Nehaveigur

Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez still shows the Soviet Union on its maps of the Arctic. There is no mention of global warming, unthinkable for any contemporary report about the region. That’s because it came out in 1986, but that hardly matters. The important parts are untouched by time.

One  thread that winds its way through the book is made of light.

Sitting high on a sea cliff on sunny, blustery weather in late June – the familiar sense of expansiveness, of deep exhilaration such weather brings over one, combined with the opportunity to watch animals, is summed up in a single Eskimo word: quviannikumut, “to feel deeply happy”.

Where there is light, there’s darkness:

Winter darkness brings on the extreme winter depression the Polar Eskimo call perlerorneq. According to the anthropologist Jean Malaurie, the word means to fell “the weight of life.”

Eskimos, today more commonly known as Inuit in North America, aren’t the only ones who seek light.

A comparison with cathedrals has come to many Western minds in searching for a metaphor for icebergs, and I think the reasons for it are deeper than the obvious appropriateness of line and scale. It has to do with our passion for light. Cathedral architecture signaled a quantum leap forward in European civilization. The gothic cathedral churches, with their broad bays of sunshine, flying buttresses that let windows rise where once there had been stone in the walls, and harmonious interiors – this “architecture of light” was a monument to a newly created theology. “God is light,” writes a French cultural historian of the era, Georges Duby, and “every creature stems from that initial, uncreated, creative light.” Robert Grosseteste, the twelfth-century founder of Oxford University, wrote that “physical light is the best, the most delectable, the most beautiful of all the bodies that exist.”

That’s the sort of tangent that makes Arctic Dreams relevant almost 40 years after it was published. And this:

Occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different. In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadow, and what is lost is profound. The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

Lopez died in 2020.