"The greater part of this world is water." "[The fisherman's gaze was] panoramic, comprehensive and...highly mental. A strange view of abstraction....awash in the away, in the elsewhere, in the featureless, ever-changing country, the ocean where everything was reduced to nothing...much." |
Serendip is a web site devoted to a sort of science education that is playful, exploratory, self-directed, and generative of the new. Among its recent offerings has been an extensive exploration of questions about
Taking a leaf from each of those avenues of inquiry, this site highlights both the geographical distinctiveness of one part of the world, and the ways in which different sorts of thinking and habits of being may arise in different landscapes. On a recent trip to Iceland, as I recorded the strikingly inhospitable landscape of the island with my camera, I was also exploring a strikingly independent psychological landscape by reading a range of literary texts. I juxtapose those two forms of exploration here, as a means of representing, and inviting further reflection about, possible intersections between the interior and exterior worlds that make us human. Anne Dalke, June 2006 |
"Iceland looked like the moon, or maybe Mars. The terrain--he couldn't call it earth because it seemed to be lava--was red and rippled as if frozen in mid-flow." |
"Here silence, shot through with bird cries, and the visual equivalent of silence, these naked scarps of earth, monotomous, magnificent, and empty." |
"In the animal world [an only child] meant that a species had few natural predators. But humans had so many: fear, doubt, boredom." |
"They did not use here... right, left, up down, or any normal designations of direction; everything was according to a compass, as in, pass me that salt on your east, please." |
"It is a useful habit never to believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own." |
"...why should people who've been reared on independence describe what goes on in their minds? The mind is just like a weathercock. And just as apt to box the compass every five minutes." |
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