In December 2019 I finished
Horizon by Barry Lopez – what some say is an update to his landmark Arctic Dreams and other essays about the natural world. Ultimately, a testament of hope in the face of the crisis of climate change, the book points the way to an r/evolutionary change that could save us all.
Dear Mr. Lopez,
One day during my high school years I picked up and read Loren Eiseley’s “The Immense Journey”, which had been kicking around our house for as long as I could read, the title often scanned but never acknowledged. Eiseley’s essays transported me into an alternative reality, phase-shifted from our day to day, the pulse of time slowed enough to hear the voices we don’t stop to hear, to see the colors we don’t imagine, to absorb the wisdom that is there for our benefit.
On the morning after I finished Horizon, long before sunrise, I watched a star makes its way from the branches of a pine tree across the road into open sky as it followed the ecliptic, where it finally gave up its light to the morning sun. I thought about orreries, astrolabes, the elaborate celestial mechanics designed to explain the geocentric universe – with their complex errors to explain retrograde motion, and the simple correction of placing the sun in the center of our solar system. I thought about the complex orreries we have constructed to defend predatory mercantilism, and how a simple basic change in perspective could alter our precipitous path.
We spend half our lives facing the light, the other half facing what is obscured by the light. For the first time in my life, thanks in large part to you, I feel gratitude for the night wakefulness that makes visible what would otherwise be unnoticed. You have been one of my cherished companions since I first read Arctic Dreams. Horizon has given me hope, inspiration, strength and direction: start by taking the time to see what is in front of my eyes. Thank you so much.
with gratitude, Theodore Mook