Horizon

"Arctic Dreams is a really seminal book that was published back in 1986. I remember reading it and feeling very moved by his writing. It evoked the austerity of the Far North in a way that was also quite lush, if that doesn’t sound too contradictory. Both Arctic Dreams and Horizon are really long. Lopez gives himself room to spool out ideas in prose that’s just exquisite, but also engaging. Part of his project is to show that the spaces we think of as being empty, such as the icy vast expanses at the poles, are full—not only of nature but also of culture. This book is the culmination of a lifetime of travel, not just to the polar extremes but all over the world. It takes the form of a series of layered reminiscences and retellings. Meaning emerges in recollection and in revisiting. Part of what Lopez wants to say is that we can never come to the end of our knowledge of a place, no matter how often we revisit it. But the implication is also that we can know some places better over time, through the wisdom of accumulated experience. It starts in the third person, but that’s a narrative device. He’s playing with questions like, how do we get close to things, how do we get perspective, and, what can we ever really know? He starts off with a vignette from his own youth. Then the book becomes a first-person memoir, but there’s no strict chronological order. Lopez jumps around in time and place. He’s trying to create the sense, I think, that progress is illusory, that the only way we can approach truth or wisdom is circular or cyclical. In similar terms that Powers eventually allows himself to get to, Lopez engages quite directly with the question of how we are going to steward the planet. What are the answers to the insults that we’ve visited on the planet? He asks, “What act of imagination will it finally require for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate?” “What are the answers to the insults that we’ve visited on the planet?” What I like about the book is that it refuses to separate the natural and the social or, as he puts it here, the biological and the cultural. He shows that places we think of as wildernesses are homes for indigenous people from whom we need to learn essential things. The book is really a series of meditations on how can we learn from each other, and from the people whom we haven’t been willing to listen to in the past. He goes all over the place. He goes to the Canadian Arctic, off the coast of Greenland. He goes to the Antarctic. He spends time on Cape Foulweather, the point on the Oregon coast where Captain Cook made his first landfall on the northwest coast of what was then New Albion. He spends time in Australia, in the outback; in Kenya; the Galapagos. You get the sense of a man who’s quite well connected and has this insatiable desire for travel. But it’s a kind of travel that’s very thoughtful. He wants to go to places and listen. That means listening for the echoes of the past as well as the contemporary concerns of the people who live there. He does this all in the mode of landscape writing , but what’s really interesting about him is that he manages to save it from just being a purely aesthetic appreciation of the land. Instead, it’s infused with the question of the moral and ethical implications of our relationships with other people on the planet and even relationships with people in the past and in the future. Those are the kinds of things that we haven’t found a language for, politically, and that’s why a writer like Lopez is so helpful because he can make explicit the question of, ‘How can we think about our obligations to the future?’ And write that down in a way that you can return to and re-consider from a new perspective. It’s a really long book, so it takes time to read. That in itself is a form of disciplined engagement. We should be taking more time to think about these things. It’s a book to savour. It’s not a book to rush."