tealin | Our Daily Bill: More Discovery (Reply)

The second year on the Discovery was time for more reflection, and what can only be called 'extreme sketching.'

Went up Crater Hill to make some sketches. One has to be pretty rapid over it. I started by getting my hands practically frozen in putting on my crampons – a matter of three minutes; the pain in bringing them back in warm gloves makes you dance first on one foot and then on the other, because there’s nothing else to do. I repeated the proceeding three times in sketching with my right hand. There is nothing to fear if you stop when you can no longer feel the pencil, then put on warm gloves and you soon feel something else for 5 to 10 minutes. The softest B is as hard and gritty as an H, and makes the same sort of mark ... My eyes have been in a sorry state all day from sketching with sun-glare, streaming with water and very painful from time to time. Sketching in the Antarctic is not all joy, for apart from the fact that your fingers are all thumbs and you don’t know what or where they are till they warm up again, you can only sketch when your eyes stop running – one eye at a time through a narrow slit in snow-goggles.

– from Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, pg 119

Why in the name of all that is holy were we always taught to fear God? It is an idea that still hangs in my mind that if I don’t fear Him enough something terrible will happen someday – and that is the sort of Ogre one is expected to ‘worship and glorify’ ... an unapproachable Being to be addressed by the repetition of high-sounding and eloquent phrases full of a rather pompous grandeur.... I think I want a more familiar God whom I can turn to at any minute of the day without fear, rather than a Being who must be approached with extra special language on one’s knees, or by priests in splendid vestments.... It is everything not only to reverence Him but to love Him, and to feel that you know Him so well that you can even enjoy fun with Him.

pg 120-1

What I marvel at most now is that you saw the reasons for giving me those walking tours in Wales before I left school, do you remember? and all that bird-nesting regardless of my school-work, Sundays and even meals; and making me draw plants and birds and what not; and then my visits abroad – and rather than spoil the whole show for six penn’orth of paint you were good enough to give me everything, and not a thing you have given me in the way of education but has helped to fit me for this sort of business, and I have only recently begun to see how fully I owe it all to your broad view of things ...

– to his father, at the end of the Discovery expedition, 1904
from Edward Wilson of the Antarctic, pg 144