Yesterday’s note sideswiped Barry Lopez’s fine essay, rather than hitting it head on. If you’re a writer and like to think about writing, I’d recommend it. Here’s a better attempt at telling you why the essay is intriguing:
Lopez was sitting in the room where he writes, reading Adolphus Greely’s mammoth account of the disastrous expedition he led into the Canadian Arctic in 1883-4. The report was interesting, and Lopez wanted to read it. But he kept getting distracted by the living environment in front of him — his room with its many interesting artifacts, including a model of a whaleboat, and the world outside his windows.
It’s the tension between wanting to read a reflection of a human encounter with nature world and wanting to encounter the natural world in front of you right now.
Two separate realities, inside and out, but they elide subtly.
Lopez argues we need both. We humans build whaleboats — inventions made of natural stuff — and we build them better by studying the experiences of other thoughtful people who’ve left us an account of their own struggles. But at some point, I must make my own and try it in a natural world that is dangerous as well as beautiful.
• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998. “The Whaleboat” is on pp. 175-87. The quotation is on p. 176.
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