The Balloonist Read Online Free Page A

to Malmö like a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to be interpreted, except that the Pole is something difficult or impossible to attain which must nevertheless be sought for, because man is condemned to seek out and know everything whether or not the knowing gives him pleasure. In short, it is that same unthinking lust for knowledge that drove our First Parents out of the garden.
    And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand on!
What
would you find? Exactly nothing. A point precisely identical to all the others in a completely featureless wasteland stretching around itfor hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us, perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men. What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The doctor was right, even though I dislike him. Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a surrender to it. To the doctor then I am a criminal, to the Danish ministers some kind of prophet or saint. Or I will be if I succeed. Succeed in what? I had forgotten my own arguments on the pointlessness of my goal.
    I don’t note any of this in the diary, of course, nor do I confide it to my companions. I have already come to realise that this little book only a few centimeters square, with its prim calendar in Swedish and its toylike printed phases of the moon, will be totally inadequate for transcribing the true record of what is to come. For what is to happen can only happen inside our three minds, and will be recorded there in the infinitely complicated system of fibers and electrical charges that we call the memory, without understanding very clearly what we are talking about. The outward events become instantly nonexistent except insofar as they are fixed by this mysterious organ. The important events that happen to me in the next few days will therefore be those that take place inside my own mind. I hardly propose to communicate these complicated cerebral events to my companions and even less to the world at large, even if it were possible to do so, which it is not. The contents of the mind are infinite in their convolutions and at any given instant couldn’t be encompassed by a hundred encyclopedias, let alone by a small pigskin booklet costing two kronor. So it is clear that like Columbus I must keep two diaries, the pigskin booklet devoted to what are crassly called facts, and the other a Mental Diary in which the true events of the next few days are recorded. The log that Columbus showed to his crew was a lie; all the positions in it were false and designed to allay their fears that they were about to fall off the edge of the world. And the pigskin book too is destined to lie, although not quite in the same way. It is destined to lie because the outwardevents of our lives bear little or no relation to what is really happening to us. The pleasures and pains that come to the body from the outside are pinpricks; the intelligent mail regards them with contempt. It is not the body but the mind—this monster, this tyrant—that must be tricked and deluded into thinking that its lot is a happy one. The outer world exists only in my perception of it, and this perception is bent always by the shimmering lens of my consciousness. So it is clear that the Mental Diary must concern itself both with inward and