This week I’ve been reading Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie’s book of essays. In ‘Aurora’, she visits what I presume is Norway. She sees fjords. She sees icebergs. She sees the northern lights. There is a discussion amongst the passengers on the boat about whether the northern lights keep you awake at night or not – ‘all that energy’.
They are just charged particles, trapped in the earth’s magnetic field. True, but aren’t we all?
She contrasts herself and her friend Polly who she has met on the trip with the doctors, dentists and engineers on the boat, ‘people, it would seem, of professional certainty’.
People like myself – and Polly, I suspect – who don’t quite know what we are. Who know only that we live short lives, that we float on the surface of a powerful silence, on the surface of a mile-deep fjord, with icebergs, that we’re driven by some sort of life force, flickering and green.
This made me think of the questioning of Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
“ ‘Seem like we’re just set down here,’ a woman said to me recently, ‘and don’t nobody know why.’”
At the same time, Dillard also hints at the impossibility of ever getting to the why. She describes how children are born wanting to learn where they are, but become diverted from this intent.
“Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighbourhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”
Kathleen Jamie is discovering the where. And perhaps discovering the where is one of the answers to why, and the what is to be an explorer.
Olivia Sprinkel 