Mercury falling...

We start a new semester this week, and as part of the old semester, my sophomores read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” Until this summer when I knew I'd be teaching it, I don't think I'd read it since I was their age. Probably you've all read it, but if you need a refresher, the story is of a man traveling alone through the Yukon during a cold snap. He's been told not to go out alone, but he doesn't listen to the old-timers. Long story short, he gets wet, needs to build a fire, almost does, but then screws it up. For whatever reason, I was struck by this line: “The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow.” And, as he runs desperately, trying to keep warm: “He seemed to himself to skim along above the surface, and to have no connection with the earth. Somewhere he had once seen a winged Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when skimming over the earth.”
London may or may not have meant these to be central images of the story. Still, It’s this impression I get of the vast coldness of space assaulting the world and a man alone unable to stand against it. This man is not connected to the world: as opposed to, say, the dog that’s with him, the dog that knows they shouldn’t be out in such cold as is assaulting them. Its instincts tell it this and its instincts finally allow it to survive while the man does not.
A connection to the world, indirectly through the dog, would have saved this man. London tells us the dog “was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it was for its own sake that it yearned back toward the fire. But the man whistled, and spoke to it with the sound of whiplashes, and the dog swung in at the man’s heel and followed after.” The man’s relationship to the dog has been this: “The one was the toil-slave of the other, and the only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of the whiplash and the harsh and menacing throat-sounds that threatened the whiplash.” Those of us who know dogs know that a well-treated dog is a loyal companion, one who will look out for us as best it can. We've all heard stories of heroic dogs saving their owners from various fates--it's not just for border collies any more. If this man had been the sort to treat dogs better, the sense London gives us is that the dog would have been able to help him; if he’d been that sort of man, he might have been more attentive to the signals the dog was giving him. But he was not connected to the dog this way.
Likewise, man cannot go through the world like Mercury, like some god. The old-timer on Sulphur Creek told him that a man needs to have someone else with him when the temperature gets below 50-below. The protagonist of the story scoffs at the man and at one point even feels that "any real man" would be able to make such a journey alone. A real man, here, is thought to be god-like in his ability to do whatever he wills himself to do, alone and unaided by animals (as we’ve seen), by other men, or even the wisdom of older, more experienced men.
Men, facing this cold of space, this cold of the nothingness outside our world, must rely on the things of this world: the “natural” allies we could have as well as the wisdom and the companionship of our own kind. Isn't this, really, just the state of the world? On the cosmic scale, this is reality. Man, striding across the world as though he is above it, as though he does not need to be connected to the world or to nature, will sooner or later discover his error. We like to think that we can pollute the water and air, that we can devour non-renewable resources like candies, that we can turn the whole world to our purposes without regard for other species, and we've managed for quite a while. So did the man in London's story, he reflected a few times on how well he was doing, patting himself on the back and laughing at the nay-sayers. Nature, though, got the last laugh.

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