When we imagine the polar regions, we see a largely lifeless world covered in snow and ice where icebergs drift listlessly through frozen waters, like solitary wanderers of the oceans floating aimlessly in total silence. But nothing could be further from the truth. This book takes us into the fascinating world of icebergs and glaciers to discover what they are really like. Through a series of historical vignettes recalling some of the most tragic and most exhilarating encounters between human beings and these gigantic pieces of matter, and through vivid descriptions of their cycles of birth and death, Olivier Remaud shows that these entities are teeming with many forms of life and that there is a deep continuity between iceberg life and human life, a complex web of reciprocal interconnections that can lead from the deadliest to the most vital. And precisely because there is this continuity, icebergs and glaciers tell us something important about life itself – namely, that it thrives in the most unexpected of places, even where there seems to be no life at all. At a time when we are increasingly aware that the melting of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice is one of the many disastrous consequences of global warming, this beautiful meditation is a poignant reminder of the interconnectedness of all life and the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystems.
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Olivier Remaud. Thinking Like an Iceberg
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Guide
Pages
Thinking Like an Iceberg
Acknowledgements
The Issue
PrologueThey are Coming!
1Through the Looking Glass
A game of hide and seek
Framing icebergs
The reign of the sublime
Lonely spectres
A story about skulls
Mirror, my beautiful mirror
Notes
2The Eye of the Glacier
So other, so close
Way up above
A vocabulary crisis
The wanderings of a happy man
Are icebergs whale calves?
The spirit of laws
Do not choose the wrong world
Notes
3Unexpected Lives
Disordered perception
Living ice
Iceberg portraits
All power to the verbs!
Incorporation/orientation
Noise and breath
The ear before anything else
Notes
4Social Snow
The original iceberg
Practical words
The sea ice as an institution
Sensitive colossi
‘We are sleepwalking’
Respecting distance
Notes
5A Less Lonely World
An endangered species
Empty or full?
Suddenly, nothing at all
Proof through emotion
The resistance of rocks
What separates and what unites
Notes
6Thinking Like an Iceberg
Notes
EpilogueReturn to the Ocean
POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Отрывок из книги
Olivier Remaud
Translated by Stephen Muecke
.....
Brendan’s epic was copied hundreds of times between the ninth and the thirteenth century, a real bestseller. Today’s commentators believe that the travelling monks saw an iceberg floating off the coast of Iceland. They would have entered the straits where icebergs calve off the coastal glaciers of Greenland.
At the time Church and Noble were travelling, icebergs were, in the European imagination, sometimes the ancestors of a geological age, sometimes creatures in the service of a sacred history. In both cases, they are icons of the sublime. Our narrator and the painter are not the only ones to see ‘floating mountains’ in the ocean, or cathedrals, ruins of lost cities, winding avenues, and sometimes even the face of the Creator. When ships are icebound, there is plenty of time to observe the landscape, and at such moments the romantic mind opens its toolbox and chooses the most expressive aides.
