Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard

carry them over the Pole, so Nansen and one companion set out one spring with dog sledges and kayaks to reach the Pole on foot. Conditions were too rough on the ice, however, so after reaching a record northern latitude, the two turned south toward land, wintering together finally in a stone hut on Franz Josef Land and living on polar bear meat. The following spring they returned, after almost three years, to civilization.
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    Nansen’s was the first of several drift expeditions. During World War I, members of a Canadian Arctic expedition camped on an ice floe seven miles by fifteen miles; they drifted for six months over four hundred miles in the Beaufort Sea. In 1937, an airplane deposited a Soviet drift expedition on an ice floe near the North Pole. Thesefour Soviet scientists drifted for nine months while their floe, colliding with grounded ice, repeatedly split into ever-smaller pieces.
    The Land
    I have, I say, set out again.
    The days tumble with meanings. The corners heap up with poetry; whole unfilled systems litter the ice.
    The Technology
    A certain Lieutenant Maxwell, a member of Vitus Bering’s second polar expedition, wrote, “You never feel safe when you have to navigate in waters which are completely blank.”
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    Cartographers call blank spaces on a map “sleeping beauties.”
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    On our charts I see the symbol for shoals and beside it the letters “P.D.” My neighbor in the pew, a lug with a mustache who has experience of navigational charts and who knows how to take a celestial fix, tells me that the initials stand for “Position Doubtful.”
    The Land
    To learn the precise location of a Pole, choose a clear, dark night to begin. Locate by ordinary navigation the Pole’s position within an area of several square yards. Then arrange on the ice in that area a series of loadedcameras. Aim the cameras at the sky’s zenith; leave their shutters open. Develop the film. The film from that camera located precisely at the Pole will show the night’s revolving stars as perfectly circular concentric rings.
    The Technology
    I have a taste for solitude, and silence, and for what Plotinus called “the flight of the alone to the Alone.” I have a taste for solitude. Sir John Franklin had, apparently, a taste for backgammon. Is either of these appropriate to conditions?
    You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.
    The Land
    I have put on silence and waiting. I have quit my ship and set out on foot over the polar ice. I carry chronometer and sextant, tent, stove and fuel, meat and fat. For water I melt the pack ice in hatchet-hacked chips; frozen salt water is fresh. I sleep when I can walk no longer. I walk on a compass bearing toward geographical north.
    I walk in emptiness; I hear my breath. I see my handand compass, see the ice so wide it arcs, see the planet’s peak curving and its low atmosphere held fast on the dive. The years are passing here. I am walking, light as any handful of aurora; I am light as sails, a pile of colorless stripes; I cry “heaven and earth indistinguishable!” and the current underfoot carries me and I walk.
    The blizzard is like a curtain; I enter it. The blown snow heaps in my eyes. There is nothing to see or to know. I wait in the tent, myself adrift and emptied, for weeks while the storm unwinds. One day it is over, and I pick up my tent and walk. The storm has scoured the air; the clouds have lifted; the sun rolls round the sky like a fish in a round bowl, like a