Status Updates From The Afterlife of George Car...

"I would imagine myself, after a week, going back to the barracks and pretending I’d been in London on a spree. And so I did nothing. I continued to live in my Labrador journal. I returned there every night before sleep like a pigeon flying back to its cote."

"Yet there was still a side to me I never shared with anyone. Sometimes in the morning or at night when I looked in the mirror, I would see myself inside my costume, my eyes inside my mask of a face, and I would admit to myself that my life had been all selfishness and vanity.

I was a piece of human regalia, a mascot, a ceremonial mace."

"There was no question. So many unburied. No one had left the island alive. They had camped there for the seals, and the disease had taken them like the fulfillment of one of their terrible myths. It had lain coiled in her trunk like a vicious animal. Did she take it out and put it on like a wig? Did she dance with it on?"

"Some took up rocks and beat their faces until they were swollen and streaming with blood [...] Attuiock’s sister broke open her cheek and put out one of her eyes. Cartwright found himself sobbing, pleading with them to stop. He was shocked and astonished by this wild show of grief, this intense objection to loss on the part of people who seemed to possess so little, to whom death was such a common thing."

Surprised that Cartwright knows where the clitoris is.

"For a few seconds Cartwright toyed with the idea of making himself king of the independent nation of Labrador."

"You are Inuit,” Attuiock told him. “You are human.”

"'But it’s so godforsaken bloody cold.… When I’m done, could you put me in a barrel with salt, and see that I get back to England? To my sister. You could pour me out In a ditch or meadow, so long as it’s in Kent.… I’ll pay for it. There’s my watch and musket. And last year’s pay.'

Cartwright had the cooper make a barrel-shaped coffin for him and buried him in the snow under a north-facing cliff near the sea." AHHHH

“You’re a hypocrite. You came here to escape England and so did I. But you bring with you the very things you wanted to flee.”

“[...] Our only strength is in our appeal to law, in presenting ourselves as representatives of our country. If we were only individuals, this land would devour us like a trout leaping and swallowing a fly.”

“I say we’ve got nothing to fear but what we bring with us.”

"It wasn’t only his penis that Cartwright decked in odd attire."

"“The souls of our children,” he would say, “while they will not be given corporeal form, should at least have some fleetin taste of maternal warmth as they pass from our negligent custody back to God. To cast them directly into the cold air would be too cruel.”

"Not having a sled with them to transport his body, they emptied the dead man’s pockets and buried him under heavy blocks of snow. But no amount of coaxing and calling could persuade his dog to Leave the spot where they’d buried him."

"He thought of himself as his people’s father, the rational governor to their chaotic moods.

"Mrs. Selby, who claimed to be an agnostic, never proposed the hymns, but joined in when Cartwright began one. Cartwright himself wasn’t a very religious man, but he enjoyed the occasional evening hymn, not for any devotional reason, but because of childhood associations and the sense of lonely fortitude he felt singing with Mrs. Selby in the dark in the wilderness."

"And six feet away from the fire the room was always cold, feet always numb, fingers clumsy. Fire was something the body required more than food. To stop moving, without a fire nearby, was to start freezing to death. It was as though the house were a ship, and the land and everything else open sea. It was only strategy and vigilance that kept them alive.

“People are always in danger, because everything we kill is made of souls. Everything we eat is made of souls.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything is a man inside. When seals or caribou die - it is the same even for trees – their souls come out, and they look like people. Only they still think like seals or caribou. If we offend the souls of the things we kill, they will take revenge on us.”

pausing for the night - pray for me, fam. i WILL get up early and read tomorrow (by the grace of all things readerly and righteous)...

"“I wonder, though,” Mrs. Selby said, “what use our habits will be to them, except to make the Eskimos more acceptable to us.”

“To be civilized is worthy in itself.” Cartwright spread his arms as though offering himself as an example. “It’s the duty of the civilized man to elevate the savage.”

“It’s our duty, I should think, really, to leave them alone if we can’t accept them as they are.”

“Your pious loyalty is neither honest nor handsome." “You will not speak to me like this.” He used his military voice. “You’re acting on your own behalf here, not the King’s,” Mrs. Selby went on. “And I think we’re more alone than you suppose.” “All the more reason then to honour the King and the nation that give us our strength.”

“It’s our own strength we’ll have to rely on here.”

"Mr. Langman completed his oven today. Having taken out of the oven the supports which he’d made use of to turn the arch upon, he was making a fire in it in order to bake a pie, when alas! down it ffell; to no small mortification of us all."

"Strangely, the huge, scarcely mapped land didn’t dwarf people. It made them large and significant. In London, people were what you ignored, a stream of anonymous faces. In Newfoundland, they were rare. Each was a town, a county in himself."