The Library of Ice
Page 27
‘unexpectedly wide and so strange . . .’ ‘A Winter Walk’, in H. D. Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer (New York, NY: Penguin, 2012).
‘The residents of Concord have continued . . .’ see Richard B. Primack, Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
‘If a writer of prose knows enough . . .’ Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968).
‘I looked to the north at the two ranges of mountains . . .’ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York, NY: Scribner, 2014).
‘Snow is truly a sign of mourning . . .’ in Giuseppe Ungaretti, Lettere a Soffici (Florence: Sansoni, 1981). Translation by Mark Thompson, in Chapter 17 ‘Whiteness’, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919 (London: Faber & Faber, 2008).
‘It could be a game of Cluedo . . .’ This account of the ‘Alpine accident’ is based on the facts given by Konrad Spindler in The Man in the Ice: The Discovery of a 5,000-Year-Old Body, translated by Ewald Osers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994).
‘The men . . . sorrowed so deeply . . .’ Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos, quoted in David A. Morrison and G.-H. Germain, Inuit: Glimpses of an Arctic Past, (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1995).
‘A gold mine which opened to great excitement . . .’ ‘The Nalunaq Gold Mine’ in a special issue of Geology and Ore No. 11 (February 2008).
EPILOGUE
Old Icelandic Rune poem, translated by Nancy Campbell.
‘a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen . . .’ The editions used are H. D. Thoreau, Walden: Or Life in the Woods (London: Penguin Illustrated Classics, 1938) and The Journal 1837–1861, edited by Damion Searls (New York, NY: NYRB Classics, 2009).
‘Winter never rots in the sky . . .’ in Gavin Weightman, The Frozen Water Trade (London: HarperCollins, 2010).
‘Map of Fresh Pond showing the division lines of the proprietors extended into the pond and defining their right to the same as decided by Simon Greenleaf & S. M. Felton, commissioners’ by George A. Parker in the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection, Boston Public Library, G3764. C2:2F7 1841 .P3x.
‘Its demands are peremptory . . .’ in Foster Smith, quoting the Annual Reports of the RailRoad Corporations in the State of Mass., Boston, MA, 1844, in Ice Carrying Trade at Sea: the proceedings of a symposium held at the National Maritime Museum on 8 September 1979, edited by D. V. Proctor.
‘The glaciologist Louis Agassiz . . .’ For this connection, I am grateful to Laura Dassow Walls for her excellent biography, Henry David Thoreau (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
‘How many Calcutta tables glittered . . .’ in Joachim Stocqueler, The Memoirs of a Journalist (Bombay and London: The Times of India, 1873).
‘Immediately . . . I was afflicted . . .’ Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Undertakers’, in The Second Jungle Book (London: Macmillan, 1962).
‘The Door for entering this Ice house . . .’ in Papers of Robert Morris: 1781–1784 Vol. 9, edited by Elizabeth M. Nuxoll and Mary A. Gallagher (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
‘Opened the Well in my Cellar . . .’ in Sylvia P. Beamon and Susan Roaf, The Ice-houses of Britain (London: Routledge, 1990).
The map of Atlantis is ‘Situs Insulae Atlantidis, a mari olim absorpte ex mente Aegyptiorum et Platonis descriptio’ in Athanasius Kircher, Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1665).
‘But afterwards there occurred . . .’ Plato, Timaeus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html (accessed 31 May 2018).
Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis), in the collections of Dia: Beacon, https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/smithson-robert-map-of-broken-glass-atlantis-1969-2013-027 (accessed 31 May 2018).
On sea-level rise, see J. L. Bamber and W. P. Aspinall, ‘An expert judgement assessment of future sea level rise from the ice sheets’, Nature Climate Change Vol. 3, No. 4 (April 2013) pp. 424–7, and also https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1778 (accessed 31 May 2018).
‘the excesses of larger and more powerful countries . . .’ Address by Mr Gaston Alphonso Browne, prime minister and minister for finance and corporate governance of Antigua and Barbuda, in the Official Records of the United Nations General Assembly Seventieth Session, 23rd plenary meeting, New York, 1 October 2015, A/70/PV.23.
‘snow Pits . . . sunk in the most solitary and cool’d places’ in Boyle’s New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold (London: 1665).
‘searching for ice-houses in out of the way places . . .’ and following, in Beamon and Roaf, The Ice-houses of Britain.
C. Schultz-Lorentzen, Dictionary of the West Greenland Eskimo Language (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1927).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The travels described in this book took place over seven years. My first journey to Upernavik in Greenland in 2010 was supported in part by Grants for the Arts from Arts Council England; without this funding my explorations of cold climates would not have begun. It was an immense privilege to spend time with the people of Upernavik and this book is a testament to their generosity in sharing their abundant knowledge, as well as scarce resources. The following institutions also provided valuable space to research and write: Ilulissat Kunstmuseum, Greenland; Doverodde Book Arts Centre, Denmark; Hawthornden Castle, Scotland; Herhusið, Siglufjörður, Iceland; the Gunnar Gunnarsson Institute, Iceland; Jan Michalski Foundation, Switzerland; and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. My thanks to the staff at these institutions, who gave freely of their time and knowledge, as did others at British Antarctic Survey and Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge; the Lit & Phil, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Royal Academy, London. I am grateful to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers for a grant to travel to the United States to view Thoreau’s manuscripts at the Morgan Library in New York and work at The Lone Oak Press in Massachusetts.
Special thanks to my agent Kirsty McLachlan, at DGA Ltd, for her insight and encouragement, and to editors Rowan Cope and Jo Dickinson at Simon & Schuster for their belief in the manuscript and care in guiding it to publication. Thanks also to Caroline Blake for her copy-editing, and to Jo Whitford and the wider team at Simon & Schuster. Several editors and curators gave me commissions which kept my mind on the Arctic while I was back in the UK: I am grateful to Phil Owen, of Tertulia; Francesca Goodwin, of Fabelist; Mike Sims, publications manager at The Poetry Society; Sebastian Carter, editor of Parenthesis; Mark Goldthorpe, of ClimateCultures; Em Strang, Nick Hunt and Charlotte Du Cann, of Dark Mountain; Sam Phillips, at RA Magazine; and Will Eaves, Anna Vaux and Catharine Morris, at The Times Literary Supplement. Thanks too, to Thea Lenarduzzi for commissioning a feature on Greenland for what turned out to be the last printed Sunday edition of the Independent. The section on ice cores was first published as ‘The Library of Ice’ on Terrain.org, having won the journal’s 2012 Non-Fiction Contest; my thanks to Julian Hoffman, who awarded the prize, and to editor Simmons Buntin. Roni Gross of Z’roah Press in New York is an inspiration, in art as in life; she published my first poems about Upernavik, and I remain thankful for her continued support of my work. I wish to express my deep appreciation of Mary Jean Chan and Theophilus Kwek, friends and former co-editors at Oxford Poetry, who supported my decision to step down from editorial responsibilities to complete this manuscript.
I am grateful to the artists and other individuals who shared their experiences and ideas through interviews – in particular Carmen Braden, Bill Jacklin RA and Emma Stibbon RA. I also wish to thank many others, not named in the text, with whom I’ve discussed either books or ice or both, including Helen Barr, Kaddy Benyon, Julia Bird, Sarah Bodman, Isabel Brittain, Chris Calver, Vahni Capildeo, David Collard, Edwina Ellis, Nick Gingell, James Gledhill, Dennis Harrison, Nasim Marie Jafry, Ralph Kiggell, Bernard Kops, Robert Lock, Helen Mitchell, Eleanor Morgan, Kirsten Norrie, Judith Palmer, Clementine Perr
ins, Katie Potter, Russell Potter, Paul Preece, Dan Richards, Jane Rushton, Lavinia Singer, Andrew Smardon, Bethan Stevens, Stephen Stuart-Smith, Matthew Teller, Pierre Tremblay, Mark Turin, Lindy Usher, Ruth Valentine and Lefteris Yakoumakis. Thanks especially to David Borthwick, who reminded me of the etymology of ‘ecology’. Last but not least a warm thank you to Nick Drake, whose collection The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe) contains a poem voiced by an ice-core sample or ‘the library of ice’, for graciously sharing this phrase with me. The works of numerous authors fed my imagination during my travels; many of these books are mentioned in the text. One which is not is Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, which kept me company on my journey to Upernavik and informed much of my subsequent thinking on the Arctic. With such good study guides, any mistakes which appear in The Library of Ice must remain my own.
On my travels I met many people who influenced the shape of this book. (To protect the privacy of individuals, some names have been changed in the text.) My thanks to everyone who helped me on the road and in the snow, especially Haukur Einarsson, Sindri Bessason and Þórey Gísladóttir at Glacier Adventure, Iceland; Lizzie Meek at Antarctic Heritage Trust; Naomi Chapman at The Polar Museum; the HERA-funded Arctic Encounters research group at the University of Leeds; Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck, and Liz and Lars Hempel-Jørgensen in Denmark; Ole and Thrine Gamst-Pedersen and Nivi Christensen in Greenland; the Scottish Arctic Club; Helena Dejak, Kristján Jóhannsson, Örlygur Kristfinnsson, Guðný Róbertsdóttir, Björn Valdimarsson and Ólöf Sæunn Valgarðsdóttir in Iceland; and Dervla Murphy in Ireland. Serge and Caroline Zvegintzov expanded my library through book loans, as did Catherine Zvegintzov with gifts. My parents Colin and Anne Campbell taught me to respect nature and encouraged me to look searchingly at writers’ and artists’ representations of it, and Kenneth and Eithne Campbell have fostered my curiosity about the world for years, beginning with an early subscription to National Geographic. Finally, my profound thanks to Anna Zvegintzov, without whose love and patient support this book could never have been completed.
ADDITIONAL COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Excerpt from Kevin Crossley Holland’s translation of Riddle 69 from The New Exeter Book of Riddles used by permission of Enitharmon Editions © 2008 by Enitharmon Press, www.enitharmon.co.uk.
Excerpt from LETTERS TO FRIENDS, FAMILY, AND EDITORS by Franz Kafka, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, translation copyright © 1977 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Schocken Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for permission.
Excerpt from ‘Sur’ by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright in the United States, its territories, the Philippines and Canada © 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in the New Yorker in 1982. Then again in The Compass Rose, published by HarperCollins in 1982. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. All other territories: The Compass Rose © Ursula K. Le Guin, 1982, first published in Great Britain in 2015 by Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, London.
Excerpt from ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever. First appeared in the New Yorker in 1964. Then again in The Stories of John Cheever, 1978. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1979, first published by Vintage in 1990, imprints of Penguin Random House UK.
Excerpts from ‘Journey to Iceland’ by W.H. Auden, first published in Poetry Vol. 49, No. 4 (January 1937). Then again in Letters From Iceland, first published by Faber & Faber in 1937.
Excerpt from ‘Lecture on Nothing’ from Silence: Lectures and Writings © 1961 by John Cage. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.
Nancy Campbell is an award-winning writer, described as ‘a deft, dangerous and dazzling new poet’ by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Her previous book on the polar environment, Disko Bay, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2016. A former magazine editor, she contributes to the Times Literary Supplement, Royal Academy Magazine and other journals. She has been a Marie Claire ‘Wonder Woman’, a Hawthornden Fellow and Visual and Performing Artist in Residence at Oxford University. She lives in Oxford.
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