Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden | Poetry Foundation

Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden | Poetry Foundation

Those Winter Sundays

BY ROBERT HAYDEN 

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright ©1966 by Robert Hayden. Reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Source: Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1985)

‘Icebound’ Takes Us Back to the Arctic, in All Its Terror and Splendor - The New York Times

‘Icebound’ Takes Us Back to the Arctic, in All Its Terror and Splendor - The New York Times

‘Icebound’ Takes Us Back to the Arctic, in All Its Terror and Splendor

In her new book, “Icebound,” the journalist Andrea Pitzer chronicles William Barents’s three attempts to find a mythical northeast passage to Asia.

Credit...Christopher Miller for The New York Times

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By Rachel Slade

• Published Jan. 8, 2021Updated Jan. 12, 2021

ICEBOUND
Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
By Andrea Pitzer

Europeans once dreamed of an open sea at the top of the world. In 1606, Gerard Mercator, arguably the most famous cartographer of his time or any other, published a top-down map of the earth as he understood it. At the center of Mercator’s North Pole stood a magnetic mountain that pulled all compass needles northward; whirling around the mass of gray rock was a warm sea ringed by a thick circle of ice.

At the time, no one had a clue what the poles looked like. Mercator based his map on a theory proposed 1,800 years earlier by Pytheas, the first Greek to breach the Strait of Gibraltar and check out the Atlantic for himself. Pytheas sailed up the west coast of Europe, circumnavigated the British Isles, then continued north until he hit ice, possibly Iceland. Beyond that, he theorized, might be a free-flowing sea.

Pytheas’ travelogue was picked up by Pliny and others. Uncontested over centuries, his polar sea theory hardened into fact. Thoughts of that undiscovered ocean at the top of the world marinated in European imagination throughout the Middle Ages until the Portuguese found they could sail around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, prompting a trade route bonanza.

By the 16th century, European ships were poking into every bay, inlet and river. If there was a navigable ocean at the pole, it could provide a shortcut to Asia. In 1594, Dutch investors bet big on that theory, commissioning the cartographer William Barents to lead an expedition to the northernmost tip of Norway and then east over Russia in search of a northeast route. If they were right, Barents would make the Dutch phenomenally rich.

Climbing the Himalaya With Soldiers, Spies, Lamas and Mountaineers - The New York Times

Climbing the Himalaya With Soldiers, Spies, Lamas and Mountaineers - The New York Times

HIMALAYA
A Human History
By Ed Douglas

When I first came to India, I asked one of the most erudite politicians in the Indian government a question I had been scared to pose to anyone else but that seemed fundamental to understanding the region: Why does India have so many people? Geographically, it’s one-third the size of the United States but its population is nearly five times as large. The politician, who had had a long successful career in the United States as a business executive and seemed happy to explain just about anything to a new correspondent, stood up from his desk and walked over to a large wall map. He tapped a certain region, shaded brown and white.

“The answer,” he told me, “is the Himalaya.”

He explained that the world’s highest mountain range, home to Mount Everest and countless myths and counter-myths, had created such an immense river network that it left behind staggeringly rich soil across a vast swath of Asia. It’s no accident, he said, that on either side of these mountains lie the world’s two most populous nations, India and China. If you include Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, all of which also greatly depend on rivers sourced in the Himalaya, we’re talking about nearly half of humankind tied to these mountains.

The range, part of an even vaster highland region stretching more than 2,000 miles from Kyrgyzstan in the west to Myanmar in the east, has shaped Asia more than any geographical feature has shaped any other continent. The forces that drove religion, trade, learning and human interactions flowed across these mountains and their foothills for thousands of years. Even today, some of the rawest flash points in Asia, which can send armies rushing to the border and fighter jets roaring through the sky, lie high up in the Himalaya. The pros never put an “s” at the end of the word; it’s just Himalaya, which in Sanskrit means “abode of snow.”

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A climber from the Royal Geographic Society films members of an expedition on Mount Everest in 1922.Credit...Times Wide World Photos

In “Himalaya: A Human History,” the journalist Ed Douglas untangles the history of the mountains starting from when they were formed, about 50 million years ago, to the Everest climbing craze today. His book is the fruit of an enormous amount of research that focuses on the conquest of the mountains and the interconnected kingdoms and states that vied for control. His observations are sharp, and in many passages, his writing glows.