The Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Kolbert

Author:Elizabeth Kolbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2007-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Change, change, change throughout the Antarctic century. What we think we see, in the far South, shifts with our own preoccupations, like the jumbled icefloes in Antarctic waters which have seemed to travellers to morph into very different architectures, depending on who was doing the looking, and when. Captain Scott’s men saw the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral going by; Lieutenant Shirase’s saw ruined temples. Look for modernist purity in the tabular bergs, and you find it. Look for tentacular, Gaudi-esque curlicues, and you find them too. Yet the ice’s repertoire of shapes has been the same all century long.

When the Antarctic makes its astonishing impact on the senses, people try their damnedest to describe it. That’s why there has been so much good writing about it, over the single century of its human history. People have constantly measured up the powers of language against it. But being in Antarctica is also a constant reminder of language’s secondary status, of description’s belated appearance on any scene. Nowhere else on Earth is it so clear that a place has an integrity apart from what we might say about it. Nowhere are words so obviously ineffectual a response to what just, massively, exists, whole and complete and in no real need of translation. Words, Antarctica teaches us, are not what the world is made of. Stop listening to me, then. Step aside, and sit down on that wind-carved boulder. Sit for a while: there are mountains in the distance to which the best response is hush. Take a long, silent look at the treasures of the snow.

But remember to get moving again while you can still feel your toes.

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