Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The garden and its structures, built so an emperor could play at being a hermit-philosopher, do not show how he lived, given that he never lived there. Rather, they show how he thought: it is how he wanted paradise to look. It is an essay about the end of life, a musing on what it means to grow old. In its immoderate poetry, luxurious appointments, and baroque austerity, it expresses the ambiguities of power and detachment. Marie Antoinette was given to simulating ingenuousness with her shepherdess’s crook at her Hameau in Versailles about the same time the Qianlong Emperor was building the retirement garden, but what seems like affectation in her points to a genuine idealism in him. On the cloisonné plaque that hung in the Juanqinzhai are the emperor’s words: “Purity and order in the mind on tens of thousands of issues are to be held in one heart.” An emperor’s life entails the chaos of an unruly realm; the retirement garden was to be the place where so complicated a life could be made lucid, yet remain undiminished.

ANTARCTICA

Adventures in Antarctica

Travel + Leisure, November 2008

Disaster tourism is a dubious trade in taking people to see vanishing places before they are lost—though the hope is that letting people see them will inspire those people to fight to save them. Antarctica is acutely vulnerable. As huge pieces of it melt and the temperature of the sea changes, the world’s ecosystems are thrown into crisis. It is always more shocking to see a great man fall than a lesser one; that is why we read the tragedies of history so closely, and why the heroes in Shakespeare are so often kings. Antarctica is a mighty emperor about to dissolve.

It would have been worth noting, when my husband and I signed up for the Nimrod Centennial Expedition to Antarctica, that Sir Ernest Shackleton’s pole-seeking Nimrod expedition had been a failure, and that venturing south under his name might be tempting fate. But we were trying to do only what he had accomplished—in fact, only part of what he had accomplished—and not what he had aspired to do. With a hundred years of technological advancement, we anticipated that we would easily reach the hut he had built at the edge of the Ross Sea, meant to last one winter a century ago but still standing, testament to his high standards and to a climate hostile even to the microorganisms that cause rot.

Before we launched at 4:00 p.m. on New Year’s Day 2008 from the same berth in Lyttelton, New Zealand, that Shackleton had used at the same hour on January 1, 1908, we were blessed in the Anglican church where Shackleton’s party had prayed and sang the hymn they had sung, with its Cassandra refrain, “O hear us when we cry to Thee / For those in peril on the sea.” A substantial public had gathered, including descendants of Shackleton’s crew. A brass band played; Samoyeds whose forebears had pulled Shackleton’s sledges barked as the crowd waved us off; and we were escorted to sea by the very tugboat that had pulled the Nimrod.

Tied onto the upper-deck railing of our vessel, a small banner—the sort a laundromat might use to announce its grand opening—read SPIRIT OF ENDERBY, in accordance with our voyage’s promotional material. Gigantic Cyrillic letters on the hull, by contrast, proclaimed the boat as PROFESSOR KHROMOV, as did the lifeboats, the maps, and the equipment on board; we entered and left ports as Professor Khromov because that was in fact the name of the ship. Spirit of Enderby was a flight of the enthusiastic imagination of Rodney Russ, owner of Heritage Expeditions and our trip leader. The same advance material had referred to a “refurbished Russian ice-class ship.” The word refurbished had suggested rather more intervention than the installation of industrial blue carpet throughout a Soviet research vessel from 1983—but we had not come for opulent cabins, and the Spartan accommodations seemed, then, to be part of the macho bravado of our enterprise.