should be: I am fascinated with the Antarctic and love unusual travel narratives. Lopez is beloved and seems like a thoughtful, even wise person. But my god, he is so self-serious; this book is so self-serious, and ponderous, and dull. There were some stunning moments, but the distance between them in this 500+ page repetitive slog felt as insurmountable as the lengths of Scott's final journey.

Excuse me: I am just going outside and may be some time.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I get toward the end of this I'm realizing that it's less a review and more a rambling personal reflection, so I'll add this comment at the top for those of you who are just trying to decide if you want to read it. If you're a Lopez devotee, it's an obvious must-read, a rich and fascinating coda to an incredible life and career. But it would make a strange and I think not ideal introduction to his work, so if you haven't, go read Arctic Dreams or Light Action in the Caribbean first.

Barry Lopez has a unique place among my favorite writers. I enjoy his work as much as I admire it, and the sense of depth and wisdom in it is always matched by the sense of intimacy and recognition. Of course his perspective doesn't now, and never did, despite his substantial influence, entirely match my own, but the way he integrates deeply felt but undogmatic passion in ethics, aesthetics, and curiosity into a single framework for understanding animals and material culture, science and indigenous knowledge, history and the physical world altogether is unmatched. But more on that later.

I discovered his work only after missing my first chance to see him read in person. Recently I was lucky enough to see him speak at UIUC, and had the sense that he was already looking back on his career with a sense of finality. I didn't realize this book was planned; when I first heard it was coming out, I ordered a hardcover copy immediately and worked my way through it slowly over the next month and a half.

Before Horizon, it had been a few years since I seriously engaged with Lopez' writing, though I've dipped into a few of his stories for inspiration. What the book offers, somewhat to my surprise, is really just more of the same sort of writing he's been producing for most of his career. That is, there's no hook or thesis or program. In that sense, it feels less distinctive and more pure Lopez than any particular piece of his other writing. It's a retrospective of his career, in the sense that it collects untold thoughts and experiences from places he visited throughout his life. That's not to say it feels like a random collection of unpublished scraps; far from it. The sense of intentionality and craft connecting this lifetime of insight and singular moments is all the more undeniable for its subtlety and range. It's just that none of the obvious summaries seem to quite fit. It focuses more on Lopez himself--his family, his personal habits, his emotions--than all but his most autobiographical pieces, but if you're hoping for anything genuinely surprising or revealing, you'll be disappointed. At one point he admits that a woodland scene reminds him of horror movies he's watched, but he doesn't name any, and otherwise the most recent non-literary pop culture he mentions is Mahler.

So the Lopez of Horizon is the same Lopez as always, and to the extent that feels different to me now, it's because my own perspective has shifted. He is still, as other reviewers have pointed out, serious to the edge of self-parody. He's often warm and always self-aware, but never humorous or even self-deprecating. That isn't so much a problem to me, since the earnest investment in everything he turns his eye to, without the distance of irony or especially obvious in-group signifiers, lends his work a gravitas and pathos that few writers in this field can achieve, or even attempt without feeling trite or affected. It's his sense of honest and personal engagement that makes it all work.

Because the most direct summary of what this book is, at least that I can think of, is "the reflections of a saint on his pilgrimage through a broken and beautiful world." I hesitate to use that word--I'm not trying to canonize Lopez, no matter how great he is, nor am I trying to satirize him as self-righteous or moralizing. And his writing certainly isn't religious. But as much as that word is an uncomfortable fit in the context of contemporary American culture, it seems to capture the essence of what the book actually is. Unlike Lopez' previous writing, it isn't really a work of science or nature writing, or journalism, or even environmental exhortation or personal memoir.

Instead, it's an invitation to look through Lopez' eyes as he traveled the world with his eyes on the horizon, so to speak, appreciating the transcendent beauty of light and form; appreciating human art and craftsmanship; acting as respectful ambassador to people of other cultures and classes; confronting the deepest depths of human evil; seeing the inherent human dignity in everyone around him; and grappling with the way individual animals, people, and cultures fit into the unfathomable stories of particular places. He cultivates a perspective that looks beyond single cultures or narrow moments in time and space to situate, at least in snapshot, modern humanity in a complete world--though of course he relies on cultural tools very particular to the West to do so.

This perspective was the thing that drew me to Lopez in the first place, and it's interesting to revisit it now that my own worldview has taken on more diverse influences. I was introduced to his work during a time when I was a devoted acolyte of Derrick Jensen. Lopez saw the world in essentially the same terms, but even though I wasn't prepared to reject Jensen at the time, I could still appreciate that he brought a more level-headed, thoughtful approach to it, one that admitted more beauty, made fewer demands, and avoided the reckless and poorly considered intellectual leaps Jensen used to construct his elaborate and conveniently consistent worldview. Both of them provided a way of seeing history I've still rarely found articulated elsewhere, comprehending humans as a part of nature not just ecologically or in the abstract terms of sustainability, but intimately and ethically--and perhaps most importantly, doing so in a way that isn't a transparent attempt to reach some utopian notion of human-environment harmony. Since I've rejected Jensen's strident, flawed version of that perspective, Lopez has become the only one left to provide it.

Only now, even his take on it is starting to feel a bit inadequate. The few moments of this book that do feel stuffy and out of touch to me are the times when he speculates about the dark implications of social media technology, or poses rhetorical questions about why we don't let councils of indigenous elders guide the future of humanity, or handwaves about corporate greed as a kind of inexplicable sui generis font of human suffering. It's just remarkable and occasionally frustrating to me that a lifetime of such wide-ranging curiosity and exposure to the world, Lopez has apparently never considered economic mechanisms (or even their ecological counterparts, for that matter) as forces endogenous to nature, transcending and shaping individual lives in much the same way as the many vast and beautiful processes he does care about. Instead, he treats these systemic questions as issues of personal morality and virtue, as if all of humankind were the crew of a ship trying to make decisions about our future as a single being--and only failing because of some inherent, mysterious malice unique to us.

It seems like a substantial blind spot, especially since it provides a common language for humans and other organisms in a way that strongly supports his overall project. Without it, all of his keen perception and wise consideration can find no purchase on some of the biggest questions he raises in the moments of the book that try to make more conclusive statements about his lifelong preoccupations. Questions about the nature and origin of the most extreme kinds of suffering humans inflict on each other and life in general aren't just moments of tragic reflection--or at least, they don't have to be. They can be meaningfully answered with philosophical tools we already have.

These minor frustrations left me feeling not so much disillusioned or disappointed with Lopez as reassured that I might now be in possession of a new and unique and valuable way of seeing things. That while I'm certainly not a writer of his caliber, or a personality or his drive, I might still be able to build on this tradition in a meaningful way.

On the other hand, things I've been pursuing in my research lately have brought a clear appreciation of some of his core ideas. The way he talked about the coexistence between indigenous knowledge, Western science, and animal perception always tugged at an uncomfortable question of conflicting impulses for me, without ever clarifying how the pieces were meant to fit together. The reading and thinking I've done on semiotics and philosophy of science has made all of this, as well as a lot of the way he talks about place and the being in one can allow intuitive knowledge that can't be captured by words, feel utterly straightforward and not at all squishy or mystical.

Similarly, I now have a more defined sense of my personal aesthetic preoccupations, so no longer find myself coming away from these pieces wanting to explore and experience the same things he's writing about. Instead, it makes me want to try to give my own interests and senses of the transcendental and fascinating a comparable treatment in terms of eloquence and devotion. Which is of course both more motivating and more interesting.

[༺Kiki༻ · Rating 4 out of 5]

You might also enjoy:

✱ Arctic Dreams
✱ Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
✱ Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America
✱ The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
✱ Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
✱ The Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate
✱ The Meaning of Ice: People and Sea Ice in Three Arctic Communities
✱ This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland

Arctic Explorers
✱ Arctic Dreams
✱ Farthest North
✱ The Ice Master
✱ Prisoners of the North
✱ In the Land of White Death
✱ True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole
✱ Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole
✱ In the Kingdom of Ice: The Voyage of the USS Jeannette
✱ Fatal North: Murder and Survival on the First North Pole Expedition

Ernest Shackleton: The Endurance Expedition
✱ South: The Endurance Expedition
✱ Ice Captain: The Life of J.R. Stenhouse
✱ Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
✱ The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
✱ The Lost Men: The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton's Ross Sea Party

John Franklin: The Franklin Expedition
✱ Fatal Passage: The True Story of John Rae
✱ Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition
✱ Resolute: The Epic Search for the Northwest Passage

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horizon takes readers on a journey around the world: from the Oregon Coast to Antarctica, from the Galapagos Islands to central Africa, and from Australia to the Arctic. It is much more than simply a memoir. Lopez uses his travels as a springboard for deep dives into a wide range of topics, such as archeology, anthropology, classism, climate change, colonialism, environmentalism, history, indigenous issues, philosophy, racism, resource exploitation, and science. The book's structure reflects its themes, fluidly moving between different times and places. Lopez does not try to follow a chronological timeline. He merges various visits to specific locations, commenting on the changes he observed over the decades. Published in 2019, this is a culmination of Barry Lopez's life work, bringing together a lifetime of travels, and published not long before his death.

In Antarctica, Lopez doesn't just describe the harsh landscape, he describes the tragic history of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition and Apsley Cherry Garrard’s “worst journey in the world.” His exploration of Cape Foulweather in Oregon becomes an investigation into Captain James Cook's voyages and the nature of Western exploration itself, raising questions about colonialism and intercultural encounters. In Australia, Lopez explores Aboriginal concepts of the Dreamtime. In Kenya's Turkana region, he examines early human evolution. These are just a few examples where his travel experiences prompt further thoughts on both history and science.

This memoir also comments on the future of human civilization. Lopez's observations in each location contribute to a larger argument about the need for human societies to develop more sustainable relationships with the natural world. His experiences provide firsthand witness to the dramatic changes occurring in Earth's most sensitive regions. I consider it his magnum opus. Highly recommended to those who are interested in wide-ranging, sometimes philosophical, thoughts through a wide variety of topics and are not looking for succinct or targeted information.

[Sophy H · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well Barry me old son, I think it's time to part ways!

I found this a bit too disjointed, rambling, jumping around between time and place and ultimately quite uninteresting.

I have been trying to plough through this in small sections but I still can't seem to enjoy the writing. After skim reading large sections there appears to be pages and pages of repetitive text.

When I can't get any enjoyment from reading, especially in a 500+ page book, I think it's time to call it a day.

2 stars Barry and off to the community library you go.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barry Lopez wrote about many subjects and even wrote fiction but is best known for his books about nature, particularly the Arctic. He felt the need to travel as much as to write, and Horizon is a kind of recollection of places he considered significant to a lifetime of travel and reflection. Not a memoir, the book nevertheless looks back on what he's learned about landscapes, about the wildlife and different kinds of societies he's seen. Sometimes he's writing about events that occurred decades ago. That the time shifts aren't always clear never diminishes the sharp revelations he writes.

He always approaches and observes everything he contacts with a sense of wonder. Wonder and curiosity are necessary elements in the imperative toward the next boundary from which he can see another beckoning horizon.

The book begins at Cape Foulweather, Oregon near his home. He's most interested in the weather there as it comes off the Pacific. Lopez is always aware of indigenous inhabitants, past and present. On Skraeling Island in Canada's Arctic he helps an archaeological team uncover an ancient Thule site. In the Galapagos he writes about evolution, Darwin, and Capt. James Cook's 18th century explorations of the Pacific. In Kenya's Rift Valley he's engaged in the search for man's hominid ancestors. He's disturbed by the changes man's progress our current Anthropocene period has had on landscapes and indigenous people. He uses Australia as his example in writing about our overuse of the land and its resources. In Antarctica he writes about the ways science studies the continent's icy desert.

Lopez writes sensitively, poetically about it all. Given the wealth of insight he has into these relatively remote places and the enormous historical and scientific influences at work there, we'd forgive him more pedestrian prose, but his lyricism becomes part of what he experiences, as if one couldn't exist without the other. Sometimes the writing itself and the penetrating understanding of what he sees reminds me of the best of Joan Didion. I thought this especially true in the section on Australia. There's a lot to take in, but he makes reading it a pleasure.

Adventure is a work he uses only once in the book, on p488, and not about himself. Mostly he thought of himself as a traveler. He takes part in the work wherever he goes: he helps harvest meteorites in Antarctica, he searches for prehistoric remains in Kenya, he's part of the archaeological dig on Skraeling Island. And he takes notes and writes constantly. But the reader may think the word adventure when he describes diving under the Ross Ice Shelf or taking off in a small plane in Kenya where there's no airstrip.

Sadly, Lopez died this past Christmas Day. He left us some wonderful pictures and perspectives of nature and man.

[Sydney Doidge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so torn between 4 and 5 stars because I loved this book but also had significant complaints. So I’ll start with those - first, that some of the language he used seemed sexist but in a subtle way, which is always so frustrating especially when you can’t quite put a finger on it; and second, he seemed so certain that a solution would arise if we just listened to elders, which were vaguely defined stereotypes of wise native men. I don’t disagree that we need to listen to more native voices, in fact this book drove that home for me more than anything, but being told my some American, detached man to listen to their perfect wisdom struck the wrong chord.

What I did like - the whole book felt like a steady mediation, a calm, deep walk. I felt inspired to listen more and better, to observe quietly, to open myself to opportunities by being present, to journal and record and reflect on the things I see. And I also felt more informed about humanity, its origins, its evolution, its hubris. Arctic Dreams is definitely now at the top of my to-read list.

[Carl Safina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book three decades in the making, one of our greatest writers has honed every word with enormous care as he takes us deep into regions few will get to. It's been my privilege to get to some of the same regions, which provides me as a reader the advantage of a sense of verification as we see things from Mr Lopez' perspective. It's also been my privilege to have had some personal communication with Mr. Lopez that provides a sliver of insight--mainly that he is completely authentic.
But I know him mainly because I've been a fan since someone handed me "Arctic Dreams" while I was above the Arctic Circle doing research on falcons at age 32. A National Book Award winner, Arctic Dreams is a fantastic book, one that Mr. Lopez's wife described to me (if I remember correctly) as a "once in a lifetime" achievement. But her comment came a few minutes before I met Barry for the first time and many years before his last spate of work. I think we can now say that Horizon makes it "twice in a lifetime," at least.
A deeply personal book, written from the high hill of a long life of broad vision and deep reflection—and some trauma—Horizon shows a world both magnificent and tragic. Lopez seems to find his heart's home in the vast unpeopled purity of Antarctica, a place he returns to repeatedly.
For me as an ecologist, some of the most interesting bits in the book occur when Lopez considers with admirable honesty his interactions with researchers, and theirs with him.
But the main reason for giving this book the time it deserves is that it opens an enormous swath of life, time, and reflection, the wisdom of which we are free to mine thanks to Barry Lopez's generosity of spirit and his desire to show us what he has seen and gleaned of life.

[Miguette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Barry Lopez on the importance of...Barry Lopez.

I gave up on it, I might someday go back to it. I am definitely going to read Arctic Dreams, but this was self conscious and precious. I don’t know..

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was my first Barry Lopez book, so maybe he's an acquired taste.

There were a few interesting ideas in this book, but ultimately I found the prose too thick and flowery and his non-linear way of recounting some of his travels jarring. The 500+ pages became a slog. One major theme of this book questions how the dominant cultures of the world are ignoring real perils we all face, the chief of them all being climate change. Yet as a globetrotter he never seemed to question how he himself has contributed to the problem (or more importantly, how lifestyles like his have done so).

I kept wanting to like the book. I agree with his viewpoints on almost every issue he raised. And after further reading about him, he seems like he was a five star person. But the book gets two.

[Liam Heneghan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tremendous book. Lopez in a pensive, troubled, self critical, or perhaps better phrased, a self-questioning mood. What is it to travel? What does the traveller learn, take away, or importantly what does he or she take along with them. I can't recall a book in recent years that I've been this immersed in.

[Linda Heinsohn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dull and ponderous. Lopez uses every adjective humanly possible in creating overlong, tedious, aggravating sentences that flit back and forth across time, continents, thought, and experiences. See what I did there? If you followed that sentence you may like this book. If you thought the sentence was nonsense then save yourself
the trouble and read something else instead.

[Sarah]

http://www.bookwormblues.net/2020/07/...

I’ve been on a bit of a travel kick recently, but there’s a pandemic and I’m immunocompromised, so the only real way I can currently travel is through books. A little while ago, I went online and put out a call, “I need to go on a vacation, but I still can’t really risk leaving the house. Tell me what books I should read that will take me on a mental vacation.” Someone mentioned, “Anything by Barry Lopez” and here we are.

I’ve never read a Barry Lopez book. In fact, I’d never heard of the man before, and what an absolute crime that is. The reader who needed a vacation in me was thrilled at this particular find. The writer and editor who makes a career out of words was basically in heaven. This book scratched every possible itch for me.

This isn’t like the other travelogues I’ve read. He both goes into a lot of detail about the numerous locations he visits, and he doesn’t. In Horizon, the book is largely about the distance, some point, far off, where heaven and earth connect. That line that bisects everything known, from everything unknown, and how said horizon can be both far away, and much closer than we really expect. That theme weaves itself through the narrative. He spends a bit of time in this book, hopping between a few different locations around the world, and in each different place, he both experiences and ponders different things, muses about the nature of humanity, and all the ways we are connected. I never quite knew what I was in for.

For example, he spends some time at the start of the book at Cape Foulweather in Washington. While I did feel he spent less time explaining the topography of the land he was immersed in than I expected, I didn’t actually end up lamenting that fact. Instead, he used his time at that location to weave together not only the narrative of his journey and experiences, but tied his time there with the past, with information about Captain Cook, and somehow managed to weave that in with his current experience, and even some musing about the future as well. It was all so artfully done, I felt like I’d fallen prey to some spell he’d woven. I was just completely taken away by his mastery of the tale he was telling.

“He spent his life charting raw space, putting down grids and elevations, but he also understood what could not be charted, the importance of the line that separated the known from the unknown. He understood what occurred in the silence between two musical notes. He also knew, I believe, the indispensability of this.”

This was pretty standard issue with every location he spent time at. Each place would drive him to examine the past, the present, and look toward the future as well. This is, perhaps, why the title of the book, Horizon, is quite apt, as the horizon is, quite literally, the point where he would often tie all of these strings together. It is both known, and tantalizingly unknown.

His writing was what really impressed me, though. There are certain authors I read just because I want to see and understand how they use words. It is part of what drives me. Words, language, the power of all of that is something I can’t get away from. Hey, I’m a full-time book editor, a published author, and book reviewer. My life is made up of words and how they are used to their full effect. Lopez is a very lyrical writer, and if you’ve read either of my books, you know that lyrical writing is my jam. I often found myself completely captivated by how he would twist phrases, manipulate words, and pack a powerful punch with all of the above. He doesn’t write on one level, but multiple levels, and I loved that. I loved the way I could be reading about, for example, Captain Cook, but also very much be reading about my own human experience in the world, as well as Lopez’s. Layers and metaphor are my playground, and Lopez is a master of that particular craft.

Horizon is a work of art. I was enchanted not only by the journey Barry Lopez takes throughout this work, but how well he ties together the human experience, showing that we are not islands unto ourselves, but connected to each other, to the world as a whole, to history, to the future. He doesn’t shy away from hard truths, like our changing landscape, and our responsibility for said changes. Neither does he seem to lose all hope. That being said, it is the quiet moments that had the most impact on me. The moments where he seems to put everything else aside, and just quietly reflect.

“The history of art in the West, I believe, can be viewed as the history of various experiments with volumes of space and increments of time, with frequencies of light and of sound. Art’s underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction. Art does not aspire to entertain. It aspires to converse.”
The horizon is not just something to explore, a hazy, far off dream, but a point of connection. In a world that, despite our connectivity, feels increasingly disconnected, this book ended up be the exact medicine my soul needed. Horizon is a poetic, powerful examination of the human soul, the larger world, and the horizon, which both connects and obscures. Filled with some of the most beautiful writing I’ve come across in a long time, and an overwhelming sense of wonder and respect, this book put Barry Lopez on my radar, and I’m excited to spend some time reading more of his work.

“The moment of surprise informs you emphatically that the way you once imagined the world is not the way it is. “To explore,” he says, “is to travel without a hypothesis.”

[Arthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

No review for this--at least, not yet. This book overwhelms and courteously invites you to consider your own humanity, the wildness of the earth, and possibility of hopelessness and hope. It raises a deeply serious question about our "survivability" because of the deepening loss of community, compassion and empathy. It doesn't leave me hopeless, but I feel on the edge of hopelessness. Is it too late?

"What we say we know for sure changes every day, but no one can miss now the alarm in the air. Our question is, What is out there, just beyond the end of the road, out beyond our language and fervent belief, beyond whatever gods we've chosen to give our allegiance to? Are we waiting for travelers to return, to tell us what they say beyond that line? Or are we now to turn our heads, in order to hear better the call coming to us from that other country? It arrives as a cantus, tying the faraway place to the thin living deep within us, a canticle that releases us from the painstaking assembly of our milagros, year after year, and from a faith only in miracles" (512).

[Mark Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I think about Horizon years from now, I will picture Barry Lopez bobbing in the frigid ocean waters underneath the ice shelf in Antarctica:

“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. Looking up eighty feet or so into the irregular geometry of the ice shelf front, bathed as it was in late evening sunlight from the northwest, I felt like I was standing in the apse at Chartres gazing up into the groined vaults between the capitals of the columns, complexly curved surfaces lit by the cathedral’s clerestory windows. In Antarctica there was no end to the wonder.”

Anywhere Lopez goes there is wonder. Lopez could sit in your backyard for a month and produce a few hundred pages of interesting prose. He doesn’t need to move. He only needs to sit. And ponder. The fact that he dons scuba gear to swim under the ice shelf in Antarctica is the equivalent of an action sequence in a James Bond movie, compared with the rest of the 500-plus pages in Horizon.

Lopez is happiest, it seems, alone. Except he’s never alone alone because the world teems with activity through his eyes. And soon you realize that in addition to all the magnificent reflections on time and the history of humanity that this quiet, keen-eyed writer is also pissed-off. Come for the nature and anthropology, stick around for the attitude. Lopez is irritated by our inability to recognize the barbarism that has come before us, the brutality needed to maintain them, and our ability to ignore violent despotism today.

“For schoolgirls in northern Nigeria trying to run from Boko Haram raiders laughing at their panic, for impoverished Christians in South Sudan trampled by Janjaweed cavalry, for a family blown piecemeal across a city square by one of al-Assad’s barrel bombs, the sixteenth century is now,” he writes while wandering the Galapagos.

Nearly every culture has used “barbaric perros de presa” (guard dogs) “against those it hates, or those whose possessions it desires.” And it’s not only those who directly administer physical brutality that Lopez loathes. He goes after bankers, too, for underwriting the development of slave trades, “as immoral an enterprise as anything the Mongol pariah Timur Lenk ever imagined.”

The United States does not get off the hook.

“America revolted successfully against its parent country, declaring its opposition to colonial impositions of any sort and enshrining a “melting pot” folklore that, while it claimed to welcome the oppressed, remained suspicious about and resistant to diversity. And America, the most successful of England’s former colonies, went on to become a formidable colonizer itself, imposing its system of political organization and its policies for economic growth on other nations, to the point of authorizing assassinations and supporting juntas and coups that agreed not to interfere with the international operations of American corporations. At the same time, America also ignored institutionalized social injustice around the world, like apartheid, and strong arm dictators like Suharto and Syngman Rhee, if raising an objection might create significant economic tension or disruption.”

Lopez is the anti-provincialist. He sees the whole world, its interconnectedness. He watches the Pacific ocean and thinks about the volcanoes and canyons far below. In the Arctic, looking for Arctic Small Tool tradition (ASTt) sites, Lopez first admires “a hearth holding the charred remains of willow twigs thinner than a pencil” and thinks about his degree of empathy with the “anonymous and long-gone residents” before telling a story from his childhood about a neighborhood girl with cerebral palsy who was hit by a car and died.

“Occasionally, I presume, this kind of childhood memory, the brutal, unregarding nature of everyday life, must come crashing through without warning for people in incongruous circumstances, as it did for me that cool summer evening walking barefoot alongside that stream.”

Lopez’ ability to interweave personal stories, his own expanding horizons, with scientific insights or, say, long takes on Charles Darwin or Captain James Cook is a marvel. He draws readers in with matter-of-fact moments. “My hands are slotted loosely in the pockets of my trousers” begins the “Port Arthur to Botany Bay” section of Horizon as Lopez heads to Australia and Tasmania. Heading to Queen Maud Mountains, he writes: “To get oriented here is difficult. The light is flat because the sky is overcast. The sun’s weak rays create only a few anemic shadows by which to judge scale and distance.”

Through his calm style and through its detail, Lopez’ prose demands we slow down. He wants us to read the words more slowly and he wants us to take in the world at a more deliberate pace.

I’m writing this during the week of the April 8 total eclipse (2024). Millions of us travelled so they could sit in the path of totality and experience darkness and that creepy daytime temperature drop when the sun is fully blotted out. The event dominated news coverage and, well, kind of stopped us all in our tracks. Yes, total solar eclipses happen about once every year or two, but rarely across a 14-state path such as this one took. Among the frequent comments from eclipse-watchers was that the moment made them feel alone with the universe and how small it made them feel.

I’m sure Lopez would enjoy an eclipse and relish in its power as much as anyone, but it’s in as if in the collection of stops in Horizon he’s saying that it’s really all around us, every day. We don’t need the moon and sun to align just so as an excuse absorb our place in the cosmos. Sierra Crane Murdoch’s essay for the Paris Review pointed me to this Lopez quote: “Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention.”

Reading Horizon, you might feel your own heart rate slow. Reading Horizon, you might find yourself more frequently thinking about how we got here, how we’re treating the planet, and how we’re treating each other.

[Lance Tilford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barry Lopez is a master of capturing the essence of a journey, both in the physical and spiritual sense. He approaches his subjects--in this case, a handful of remote spaces on the globe including the Arctic, Antarctic, Galapagos Islands, the wild coast of Oregon, an African savannah and others--both with reverence and a critical eye.
The journeys he relates in Horizon are perhaps even more personal this time, as each place triggers memories of a deep and wide variety of experience, of not just geographical space, but emotional and psychological revelation.
Lopez' writing is masterful, as always. This is a volume to savor, to immerse yourself in Lopez' sense of place and state of mind, two feet firmly on the ground but an eye to the horizon. My only regret is that this book has a bit of a feeling of closure, as if Mr. Lopez might not write another epic, at least of this scale.

[Mehtap exotiquetv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barry Lopez nimmt den Leser mit auf eine Weltreise. Von der Antarktik bis zu Galápagos bis nach Australien berichtet er von seinen Erlebnissen und schafft Analogien zu der Gesellschaft und wie wir miteinander leben und wie unsere Handlungen unsere Umwelt verändern.
Auf den Galápagos Inseln nimmt er uns mit zu Darwins Entdeckungen und auf eine Polarexpedition in der Antarktis.

Ein schönes umfangreiches Buch, dass einen zum Nachdenken anregt.

[Hanna Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is my whole heart

[Jenny T · Rating 2 out of 5]

When my rating digresses so much from the average, I feel the need to tell you why.

I think Lopez's intentions may have been to describe the unseen, and help the reader explore the depths of the world that few have gone. He may have wanted to link that to lesser known histories, cultures, injustices, sciences, arts...

What he actually did was make me trudge painfully through 500 pages (actually 14 hours of listening to the audiobook at 1.65x speed) of scattered, seemingly indefinite rambling. There was immense potential, and he is clearly a learned, well traveled individual. But at times he came across as pompous, and at best he was long winded. I think perhaps he was trying to do too much, ponder too much. I captured a few gems of information, but overall it was too scattered for me to appreciate as a whole.

[Juliana James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Arctic Dreams. I do not love Horizon, I found myself skeptical of his analysis of Cook and I felt it was very tilted towards a male view of the world. I found the book to Beas much about his ego of where he traveled to, which most people could never afford, and in a time of such inequality, I found that hard to stomach eventhoughI have enough money to travel anywhere I want. I felt like the writing was about Lopez being the priest of environmental responses and while Idid findwisdomandcompassionin his words, the book put me off andI quit reading it halfway through. I was too long.

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5 A book for our times. Not an autobiography but autobiographic. Not a travelogue but essays of travels. A story of our place in the Anthropocene, both uplifting and depressing, and ultimately a beautiful account of a life devoted to understanding people and places that are ultimately unknowable. From the coast of Oregon to the Galapagos to Tanzania to Australia, and ending in Antarctica. Really without adequate words to communicate how singular this book feels.

[Scott Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most thoughtful book I’ve read in at least a decade.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I fell into conversation with a local man about this feeling that so many visitors have of attaining here a state of transcendent peace. Concerning the modern significance of these islands, he had this reflection: “La tierra puede transformar el alma y lamente, y corazón de todos los hermanos.” (“ It’s possible for this place to shift your soul, to ameliorate the pain of modern existence, to elevate the heart of everyone who visits here.”)”

“My goal was to experience the world intensely and then to put into words as well as I could what I’d seen. I was aware others could see better than I, and also that other people were not able to travel in the way I had begun to, going away habitually. And whatever a reader might make of what I tried to describe, I already understood that their conclusions might not match my own. I saw myself, then, as a sort of courier, a kind of runner come home from another land after some exchange with it and its denizens, carrying, by way of a story, some incomplete bit of news about how different, how marvelous and incomprehensible, really, life was, out beyond the pale of the village in which I had grown up. Looking back, I see that this ideal—to imagine myself in service to the reader—had me balanced on the edge of self-delusion. But it was at the time my way of working. It didn’t occur to me that taking life so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?”

Every word of this book was carefully chosen, and they are steeped in the self-reflection of a lifetime, and as if the author knows his time on earth is short, and while serious, and honest about our flaws, it also lifts us up and makes us cherish the earth even more than we did before. There are flaws to his stories, also, but it is the most deeply personal book of his, and the ultimate storyteller seems to want to reveal himself, and remind us, by god, the world is full of contradiction and paradox, and each of us contain the dark and the light, and each place is a heaven and hell.

Last weekend, I was on a hike near Vail, Colorado and pleased as punch with myself that I had found a new wildflower I had never seen before; it was this lovely white lily or daisy looking one, with flowers clustered vertically that reminded me of shooting stars, with very distinctive purple stripes on the inside and mustard yellow spots on the petals. It turned out to be a mountain death camas and consuming them can be fatal, beauty and death in the same entity, and that type of contrast is evident in all these stories.

Part of his appeal is his travels to exotic places and his participation in various scientific endeavors that we ostensibly never will, but what I really love is the way his language is like a poem or a prayer, even as he is merely relating some dry scientific facts; he is awake and aware to the spiritual quality of the land and how that brings meaning to our lives. His intro alone had me in raptures, and I absorb his words and stories for the meaningful and coherent “trajectory” of my own life.

Some stories spoke to me more than others, but this will be something I will reread again and again, as a treasure trove of insights and ways of being in the world, on the earth, that I crave and collect.

“He was advocating for the sort of emotional and spiritual relationships all cultures experience in their encounters with their places, and which many of these cultures still enshrine alongside their more empirical, or analytical, responses to those same places, finding those perceptions equally valid in furthering an understanding of what is, finally, beyond understanding.”

“My further desire in planning this 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 time in our cultural and biological history when it has become an attractive option to lose faith in the meaning of our lives. At a time when many see little more on the horizon but the suggestion of a dark future.”

“Embedded in the system of belief that over the years came to replace (or perhaps augment) religion for me is a conviction that the numinous dimension of certain inanimate objects is substantial, as real as their texture or color. This is not, I think, an illusion. One might not be able to “squeeze meaning” from a stone, but a stone, presented with an opportunity, with a certain kind of welcoming stillness, might reveal, easily and naturally, some part of its meaning.”

Words.

Olla podrida- a Spanish stew, or any collection of miscellaneous items

Flânerie, Flaneur - aimless idle behavior, one who engages in

Declivity- a downward slope

Liminal- occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

Moonraker- A small, light sail located high on a mast (above the skysail) and used for speed

Plosive- denoting a consonant that is produced by stopping the airflow using the lips, teeth, or palate, followed by a sudden release of air.

Knapper: one who will shape (a piece of stone, typically flint) by striking it so as to make stone tools or weapons or to give a flat-faced stone for building walls.

Debouch- emerge from a narrow or confined space into a wide, open area.

Xeric- (of an environment or habitat) containing little moisture; very dry

Mesic- (of an environment or habitat) containing a moderate amount of moisture. Compare with hydric and xeric.

Tombolo- two landmasses connected by a narrow isthmus.

Inflorescence- the process of flowering

Umwelt- (in ethology) the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.

Meretriciousness- apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity.

Disquisitions- a long or elaborate essay or discussion on a particular subject.

Lebensraum- 1. Additional territory deemed necessary to a nation, especially Nazi Germany, for its continued existence or economic well-being. 2. Adequate space in which to live, develop, or function.

“I spent hours on the cape emptying my mind of analysis, suspending its incessant quest for essence, and regularly encountered in doing so William Blake’s enduring metaphor, that the entire world is rendered for us in a single grain of sand.”

“When in 1979 I encountered a traditional group of people for the first time on their home ground, at a small Nunamiut Eskimo village called Anaktuvuk Pass, in Alaska’s Brooks Range, I had among my first thoughts an obvious question: Why did I know so little about these people? I didn’t mean knowledge about their material culture or their hunting techniques or the way they were able to survive in the harsh landscape they’d chosen to live in, but about the way they understood the world. What did they find mysterious but still worthy of their full attention?”

“But one can choose, as well, to step into the treacherous void between oneself and the confounding world, and there to be staggered by the breadth, the intricacy, the possibilities of that world, accepting its requirement for death but working still to lessen the degree of cruelty and to increase the reach of justice in every quarter.”

“It’s been my experience that these hours of perusing the water, here or while at sea—taking in the occasional bird or surfacing whale, watching light shift on the surface—induce an awareness of another sort of time, a time that fills an expansive and undifferentiated volume of space, one not easily available elsewhere. On those days, such a seemingly mindless vigil offers relief from the monotony of everyday experience.”


“The images of nebulae and galaxies were wondrous. Mesmerizing. With images like these before us, I remember thinking, our direst problems as a species—desertification, collapsing fisheries, barbarism, poverty, species extinction—might shrink down into something conceivably manageable. These images of timeless creation, carefully contemplated, might unfreight a depressed soul. They prompted in me a sense of the impossible having given way to the possible, a feeling as intense as the despair I’d once felt before I looked at Fernando Botero’s drawings of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, or before I looked at Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of broken families, victims of drought, famine, and war.”

“I subscribe, I suppose, to a popular notion, that “the [undisturbed] land heals,” that it can bring the disheveled or distracted mind to a state of calm transcendence. Exposure to an unusually spectacular place in conducive circumstance, the thinking goes, can release one from the prison of one’s own ego and initiate a renewed awareness of the wondrous, salutary, and informing nature of the Other, the thing outside of the self.”

“William Blake, prominently in Western history, wanted to rid the human imagination of a particular kind of darkness, the darkness that leads to despair, to hatred and war, by opening it wider to both the real and the numinous dimensions of the world. He wanted humanity to realize the immeasurable breadth of the human imagination, its capacity to rise above fatal despair, even as the world grew darker at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Somewhere, Camus wrote: “The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation.” Blake and Camus were asking us to set aside our cherished illusions and to engage instead with the problems they both saw coming.”

“The wildness around me here, the clearing where I camp and the stands of undisturbed old-growth Sitka spruce beyond, within which the brightest light at midday is still only crepuscular, is not a point of arrival for me. It is my point of departure.”

“At the foot of the glacier I squat down in order to hear more loudly the percolation of meltwater from the glacier’s cold lip, the hissing bursts of air as small pockets within the ice release their stores of ancient atmosphere. With my head tilted this close, I can feel the glacier’s frigid exhalation against my cheekbones. For a few moments the density of the silence in the valley exists in concert with the continuous sound of this huge object’s meltdown.”

“The idea that “beauty” refers to a high level of coherence existing everlastingly in the world, and that beauty can be renewed in us through reintegrating ourselves with a world over which we have no control, has appealed to me ever since I became aware of this Navajo ceremony, a formal expression of that idea.”

“Everyone I know who’s dug up the material culture of a vanished people somewhere on Earth longs for a conversation with the subjects of their inquiry, with the cave painters at Chauvet in the Ardèche Valley in southeastern France, with the Clovis hunters at Blackwater Draw in New Mexico, with the Semites at Ur, or with the Thule. If I could speak with the Thule, I would want to know what they found beautiful, and in what, precisely, had they placed their enduring faith.”


“If I were to scribe a line on a map of the Pacific this evening, straight away to the northwest, it would not cut a shoreline but for Galápagos’s for 6,098 miles, not until it came to the Aleutian Islands. If I were to draw another line straight south, it would not encounter a coast until it met the wall of the Abbot Ice Shelf in Antarctica, 4,993 miles distant. If I looked to my left and imagined the far-off Bay of Panama, and then to my right and envisioned the Philippine Sea, the span would be more than 10,000 miles. The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific. If one were truly to comprehend the size of the thing, one would be halfway to imagining God.”

“Our question is, What is it out there, just beyond the end of the road, out beyond language and fervent belief, beyond whatever gods we’ve chosen to give our allegiance to? Are we waiting for travelers to return, to tell us what they saw beyond that line? Or are we now to turn our heads, in order to hear better the call coming to us from that other country? It arrives as a cantus, tying the faraway place to the thing living deep inside us, a canticle that releases us from the painstaking assembly of our milagros, year after year, and from a faith only in miracles.”