Philobiblon

p. 19

“The famous saga of Eric the Red may be called so but it is really about a skorungur, which is what we call a strong woman hero. Her name was Gudrid the Far-Traveller, his wife, and she lived in the 10^th century.” ….Like Thilda says, the Icelandic women are strong because they are descended from Vikings and conquerors and raised by the icy sea wings which sting their cheeks and the hot geyser steams which scald them. And in a land where fire and ice are in battle and care little for anything around them, all people must be strong … Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place… I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The outside that I know is broken to pieces and scattered. Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factor, a sugar beet factor and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a 30-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their gardens because the power station left radon in the topsoil.”

p. 268 Edmund Hillary the mountaineer climbed Everest because it was there. Astronaut Gene Cernan of Apollos 10 and 17, when asked why he thought we went to the moon, said because it’s there. When Tenzing Norgay the Sterpa got to the top of Everest he got on his knees, buried some biscuits in offering and prated to the goddess of the mountain for disturbing her. We should have gone to the moon like Tenzing Norgay. Maybe this really is the point in the age where everything changes, a rewriting of myths, a sort of coming-of-age of the human narrative. Remember that everyone mocked Copernicus at first when he said that maybe Earth did not sit at the centre of the universe, hey guys, maybe it does not all revolve around us. Which is what Lovelock and Margulis were saying too. These ideas do not instantaneously propagate. They resonate only once a situation occurs that prompts their germination.”