Ansel Adams said “every experience is a form of exploration.” Technically true, but some explorers cover many more actual miles than others.

WORK

We were now at the end of the last long march of the upward journey. Yet with the Pole actually in sight I was too weary to take the last few steps. The accumulated weariness of all those days and nights of forced marches and insufficient sleep, constant peril and anxiety, seemed to roll across me all at once. I was actually too exhausted to realize at the moment that my life’s purpose had been achieved… . But, weary though I was, I could not sleep long. It was, therefore, only a few hours later when I woke. The first thing I did after awaking was to write these words in my diary: “The Pole at last. The prize of three centuries. My dream and goal for 20 years. Mine at last! I cannot bring myself to realize it. It seems all so simple and commonplace.”

—Robert E. Peary
—from The North Pole, 1910

At three in the afternoon a simultaneous “Halt!” rang out from the drivers. They had carefully examined their sledge-meters, and they all showed the full distance—our Pole by reckoning. The goal was reached, the journey ended. I cannot say—though I know it would sound much more effective—that the object of my life was attained. That would be romancing rather too bare-facedly. I had better be honest and admit straight out that I have never known any man to be placed in such a diametrically opposite position to the goal of his desires as I was at that moment. The regions around the North Pole—well, yes, the North Pole itself—had attracted me from childhood, and here I was at the South Pole. Can anything more topsy-turvy be imagined?

—Roald Amundsen
from The South Pole, 1913

WORD(S)

cicatrix /sick-A-trix/ or /SICK-a-trix/. noun. The scar over a healed wound. A scar in the bark of a tree. A mark or impression. In conchology, the glossy impression on the inside of the shell where muscles were attached. Variant: cicatrice.

“Good sparks and lustrous, a word, good metals. You
shall find in the regiment of the Spinii one Captain
Spurio, with his cicatrice, an emblem of war, here on his
sinister cheek; it was this very sword entrenched it.” (Shakespeare)

“She was a sibyl with a great, Dantean nose over a mouth thin as a cicatrix, which opened like a submarine flower, toothless but for two incisors and one skewed canine.” (Umberto Eco)

’An ugly cicatrix was crusted o’er;
‘Twas Jeanne’s delight to pick and bleed the sore.
She comes and shows her hand in piteous case,
And says, “I’ve pulled the skin from off the place.”’ (Victor Hugo)

WEB

1. Looking for something to watch and in need of tasty brain food? You could do worse than Paste magazine’s list of the 50 best documentaries on NetFlix.

2. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, casual or not, then you will probably enjoy the free, online Shakespeare Magazine.

3. Produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, these paper cards and postcards depicted the artists’ visions of life in the year 2000. Some are rather accurate (in spirit if not in detail).

4. Alexa Meade’s optically compressed photo-portraiture is seriously trippy.

5. Today in 1975, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. Listen to Hoffa and Robert Kennedy interviewed in 1959. Watch the 1980 (Leonard Nimoy narrated) episode of In Search of… on the mystery. Read a comprehensive story on Hoffa’s disappearance in the Crime Library.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• More photos of abandoned places, this time “Abandoned Iceland” by Þorsteinn H. Ingibergsson.

• Reader A., of North Carolina, following up on her fine state’s poet laureate debacle, notes that they actually ran a contest to find a less qualified candidate than the governor’s appointee and directs my attention to a poet whose work will now appear here later in the week. She’s not kidding when she says North Carolinians “take our BBQ and poetry very seriously.”

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