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A review by thrushnightingale
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
5.0
This book is attentive, inclusive, and compassionate. Lopez emphatically illustrates how lands we may consider wastelands, seeing no inherent value in them to our human world – lands of ice and sand, inhospitable, uncooperative land – are irreplaceable and unique and "expose in startling ways the complacency of our thoughts about land in general." They are lands difficult to possess and manipulate, which benefits them, for the incomprehensible land may maintain its myth and secret; the land where the seasons are articulated in the violent fluctuations of light and ice. The cold land is not merely frozen and void of life, but profound and subtle, and men and animals interact and live in such harsh but beautiful landscapes. They startle us into waking. „The browns and blacks and whites were so rich I could feel them. The beauty here is a beauty you feel in your flesh. You feel it physically, and that is why it is sometimes terrifying to approach. Other beauty takes only the heart, or the mind.” “I looked out at the icebergs. They were so beautiful they also made you afraid.”
It is a book about endurance. Of the polar animals and the histories these animals have suffered. I felt haunted by the incident involving a mother bear and her two cubs, manipulated and teased by hunters, the particularity of the mother’s heart-breaking behaviour towards her dead cubs, who was then also killed for common amusement. These were mindless killings emphasizing the gulf between man and the bear, whereas the Eskimos who killed a polar bear did so “in an atmosphere of respect, with implicit spiritual obligations. The Dead bear, for example, was propitiated with gifts.”
It is also a book about ice; about the brutality of ice, how it may crush boats below a mother-of-pearl sky. About the Eskimo’s profound understanding of such sceneries; to know the land as one may know a city they've lived in all their life; but instead of street signs, the caribou tracks can be read, or the colours of the ice. I wonder if such a life is an impossibility now. Modernization implies something fractures: language, and our relationship to the land, to the complexities of land, to living amongst wilderness, to gather from it whilst honouring it, having recognized that one's breath lives because the caribou lives, because the seal lives. To recognise in one's hand the hands of one's ancestor.
The Arctic journeys described by him were alluring, though there is the threat of romanticising them, for those great explorations were marked by gloom and frostbite and much tragedy. And yet – to enter the unknown. It seems an impossibility now, a fantasy. To navigate into the blue horizon which was not named. The world that was not named.
This book is also about so much more. A superb read for those who love winter, to be read during winter -- but also for those who do not love winter, to be read outside of winter. It illuminates the cold world, revealing what is achingly alive, beautiful, and powerful in the monochromes and the blues. It also confirms my belief that most nature writing is poetic and deeply life-affirming.
It is a book about endurance. Of the polar animals and the histories these animals have suffered. I felt haunted by the incident involving a mother bear and her two cubs, manipulated and teased by hunters, the particularity of the mother’s heart-breaking behaviour towards her dead cubs, who was then also killed for common amusement. These were mindless killings emphasizing the gulf between man and the bear, whereas the Eskimos who killed a polar bear did so “in an atmosphere of respect, with implicit spiritual obligations. The Dead bear, for example, was propitiated with gifts.”
It is also a book about ice; about the brutality of ice, how it may crush boats below a mother-of-pearl sky. About the Eskimo’s profound understanding of such sceneries; to know the land as one may know a city they've lived in all their life; but instead of street signs, the caribou tracks can be read, or the colours of the ice. I wonder if such a life is an impossibility now. Modernization implies something fractures: language, and our relationship to the land, to the complexities of land, to living amongst wilderness, to gather from it whilst honouring it, having recognized that one's breath lives because the caribou lives, because the seal lives. To recognise in one's hand the hands of one's ancestor.
The Arctic journeys described by him were alluring, though there is the threat of romanticising them, for those great explorations were marked by gloom and frostbite and much tragedy. And yet – to enter the unknown. It seems an impossibility now, a fantasy. To navigate into the blue horizon which was not named. The world that was not named.
This book is also about so much more. A superb read for those who love winter, to be read during winter -- but also for those who do not love winter, to be read outside of winter. It illuminates the cold world, revealing what is achingly alive, beautiful, and powerful in the monochromes and the blues. It also confirms my belief that most nature writing is poetic and deeply life-affirming.