That’s how summer is: no past or future but all present tense, long twilights like vandals, breaking into new days.

In Greenland there is no ownership of land. What you own is your house, your dogs, your sleds and kayaks. Everyone is fed. It is a food-sharing society in which the whole population is kept in mind – the widows, elderly, infirm, and ill are always taken care of. Jens said, “We weren’t born to buy and sell, but to be out on the ice with our families.

Lately I’ve had to redefine the word “knowledge” to a knowledge that cannot know anything. I’m dealing not in careless absurdities here but in the way material reality is unobservable and implicit order can be found in paradox. Perhaps despair is the only human sin. Who am I to feel disappointment? Is a bird disappointed in the sky.

Everything in your world has vanished. You have no money, no job, and no hope of finding one. That’s how it is for thousands of people here. Please don’t forget that feeling.

All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call “aware” – an almost untranslatable word meaning something like “beauty tinged with sadness.

My parents, who are older, think they don’t have to be careful, so they eat the most contaminated fish in hopes that the less contaminated fish will be there for younger people.

So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.

The mind swims laps, memory is cantilevered over genetic turmoil, and the writing goes on as if from unseen instruction, silencing, cleaving, and destabilizing words and thoughts, while the “hum” in me, the human, pushes fragments into the semblance of story.

Now what looks like smoke is only mare’s tails – clouds streaming – and as the season changes, my young dog and I wonder if raindrops might not be shattered lightning.

Everything is moving, but there’s so much we can’t see: how thought comes into being; how grasses and trees connect; how animals know weather, experience pleasure and love; how what’s under the soil, the deep microbial empire, can hold twenty billion tons of carbon in its hands.