In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

POLARITIES 175
did you find that pole?" Pooh looked at the pole in his hands. "I just
found it," he said. "I thought it ought to be useful. 1 just picked it up."
"Pooh," said Christopher Robin solemnly, "the Expedition is over. You
have found the North Pole!" "Oh!" said Pooh. (116-117)
For the international public, the North Pole and the South Pole are
not merely "things to be discovered." Despite the considerable talents of
Amundsen and others in self-promotion and sales technique, the poles
are much more than marks that motivate intense competitions and then
disappear from the collective mind. Those who follow the voyages of
self-declared "explorers" in the daily papers are encouraged to imagine
the polar regions as zones where human life becomes the object of
strange and uncontrollable forces. When the New York Times, on September
25, publishes an article entitled "Arctic Crime of Seventeen Years
Ago," concerning the murder of Ross Marvin by two Eskimos during
Peary's North Pole expedition of 1909, it strongly emphasizes the "unnatural
behavior" underlying this crime: "The brown native of the Far
North has certain childlike qualities. Under pressure of hardship and
anxiety he becomes panicky . . . the Eskimo will under such circumstances
behave in an altogether unnatural way. He will steal, mutiny, or
desert. Yet theft, defiance, or rebellion may be furthest from his usual
character." Such influences are associated with the specific geophysical
conditions of the polar regions. After their flight over the North Pole,
Byrd and Bennet describe at length how they succeeded in navigating
without magnetic compasses, which are unusable in that zone of the
planet (Annties-memoire, 117). Paul Morand uses anthropomorphic
terms to describe the simple fact that the earth can be circumnavigated
more quickly at its poles than at the Equator: "If one wants to go around
the world several times in an hour, one should go to the Pole and make
tight turns around it. If one prefers indolent tourism and the illusion of
space, one should go toward the Equator. There, the globe with its frozen
extremities hides its burning loins in a thick cloth of vegetation. Its
stomach roasts in the sun" (9). [see Ocean Liners]
In similar reflections, and in the enterprises and experiments that
trigger them, the fact of the earth's roundness-hitherto known only
theoretically-is being transformed into a dimension of everyday experience.
While Byrd, Bennet, and Morand challenge, in different ways, the
premise that the world is a physically homogeneous space [see Uncer-