Status Updates From Arctic Dreams

“Thousands of miles from familiar surroundings, genuinely frightened, and perhaps strained by the grim conditions of shipboard life, Europeans took to killing any polar bear they saw. They shot them out of pettiness and a sense of rectitude. In time, killing polar bears became the sort of amusement people expected on an arctic journey … They shot them with colonial indifference.”

“If one can take the phrase a country of the mind to mean the landscape evident to the senses, as it is retained in human memory and arises in the oral tradition of people, as a repository of both mythological and “real time” history, then perhaps such a phrase will suffice.”

“The literature of arctic exploration is frequently offered as a record of resolute will before the menacing fortifications of the landscape… it is better to contemplate the record of human longing to achieve something significant, to be free of the grim weight of life… in these Arctic narratives, then, and the threads of dreams that serve us all.”

I’m bored in Denver don’t mind my activity on this app