Ten hours out from Santiago, and my journey has one last mighty dose of context to force upon me. From my window I have a perfect view of the horizontal smile of the quarter-crescent moon, and am captivated by its reflections on the wing and, far below, on the surface of the ocean. In the southern hemisphere, of course, the moon and constellations appear upside-down compared with our familiar northern orientation; seeing the moon now on its side, and watching the southern stars recede behind the wing, gives me a sudden and quite disarming sense of the shape of our world, and of the shallowness of the tiny habitat that we're so appallingly bad at sharing.
It's an odd thing for someone with a Wittgensteinian view of language to say (although if you've been reading this blog you'll know that I'm hardly averse to saying odd things) but the view from up here is a beautiful yet merciless reminder that what's out there is what there is, and there isn't anything else.
Having spent the past few weeks considering the work of the Antarctic (and indeed lunar) pioneers - exploring exploration itself, I suppose – I've reached no profound (nor even trivial) conclusions (other than that my photography could do with improvement, and my prose could do with fewer clauses in brackets.) However, I've arrived at a something that appears to be, at least, a procedural restriction. (It also appears to be cribbed shamelessly from set theory and Kurt Godel, but there you go.) We can describe, delineate and eulogise the universe, but all we're doing is measuring ourselves against the bits we've noticed: it remains brutally inflexible and insensitive to our theories and our opinions. Its final, impenetrable defence against our attempts fully to understand it is the unanswerable fact that it INCLUDES us.
I can detect the fingers of M. Gladwell twitching to tear into this obvious piffle (and to accuse me of having become an arch-realist) but such shenanigans will have to wait until I'm back in a eulogised bit of the universe that serves Harvest Pale.
