Reader, 

We bring you this issue, loosely and inconsistently themed, on the subject of exploration. If, as the Antarctic surveyor Apsley Cherry-Garrard put it, exploration is “the physical expression of the intellectual passion,” one must wonder how the known world, finite and filled in as we find it, cordons off and contains imaginations of its inhabitants. 

In the history of Western exploration, one discovery dominates all considerations—political, poetic, economic, social—so that all become the consideration of the Americas. Old World dreamers, once thought to be merely tilting at windmills, shed off the stigma of quixotic madness and became the heroic, “unacknowledged legislators” of the Romantics. Enchantment and delight, once viewed with suspicion, became coveted; mystery, whose ominous portents were not forgotten, was to be seduced and made sing. 

This was the ascendance of the Artist, uniquely freed from society’s bonds by his vision and mystical role. Any consideration of our age should look first to the qualities of our idols. Our age suffers by the comparison: if anyone succeeds the Artist, it is the Celebrity, of dubious vision and disputable talent. The imaginative figure has again returned to obscurity and degradation. One wonders whether, in the rest of the world, the intellectual passion has survived the conquest of all physical wildernesses, and whether new knowledge—abstract, amorphous, imaginary—requires a new frontier. 

-The Editors

Buy a copy of the new issue.

This Friday we will begin shipping our Winter 2011 issue: Whither Exploration?

Featuring short stories by Charles Yu, Dwight Curtis and Gordon E. Gourd; an investigation into natural gas drilling in Your Catholic Cemetery by David W. Seitz; the true-life story of John Fairfax, Adventurer; an interview with Drs. Lonnie & Ellen Thompson, whose research WILL SAVE THIS EARTH; cartoons from the inimitable creators of All My Friends Are Dead; much poetry; much essai; and with shiny new graphics from Walter Green, Gentleman, we present this issue for the consumption of those easily excited and easily forlorn.  

In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is that we can all, all the peoples on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits.

T.S. Eliot, “What is a Classic?” 1944.