Dear friends,

Around the North and South poles, glaciers have formed over thousands of years of snowfall accumulation, each year’s fresh snow compressing past layers to create glacial ice. Researchers drill over a mile deep into these glaciers to retrieve what are called ice cores, cylindrical relics of the deep past. Ice, in capturing air and dust particles, can create records of the atmospheres of bygone geological periods. Memory subzero.

This week in the Nass, we remember. Nostalgia is a feeling of incapability and inculpability, lamenting the plain-and-simple impossibility of returning to the past in the act of remembering it. In obsolescence, our pasts remain fragmented in our ice cores as trapped particles and particulars of the now-unknowable totality of another age; as photographs and letters and dialogues which, once spoken, remain spoken for ever, in vivid though erroneous Technicolor.

These twenty pages, an ice core.

Stay warm,

Sasha Rotko, EIC