I May Be Some Time

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out of time and out of society, in a world peopled only by themselves. What's more, that world -- at least as we experience it through print -- is at times even structured like the world of myth, of legend, of moral tales. As it is

he certainly did not anticipate, and his pictures, whose 'gaiety' and 'humour' elude her completely. adventure, we need to know what they thought their exploring meant. Myths, Roland Barthes pointed out, are a special kind of 'sign' in that they are not constructed from whole cloth, but from a set of elements that are already Scott is almost certain to get to the Pole and it is something to say you were with the first party. The climate is very healthy although inclined to be cold ...' rejection, she makes imagination outbid actuality. Better absolute zero, runs the dangerous logic of her position, than fears renewed again and again; better ice imagined in solitude, cold enough to freeze all feeling, than feeling sensitiveSometimes that difference seems so wide that the histories of Antarctic exploration by the British in 'the heroic age' might as well be myths. Although it is easy to list and date the major expeditions -- Scott's Discovery expedition, 1901-4; species of fish, uncountable billions of one-celled creatures for the fish to feed on -- and birds. For the first time, this biological skew -- an essential feature of the polar landscape -- was given systematic scrutiny. Though the naval Polar medal now in regimental museum" The Evening Press 13 September 1999". Archive.thisisyork.co.uk . Retrieved 8 October 2011.

they write books filled with practical detail which make readers ask why again. They decline to answer in terms that match a question arising as this one does. Maybe then the question is impossible, less of a real question than a gesture

It would be perfectly possible, in other words, to assemble a history of all the things that the Scott myth has meant in Britain in the twentieth century. But if we want to understand why, and how, real, historical Edwardian men participated in the Antarctic