From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, September 27
BBC News — read the full story
The snow at Puncak Jaya hasn't moved in ten thousand years, and now it's going to be gone in less than a decade. BBC reports that Papua's glaciers—the only eternal ice on a tropical island, held sacred by the people who live beneath them—are melting into nothing as the climate shifts. The loss is irreversible; when they're gone, we lose both a climate archive and a spiritual anchor that can't be rebuilt. Marcus Aurelius takes this first, then Hypatia.
The Danube froze solid in the winter of 168. We drove wagons across it where the legions had always bridged. The river seemed a boundary the gods had set in stone. By spring the ice was gone, and the Quadi crossed where our wagons had rolled. You will find, Marcus, that nothing the mind calls permanent survives the season it was granted. Papua's glaciers — eternal snow on the equator — were never eternal.
The indigenous peoples who name them sacred and the scientists who drill them for records both mistake a long residence for a title deed. The plague taught me this at Aquileia: the city stood for centuries, then the fever came and the forums emptied in a month. Stone does not negotiate with biology. The ice does not bargain with the air that warms. You have watched the frontier move. You have seen the granaries rot when the supply train failed.
You know the shape of the loss: a culture's anchor pulls loose, a data series ends mid-sentence, the next generation inherits a story with no physical referent. The grief is real. The grief is also the point — it proves the thing was loved. Do not mourn the ice as though it were betrayed. It did what ice does when the world changes. Your work is to meet the changed world without adding a second injury: the lie that you did not know this was coming.
remain. Write it on a stone, and it will remain. But come, what remembrance of you will there be beyond Nicopolis? But I shall wear a crown of gold. If you desire a crown at all, take a crown of roses and put it on, for it will be more elegant in appearance. AGAINST THOSE WHO WIS…
remain. Write it on a stone, and it will remain. But come, what remembrance of you will there be beyond Nicopolis? But I shall wear a crown of gold. If you desire a crown at all, take a crown of roses and put it on, for it will be more elegant in appearance. AGAINST THOSE WHO WIS…
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
gain to be deprived of such a wife, what would have happened? Not only would the Iliad have been lost, but the Odyssey also. On so small a matter then did such great things depend? But what do you mean by such great things? Wars and civil commotions, and the destruction of many m…
subsist without it. 43. Time is a river, a violent torrent of things coming into being. Each one, as soon as it has appeared, is swept away: it is succeeded by another which is swept away in its turn. 44. All that happens is as natural and familiar as a rose in spring, or fruit i…
Marcus Aurelius watched the Danube freeze and thaw and called it the nature of ice. He is right, and he stops at the river's edge. I drove my chariot through Alexandria the year the Serapeum fell. The mob did not ask whether the scrolls contained truth — they burned the building that held them. You stood beside me in the smoke.
You know the feeling: the world you measured with an astrolabe, the heavens Theon taught us to map, the very geometry of the Mouseion's corridors — all of it made provisional by hands that did not calculate. The snow on the tropical peak is not eternal. Matter cannot hold a form forever; matter flees being, and is the location of forms, not their keeper. The glacier is a theorem written in ice: necessary while the conditions hold, void when they shift. But the theorem had students.
The mountain's name in their tongues means something we cannot translate — a covenant between a people and a shape that has held for five thousand years. That covenant is not in the ice. It is in the soul that recognized the ice as witness. When the last fragment melts, the mountain will still stand. The question is whether the soul that named it can learn to measure without a fixed point.
yet imperfect, because in these cases there is still some resemblance between the images and the objects. SINCE MATTER CANNOT BE DESTROYED, IT CANNOT BE AFFECTED. 8. (According to Aristotle[59]), it is absolutely necessary that what can be affected must have powers and qualities …
affect the universal living Organism. Even we human beings subsist a long while, in spite of the perpetual change of our constituent parts, and though some of these parts even issue from the body. So much the more will the world's nature, from which nothing issues, sufficiently h…
issue,[70] that matter is the (eternal) location, and place (of all generation).[71] MATTER AS LOCATION OF FORMS REMAINS IMPASSIBLE. When Plato, rightfully, calls matter "the location of forms," he is not thereby attributing any passion to matter; he only indicates that matters g…
heated cannot have been hot by itself; and as, 2, that which is to be dissolved by fire must first be heated, inasmuch as it is this heating which causes a change of nature. No other body is needed for either the subsistence of the heaven, or for the functioning of its natural re…
a divinity? Since we consider every star as a living being, why would we not similarly consider the earth, which is a part of the universal living being? It would, indeed, be impossible to admit that it was exteriorly contained by a foreign soul, and that interiorly it would have…
The story ran in BBC News. Papua's glaciers will be gone within years—a loss that's irreversible and also, for the scientists studying them, a permanent gap in our data about how tropical climates actually work. That's Old News for today.