Following up on her essay How to Disappear, Off Paper Editor Tessa Hulls returns from Alaska and explores the transformative power of silence and its implications on city life.
Read More
How to Disappear
TPR Editor Tessa Hulls writes about Alaska and the impulse to disappear. "Legacy requires a belief in the significance of one’s own life, and that is something that I let go of somewhere in those mountains."
Read MoreThe Seen: From Alaska
Hello The Seen readers. This post is being written from a tent pitched somewhere near glacierview, Alaska. I meant to post this before I left, but that didn’t happen. And it seems somehow fitting to be doing this from on the road.
I’ll be taking a break from the seen this month as my bicycle and I are doing some wandering up in Alaska. So I wanted to do one last seen post that was about both the geographic location I am in, and the notion that rememberance usually focuses around beginnings and endings. Middles are often lost in the tumult, perhaps because they lack the dramatic punctuation that allows for specific memories to take on the quality of myth.
Take, for example, Grizzly Man. I know almost nothing about what his life living with bears was like; all I know is that he got eaten by them. And thus everything about the long period on which he actually managed to cohabitate with bears is reduced to static: his story is eclipsed by its own ending.
And with that, dear readers, I’m going back to radio silence. I’ll be back in August with very strong thighs and very funny tanlines. And hopefully a still-full canister of bear spray.
