Brenna Davis

“Everyone who read Scott's diaries, as they became available, wished for the safety of the doomed party that they thought they had come to know. A biographer recorded the odd hope he experienced, each time he re-read the documents, that this time things might turn out differently, this time they might make it home. Empathy was vital to the response of the audience. Equally, a perverse and marginal satisfaction can be detected in the behavior of the survivors, not at all a satisfaction that the polar party died, but that they should have made their undesired end so magnificently, so much in accordance with the principles of sublime defeat that the survivors could raise as their appropriate epitaph the grimly glorious last line of Tennyson's 'Ulysses': To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
― Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination

“The man with the nerves gets things done, but sometimes he has a terrible time in doing them.”
― Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, Antarctic, 1910-1913 Volume v.1

“It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small."

-from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Because this is not a rich man's offer of something he can easily spare. This is not some supernatural personage being temporarily inconvenienced. This is love going where we go, all of us, when we end.”
― Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense