Sunday sketch / a book

 

 

"How many days it takes is difficult to say. For here

there are no days because there are no nights. One day

melts into the next, and you cannot say this is the end

of today and now it is tomorrow and that was yesterday.

It is always light, the sea is always murmuring, and the

mist stands immovable as a wall around the hut.[…]

The way to the lagoon is like a journey into the incorporeal.

Mist above us and around us, and under our feet nothing

but stones. Large, broken, sharp-edged stones."

 

—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

 

 

"We make our way along the famously beautiful coast,

until one day we notice that northward the world is growing

lighter and lighter, more bleak and more lonely. The nights

do not darken. Bare and craggy mountaintops jut out the livid

light of the water. A strange cool wind blows to me out of this

primeval landscape. It might be the world in the last days of

the Flood."

 

"When she tries to take a photograph, Ritter says,

"It seems to me a deadly sin to steal a piece of this

supernatural scene and carry it away with me."

[...]"A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to

everyone", she would say regularly later in life.

"Then you will come to realize what's important

in life and what isn't."

 

—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

1938 / Foreward by Sara Wheeler

 

 

polar bear

"Partway across a refrozen lead the bear pauses motionless,

one paw off the ground. Her head tilts and the small ears

pivot independently. She puts the paw down. She sniffs the air

at several levels, then the head is still, the attention fixed."

(Barry Lopez)

pisugtooq

"Nothing - no laboratory result or field-camp speculation -
can replace the rich, complex texture, the credibility, of something
that takes place 'out there'. And scientists working in the field know
that what they see in the field always has the potential to contradict
what they have read or been told.

[...] No matter how long you watch, you will not see all it(he) can do."

(Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams)

* the Eskimos of northwest Greenland call the 
polar bear 'pisugtooq', the great wanderer