The Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time.

[When I began to read Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, I really had no idea what to expect; I thought it was going to be in the same vein as John McPhee or Pico Iyer, authors whom I admire greatly, both for their brilliant mastery of earth science and anthropology.  I thought perhaps there would be a reminiscence of Gaston Bachelard, or perhaps Henri Michaux,  by virtue of the subtitle "Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape."  But what I have discovered about this book is more than beautifully written paragraphs of scientific insight, more than its pages of geologic mystery and fascinating biological and evolutionary narrative.  This book captures my spirit as much as it does my intellect.  I am glad to have had it recommended to me, and am equally glad to recommend it to you.  This is my second post on the subject; there will be more.  Below are excerpts from Chapter 5, Migration: The Corridors of Breath.  --M.]

Time pools in the stillness here and then dissipates.  The country is emptied of movement.  The coming and going of the animals during the short summer gives the Arctic a unique rhythmic shape.... 

Time here like light is a passing animal..., hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses althgother like a bird keeled over with a heart attack, leaving the stillness we call death.

No wild frenzy of feeding distinguishes the short summer.  But for the sudden movements of charging wolves and bolting caribou, ...the Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time.  

To lie on your back somewhere on the light-drowned tundra of an Ellesmere Island valley is to feel that the ice ages might have ended but a few days ago.  

  

How very far from Mesopotamia we have come.

We list the butterflies...we delineate the life history of the ground squirrel...we name everything...then we fold the charts and the catalogs, as if we were done with a competent description.

But the land is not a painting....

Lying flat on your back on Ellesmere Island on rolling tundra without animals, without human trace, you can feel the silence stretching all the way to Asia. 

 

You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand.  The stillness, the pure light, encourage it.

--Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams