(1993)
When the Norwegian Arctic explorer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Fridtjof Nansen died in 1930, he was president of the International Society for the Exploration of the Arctic Regions by Means of the Airship (Aeroarctic). There is a certain irony to this. Already four years earlier, a member of the society had used a semirigid construction named Norge to prove that the society’s ultimate goal—reaching the North Pole—was indeed feasible. Two years later, the Italian general Umberto Nobile, who had been in charge of this enterprise, made a second attempt to reach the North Pole from Spitzbergen in the Italia but crashed in the fog. Only some of the crew could be saved after they had retrieved their emergency gear, radio, and batteries and dragged them on an ice floe, along with the “Red Tent” that has since become proverbial. They were rescued only thanks to the emergency signals they sent via radio, which set off a multitude of flights and rides of ice-breakers and which allowed the rescuers systematically to zero in on the red tent.
Nansen, who by then was almost seventy, must have been reminded of his own helplessness during his east–west drift on board the Fram, clenched and crushed by the pack ice for three winters. Contrary to his theory, the Fram had missed the pole and failed to give a grand finale to the century of polar expeditions when, in the third year of the expedition, Nansen tried to conquer the last stretch of the way on dog sleds, with the ship as the base camp close to the pole. But now, when Nobile made his attempt, the blocked passages and pack ice, and the unspeakable hardship of overcoming or bypassing them, were surmounted by air, as if by sleight of hand. In fact, a means of rescue that Nansen could not have anticipated in 1893/95 was at hand even in the disastrous second attempt to reach the pole by plane: the radio device on the drifting ice floe. The Italian Guglielmo Marconi had put a valuable precautionary measure in the hands of his compatriot Nobile by equipping him with a radio. The advance into eternal silence, which for Nansen had still meant disappearing, as it were, into the oblivion of incertitude, was thus mitigated by the constant ability to broadcast coordinates and, ultimately, a call for rescue. While Nansen had already generated electricity on the Fram—as long as the ship was still under steam, there were no limitations to illuminating the crew’s games and reading—once the engines came to a halt in the bed of ice, the wind turbine soon froze up along with everything else. Yet even had that not been the case, nobody would have known then that electricity could be used to send or receive radio signals. One and the same decade had produced the problem and its solution—without, alas, introducing them to each other.
This situation fit neatly into the greater set of problems at the end of the century: it was the uneasy question of how long the vital condition of the sun would last, a question that for Nansen, as for others, fell under the apocalyptic rubric of “heat death.” Eternal silence was therefore only a sort of rehearsal for the final destiny of the solidification of everything.
In the year of Nansen’s death, the barricade around the earth’s poles had long been breached, the dark threats hanging over his adventure lifted, and the routes opened for transpolar air traffic. Yet a murky emotional reservation continued to hover unresolved over humanity’s self-image: the sun’s grace would not be bestowed for as long as the unbroken promise of “progress” demanded and apparently deserved. By its very radiation, the central star was burning itself up, diminishing in mass, and in doing so, depleting the “fuel” that produced the warmth and light on which life on earth depended. No escape was yet known from the shortage of time imposed by the only accepted scientific explanations for the processes of energy generation in the sun’s core and its resources.
In the decade after Nansen’s death, the “chemical” solution to this problem was supplanted by a “physical” solution: Hans Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker found the formula of the nuclear fusion cycle at solar temperatures, which suddenly extended both life’s past and future to new dimensions. For just a few moments in the history of science, the frontier of the apocalypse receded into a distance out of mind, though thermodynamics could not be tricked into supporting absolute promises of any kind. Yet the moment of time between this brilliant consolation and the dawning of an era of the new apocalyptic implications of uranium fission passed as quickly as the advances in nuclear technology would move henceforth.
We can no longer look back triumphantly on Nansen’s melancholy in the midst of “night and ice,” nor on the fin de siècle of “heat death,” no more so than on the breaking of the silence at the ends of the world. Soon, they would be crisscrossed by the incessant noise of “radio traffic,” a suitably ambiguous term. For Nietzsche, it was still a grand metaphorical gesture to write: “Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness … We have discovered happiness, we know the road, we have found the exit out of whole millennia of labyrinth.”1 It was with no lesser degree of pathos, if still with the laconism of a frozen hand, that Nansen then during the last winter of his expedition, on Christmas Eve 1895, wrote in his diary: “Oh, the road to the stars is both long and difficult!”2 Too long, it would turn out, and too costly.
Humans are risky beings, and not just because they seek frontier-pushing adventures like the voyage adrift of the Fram. They are risky for the very reason that their biological origins lie in the narrow span of the last interglacial period, when they learned the ability to cope with life caught between the advancing and receding glaciers; the natural being was now pitted against nature. To make itself independent of uncertain living conditions, this being even gained access to the fossil hoard of solar energy accrued in earliest times—were it not for the finitude of this hoard, which soon began to frighten this being like “heat death” did a century before. All its survivors retain a legacy from this prehistory: the need to test their resilience against nature, even to the point of enduring zero gravity. Once that was achieved, however, the natural being was spared the challenge of holding out in soundlessness, in the “eternal silence” of the outer spaces that still horrified Pascal, thanks to the very “medium” that had not connected Nansen to the “world.”
Without having lost the acoustic umbilical cord to the well-nurtured sphere of culture, it might never have occurred to him that his expedition had led him to the “intuition” [Anschauung] of what had been called “heat death” since the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet experiencing his first winter in the icy camp of the Fram coincided with the shocking vision of what seemed to be the inevitable fate of the planet, in a time frame measurable only by “masses of centuries”: “The world that shall be! Again and again this thought comes back to my mind. I gaze far on through the ages. Slowly and imperceptibly the heat of the sun declines, and the temperature of the earth sinks by equally slow degrees. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years pass away, glacial epochs come and go, but the heat still grows ever less; little by little these drifting masses of ice extend far and wide, ever towards more southern shores, and no one notices it; but at last all the seas of earth become one unbroken mass of ice. Life has vanished from its surface, and is to be found in the ocean depths alone.”3 The expedition gave itself some consolation in this last refuge when its probings below the ice sheet brought all manner of little creatures to the surface.
But the extrapolation into the future was not over yet, the generosity of reckoning with time not yet exhausted. The temperature had to sink even further: “But the temperature continues to fall, the ice grows thicker and ever thicker; life’s domain vanishes. Millions of years roll on, and the ice reaches the bottom. The last trace of life has disappeared; the earth is covered with snow. All that we lived for is no longer; the fruit of all our toil and sufferings has been blotted out millions and millions of years ago, buried beneath a pall of snow.”4 Only now has the earth become a “star among stars,” against all expectations implied in its name, having fully surrendered to the cosmic rule of torpor and silence. Nansen, the wayfarer upon the ice, shows no signs of longing for such silence, for his habitual world has not yet become loud enough.
“A stiffened, lifeless mass of ice, this earth rolls on in her path through eternity. Like a faintly growing disk the sun crosses the sky; the moon shines no more, and is scarcely visible.” All of this is in no way original for its decade, yet it differs in one aspect from the descriptions usually composed with didactic intentions. Nansen’s writing doesn’t simply result from the nineteenth-century epistemological habit of expanding science into knowledge, but from the intuition of the first polar winter that he just survived aboard or inside the Fram. For this very reason, the play of color of the Aurora borealis remains a powerful experience each time. Although its correlation with the solar cycle had already been recognized, its nature was only explained the year after Nansen’s return. These northern lights troubled him, because they appeared as an “aesthetic” event removed from human sight and thus like a demonstration against the human entitlement to “enjoy” them. It thus seems like a “counterdemonstration” to this rather distressing event that the 1897 publication of the expedition saga included what at the time were costly reproductions of a large number of watercolor and pastel sketches.
Since Nansen could not have known that the northern lights require solar energy, he took them as illustrations of the ice deserts that would outlast the “heat death” of life, albeit in diminished grandeur: “Yet still, perhaps, the northern lights flicker over the desert, icy plain, and still the stars twinkle in silence, peacefully as of yore. Some have burnt out, but new ones usurp their place; and round them revolve new spheres, full of new life-worlds [Lebenswelten], new sufferings, without any aim. Such is the infinite cycle of eternity; such are nature’s everlasting rhythms.”5 “Heat death” appears as a universal event, against which the only consolation is the fact that such futility of life will occur over and over again somewhere. No one, it turns out, will have been alone in the extreme solitude of the polar winter. This appeared like a delusory comfort after the waning century had started to destroy the sense of cosmic “sociability” that the Enlightenment of the prior century had dreamed of by making the masses of space and time explode—the worlds had nothing but silence to gain from their plurality.
Except for the “life-worlds” presented in them, Nansen’s eschatological banalities belong to contemporary history rather than to the history of science. They also resound with biblical notions, causing the premundane tohubohu to echo in that of posterity, in the normal state of things from which the glory of the world had risen by divine command as a mere episode, only to sink back at the fading of that order: “I have never been able to grasp the fact that this earth will some day be spent and desolate and empty. To what end, in that case, all this beauty, with not a creature to rejoice in it?”6 asks the Stoic, to whom Copernicus could have been but the theoretical corrector of an excess of self-importance. But now there is only the prospect of the wild ice and the droning of its senseless compressions and fractures: “Now I begin to divine it. This is the coming earth—here are beauty and death. But to what purpose? Ah, what is the purpose of all these spheres? Read the answer, if you can, in the starry blue firmament.”7
The deflection of our gaze toward the starry sky is a late nineteenth-century figure of thought that is hard for us to retrace. The countless repetitions of the same, or better yet: of the same futility in different life-worlds intend to reflect a semblance of meaning onto this experiment, which Nansen had compressed into an “expedition”: an experiment in torpor, in nautical passivity, of giving oneself over to the dubious ice drift. This experiment is, in brief, a simulation of how to make sense of “heat death.” It takes place in a future in which the earth is nakedness, when even snow will no longer fall onto the vastness of glacial upheavals and rupture lines: “Why will it not snow? … This snowless ice plain is like a life without love—nothing to soften it. The marks of all the battles and pressures of the ice stand forth just as when they were made, rugged and difficult to move among.”8
Even though this is a diary entry, it anticipates the conditions under which advancing on the pole by sleds would fail later on. Without the intangible and imperviously drifting vessel that was the Fram, nothing was possible in this world—unless one had fallen prey to anachronism and thought of flying over the pole. This was the idea of the Swede Salomon August Andrée, who would pay the ultimate price in 1897, when he refused to submit to nature’s obstructions.
In the thick of the third polar winter, during his march back and at an undetermined position, Nansen, from the crude hut in which he spends the winter with Johansen, catches sight of the moon over the unknown land. “A weird beauty, without feeling, as though of a dead planet, built of shining white marble.… And everything so still, so awfully still, with the silence that shall one day reign when the earth again becomes desolate and empty.”9 Not enough to conjure up the beginning of the Bible; also, what hovered over the waters on the first day of creation is now back again, in what becomes the final scene of all things ever formed: “In the flaming Aurora Borealis the spirit of space hovers over the frozen waters. The soul bows down before the majesty of night and death.”10
All of a sudden, the reflection via the detour through the universe fails to yield up meaning:
As we walk up and down here shivering we gaze into the boundless starry space, and all our privations and sorrows shrink into nothingness. Starlit night, thou art sublimely beautiful! But dost thou not lend our spirit too mighty wings, greater than we can control? Couldst thou but solve the riddle of existence! We feel ourselves the centre of the universe, and struggle for life, for immortality—one seeking it here, another hereafter—while thy silent splendor proclaims: At the command of the Eternal, you came into existence on a paltry planet, as diminutive links in the endless chain of transformations; at another command, you will be wiped out again.… Is, then, the whole thing but the meteor of a moment? Will the whole history of the world evaporate like a dark, gold-edged cloud in the glow of evening—achieving nothing, leaving no trace, passing like a caprice?11
When Nansen notes in his diary that he read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species while lying in bed, this feels like a mise-en-scène that neatly corresponds to the Fram’s ice-bound predicament. Nansen is a zoologist, not an engineer like Andrée or Nobile; it does not occur to him to “overfly” the three-year-long hardship in ice and darkness, for his ideas never deviate from the basic pattern of the struggle for survival. The ship’s construction was designed to “endure” the forces of nature, not to override them. Departing the icy stronghold on dog sleds to storm the target point of the absolute north is thus very much the consequence of viewing humans as caught in the ultimate test to which they might submit themselves. The probability was zero that the two groups—the Fram group and Nansen and Johansen on their sleds—would ever make it back home, across the frontier of silence, anywhere close to the same time. But that is precisely what happened, endowing their endeavor with the aura of an almost mythical validation.
And now, as if by an explosion, the silence was shattered by means of a technology that might have been designed for the geographical location and shape of Norway: telegraphy. Virtually in a single moment, the message spread that ended the long uncertainty about the expedition; that it still relied on wires to achieve this end was insignificant. However, it makes us aware how shortly before the ubiquity of connections the venture of advancing into eternal silence was made. The era of unreachability was hastening toward its end.
Translated by Florian Fuchs
Originally published as “Vorstoss ins ewige Schweigen: Ein Jahrhundert nach der Ausfahrt der ‘Fram,’ ” from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 24, 1993, 53–54.
1. [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 127.]
2. [Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North: Being a Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram, 1893–96, and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johansen, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897), 2:453.]
3. [Nansen, Farthest North, 1:439–440.]
4. [Nansen, 440.]
5. [Nansen, translation altered.]
6. [Nansen, 253.]
7. [Nansen, 253–254.]
8. [Nansen, 335–337.]
9. [Nansen, 2:440.]
10. [Nansen, 441.]
11. [Nansen, 441–442.]