A Commonplace Entry

Natural Man

  
   Man, bone by bone, flint by flint, has been traced backward into the night of time more successfully than even Darwin dreamed. He has been traced to a creature with an almost gorilloid head on the light, fast body of a still completely upright, plains-dwelling creature. In the end he partakes both of Darwinian toughness, resilience, and something else, a humanity---if this story is true---that runs well nigh as deep as time itself.

   Man has, in scientific terms, become natural, but the nature of his "naturalness" escapes him. Perhaps his human freedom has left him the difficult choice of determining what it is in his nature to be. Perhaps the two sides of the dark question Darwin speculated upon were only an evolutionary version of man's ancient warfare with himself---a drama as great in its hidden fashion as the story of the Garden and the Fall. (pp 113-114, The Firmament of Time)

The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley. Atheneum, 1969 (1960)

Antarctic Adventure

The Worst Journey In The World 

by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

"The flowers were of snow, the rivers of ice, and if Stevenson had been to the Antarctic he would have made them so. (p 255)

Who would have guessed that a slight, young, recent Oxford graduate who paid for his passage with Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition would not only survive the ordeal but also write a classic narrative of his adventure? I might have been surprised had I not recently been reading the biography of young Teddy Roosevelt who overcame early physical weakness and dire diagnoses from his doctors to become a legendary explorer himself (and much more). Apsley Cherry-Garrard (known as "Cherry" on the expedition) narrates a story of the expedition that is both a moving account of their fateful Polar journey and a superb group portrait of Scott and his team.  The physical ordeals that Scott's team endures, the fateful decisions, hardships beyond imagination and ultimately death are portrayed in a penetrating and suspenseful narrative.  One thing that distinguishes Cherry-Garrard's tale are the literary references that inhabit the narrative;  from the chapter epigraphs to his own literary writing style they more than embellish an already taut and exhilarating tale.  I will set this beside another of my favorite Antarctic adventure narrative, Endurance, Alfred Lansing's narrative of Sir Ernest Shackleton's incredible voyage. I recommend the adventure narratives of both Cherry-Garrard and Lansing to all who love great tales of adventure.

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. The Adventure Library, 1997 (1922).

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places

by Bill Streever

It has been said that feathers evolved first to protect birds from the cold, and later the birds realized or learned or somehow found out that feathers, managed in just the right way, would allow the convenience of flight. (p 135)


Bill Streever's book, Cold, is subtitled "Adventures in the World's Frozen Places". It read like a natural history of the climate of cold with almost everything you might want to know about cold from the scientific discovery of absolute zero to the development of high-tech clothing to augment if not surpass the use of nature's wool and fur to keep warm when it is cold. Using the calendar year - starting and ending in the summer - the author takes you on ever colder adventures and explorations of the nature and meaning of cold. He includes details of how animals cope with cold such as hibernation: what it is and how some animals use it while others use a variant of it to survive the cold of Winter.  His story is one that expands to include the way cold climate has shaped our planet and gave this reader pause to consider the massive forces that have been unleashed to raise and lower the earth's temperature over the millenia. Having grown up in an area of the Midwest United States whose contours were shaped by the last major ice age I found this book a fascinating education in who and what cold had effected elsewhere over history. Streever interlaces his personal adventures with natural history and science creating an educational and entertaining story of the continuing presence of cold in our lives.

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever. Little, Brown & Co. New York. 2009

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