Landscape, Desire, Knowledge

The world evinced by Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams is one which defies an easy explanation. To some it is an icy wasteland, a wilderness to conquer. To others it is home. In his travels with “Eskimos hunting narwhals off northern Baffin Island” and “marine ecologists on hundreds of miles of coastal and near shore surveys” and “landscape painters in the Canadian archipelago” and “rough-necks drilling for oil,” Lopez seeks to bend his understanding to the necessities of the land. “How does the land shape the imaginations of the people who dwell in it?” he asks. “How does desire itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge?” The book goes on to demonstrate how these questions, if not answerable objectively, might at least be approached. In one particularly instructive scene, Lopez describes being dropped off on a remote island and having to say goodbye to some companions with whom he had been traveling. They ask him to carry some letters back to civilization and mail them home to their families. This small gesture sparks something in Lopez: “I thought about the great desire among friends and colleagues and travelers who meet on the road to share what they know, what they have seen and imagined. Not to have a shared understanding, but to share what one has come to understand.” In a world that will not bow to our will, that shapes and is shaped by human desire, in which our actions reverberate farther and longer than we can know—in such a mysterious and terrifying and wonderful place, the humble sharing of our understandings, which are necessarily fragmentary and incomplete (and therefore supple and ever-expanding), the sharing of what we have come to understand trumps the small-mindedness of calling knowledge only that upon which we can all agree. Imagine the results if we cultivated such reverence and humility in our day-to-day lives. 

(image source here)