Word: incognita
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...people in the advance guard of that spreading population, the now-and-future pioneers of perhaps doubtful American prospects. If their implacability looks admirable, Sternfeld has also made us see it as strangely unsettling, the risk of a squandered endowment. In the end, who needs the wilderness? For terra incognita, we have ourselves...
Artists are crazy, the rest of us like to think. And great artists are emotional idiots savants, charting the terra incognita of human experience by going over the edge. It is a lovely delusion. It excuses so many excesses and failures, gives rise to so many cautionary legends. George Gordon, Lord Byron incarnated one such fable: the poet as demon lover. He was dead at 36. Joe Orton, the English playwright who died in 1967, lived out another. He cruised danger as if it were a cute trick in a public gents', and was murdered at 34 -- for love! Nice...
...They dislike discontinuity, uncertainty, unpredictability. SDI has compelled them to face up to some of the more worrisome consequences of their promiscuous accumulation and deployment of land-based ballistic-missile warheads. Having pressed their advantage on missiles for so long, the Soviets now find themselves stumbling into the terra incognita of high-technology defenses, where the Americans may turn out to be more at home...
...eons, the frozen north was terra incognita, the work of a mapmaker's imagination. Now it is the turn of writers to define its contours. The latest lyricist is Journalist Barry Lopez. "Much of the tundra," he notes, "appears to be treeless when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees--a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realize suddenly that you are wandering around on top of a forest." Icebergs the size of Cleveland drift through the dark waters, and sulfur butterflies mysteriously rise in the short, delirious summer. Mirages provide a weird history...
...acters complete the collection. The Pole salutes the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who perished in the Antarctic. It also celebrates Nabokov's favorite turf: terra incognita. The playwright liked to dream of butterfly-hunting trips to the Caucasus, Mount Elbrus, the Amazon. And he recalled "tingles of delight, of envy, of anguish (when) I watched on the television screen the first floating footsteps of man in the talcum of our satellite and how I despised those who maintained it was not worth all those dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world...