> 'The end of the end of the world'
A New Yorker article from last year in which Jonathan Franzen writes about a trip to Antarctica.
I love Franzen's prose and could read his non-fiction work all day, especially the autobiographical pieces. This essay felt fragmented at first, alternating as it does between his experience on board a luxury cruise ship and the story of the dead relative whose inheritance funded the voyage. The two are tied up so well at the end, and there's an anxiousness about global warming that doesn't beat the reader into submission.
And, like anything Franzen writes, there's so many insightful asides:
There was the sense of diminishment I always get from our culture of images: no matter how finely you chop life into a sequence of photographs, no matter how closely in time the photographs are spaced, what the sequence always ends up conveying to me most strongly is what it leaves out.