Recent Reading: Arctic Dreams

Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams is certainly a unique book. It is a difficult book to summarize. Here is some of what Michiko Kakutani wrote about the book in the NYTimes in 1986:

…Having spent some five years traveling through the Arctic, Mr. Lopez possesses a deep, almost mystical reverence for nature and the land; and while this results in a handful of passages tinged with a sort of Whole Earth Catalogue sentimentality (is it possible, he wonders at one point, for man ''to live at moral peace with the universe?'') most of ''Arctic Dreams'' is set down in lucid, gracious prose. Drawing upon the work of geologists, explorers, anthropologists, archeologists and biologists, in addition to assorted myths and bits of Eskimo lore, Mr. Lopez begins by conjuring up, for his readers, an impressionistic, collage-like picture of the North. Rather than distracting the reader, the narrative digressions gradually take on a kind of organic order, as the author loops back and forth from the philosophical to the scientific, the metaphoric to the specific. A glimpse of sunlight glinting off an iceberg, for instance, will remind him of a painting by a landscape artist, which will remind him of cathedral architecture, which will bring him back to man's passion for light, his craving to come to terms with nature and God.

… In writing about the animal life of the Arctic, Mr. Lopez does not merely use facts and biological data to illustrate ecological theories; he uses them, like John McPhee, to create a dense matrix of observation and research that slowly draws the reader into a palpable world. Take, for one, his minutely detailed descriptions of the polar bear, which acquire an almost novelistic charm. We learn that polar bears are so well insulated that they have trouble getting rid of excess heat (which they deal with by eating snow), that they build dens using the same principles of architecture employed by the Eskimos in building igloos, that they are said to cover their dark noses with a paw or a piece of snow when they are stalking a seal. What's more, in learning all this, we somehow manage to come away with a sense of what a polar bear's life is like, and why the animal plays such a symbolic role in native Eskimo culture.

Here is one passage I marked that I liked:

    The aspiration of aboriginal people throughout the world has been to achieve a congruent relationship with the land, to fit well in it. To achieve occasionally a state of high harmony or reverberation. The dream of this transcendent community included the evolution of a hunting and gathering relationship with the earth, in which a mutual regard was understood to prevail; but it also meant a conservation of the stories that bind people into the land.