"Atmosphere Mingled with Distance"
From Annie Dillard's "An Expedition to the Poles."
When I woke I walked out into the colorless stripes and the revolving winds, where atmosphere mingled with distance, and where land, ice, and light blurred into a dreamy, freezing vapor which, lacking anything else to do with the stuff, I breathed. Now and then a white bird materialized out of the vapor and screamed. It was, in short, what one might, searching for words, call a beautiful land; it was more beautiful still when the sky cleared and the ice shone in the dark water.
This from Annie Dillard’s experimental essay, “An Expedition to the Poles,” where she provides a detailed history of polar exploration wedded to personal experience wedded to a philosophical deep dive into the metaphorical and metaphysical implications of what it means to find a place of “relative inaccessibility.”
The essay appears in the collection Teaching a Stone to Talk.* Every essay in the collection is a thrilling example of creative nonfiction at its finest.
*This affiliate link provides me with a small commission at no extra cost to you (and supports small, independent bookstores).
I can identify with this. Very special