Dear friends,

Around the North and South poles, glaciers have formed over thousands of years of snow fall accumulation, each year’s fresh snow compressing past layers to create glacial ice. Researchers now drill over a mile deep into these glaciers to retrieve what is called an ice core, a cylindrical relic of the deep past and something of a time capsule. Ice, in capturing air and dust particles, creates a record of the atmosphere of a bygone geological period. In other words, memory is 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