It is freezing, an extraordinary –18°C, and it's snowing, and in the language which is no longer mine, the snow is qanik—big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.

— First lines

That's how I remember my own childhood. That we always played outside, and that it was always light. In those days we took the light for granted. A child takes so many things for granted. With time, you begin to ask questions.

"What makes you think the boy was being chased?"

"There was snow on the roof that he fell from. I saw his footprints. I have a feeling for snow."

Any race that allows itself to be measured on a grade skill designed by Europeans will appear to be a culture of higher primates.

Grading is meaningless. Every attempt to compare cultures with the intention of determining which is the most developed will never be anything other than one more bullshit projection of Western culture's hatred of its own shadow.

There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless.

"There's nothing 'local' left any more I said. "If something happens in Greenland, it's connected to something else in Singapore."

In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world. A focused, sporadically selective view. When you scan a desert or an ice flow, you see with different eyes You let the details slip out of focus in favour of the whole.

Those who have travelled enough in places where it's very cold will sooner or later find themselves in a situation where survival means staying awake. Death is built into sleep. The person who freezes to death goes to sleep, and the one who is buried under an avalanche of compact, wet snow falls asleep before suffocating to death.

Tell us, they'll come and say to me. So we may understand and close the case. They're wrong. It's only what you do not understand that you can come to a conclusion about. There will be no conclusion.

— Last lines

Critique • Quotes