Telos Tryp 👻 🔮 🍌🥕🧩🍀🐸📿🙏

Two men were stranded in the Arctic for almost two years without seeing another human being. At one point, they stopped speaking because of an imaginary love affair. This is one of the strangest and most moving survival stories I have encountered. In 1909, Danish explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen sailed to northeast Greenland aboard a ship called the Alabama. His mission was to recover documents left behind by an earlier expedition whose leader, Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, and two companions had died in the Arctic in 1907. Their lost records contained valuable geographical observations. Among them was evidence that the supposed Peary Channel, believed by some to divide northern Greenland from the rest of the island, did not exist. In spring 1910, Mikkelsen set out with the ship's engineer, Iver Iversen, to find the missing documents. They travelled hundreds of kilometres across an almost unimaginably hostile landscape. They suffered from starvation, exhaustion and scurvy. Their sled dogs died. But eventually, they found the records. What they did not know was that while they were struggling to return, disaster had overtaken their ship. The Alabama had been damaged and sunk by the ice. The remaining crew had salvaged supplies, constructed a small hut from the wreckage and eventually escaped aboard another vessel. When Mikkelsen and Iversen finally returned to Shannon Island in November 1910, they found the ship gone and their companions gone. Nobody was waiting for them. Nobody knew when they might return. For the next nineteen months, the two men lived in extreme isolation. They survived on provisions, hunted animals and whatever they could salvage. Their tiny shelter became almost their entire world. They endured the Arctic winter, with its long stretches of darkness. Outside were ice, polar bears, dangerous weather and vast distances separating them from everyone they knew. Inside were two exhausted men. They had to depend on each other for almost everything. And then something extraordinary happened. Among their few possessions was a postcard showing a group of young women from a Danish school. To entertain themselves, the men began inventing personalities for the women. They gave them names. They imagined relationships. Mikkelsen developed a particular fondness for one of the imaginary women, whom they called Miss Støt. One day, Iversen composed a song about her. Mikkelsen was furious. He felt that his companion had behaved disloyally toward the woman he had imagined as his own. The two men stopped speaking. For two days, silence filled their tiny shelter. Eventually, Iversen handed Mikkelsen a mock letter, apologizing and offering to surrender not only Miss Støt but all the other imaginary women. They reconciled. They promised not to let silence come between them again. In September 1911, Iversen wrote in his diary about the unbearable slowness of time and his fading hopes that a ship might arrive. The months continued passing. Back in Denmark, many believed the men were dead. But in the summer of 1912, a Norwegian sealing vessel finally reached them. After nearly three years away from home, Mikkelsen and Iversen returned to Denmark alive. The records they had rescued helped establish that the supposed Peary Channel did not exist. The expedition had achieved its geographical purpose. For nineteen months, two men occupied an almost unimaginably small human universe. They were each other's entertainment, irritant, companion, witness and best hope of survival. Even an imaginary romantic betrayal could become a genuine source of pain. The photograph of the two men after their ordeal shows what the Arctic did to their bodies. Their story tells us something about what prolonged isolation can do to a mind. And what friendship, however strained or imperfect, can do to keep it alive.

In 1310, the Catholic Church burned a woman alive for writing a book about love. More than 600 years later, scholars discovered that the book had survived. Her name was Marguerite Porete. She came from Hainaut, a region that today extends across Belgium and northern France. Almost nothing is known about her childhood, her family or her personal life. What we do know is that she wrote one of the most extraordinary works of medieval Christian mysticism. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Written in the late thirteenth century, the book explores what happens when a human soul becomes so completely united with divine love that individual desire and self-interest disappear. Marguerite imagined conversations between Love, Reason and the Soul. She argued that a soul that had reached the highest state of divine union no longer needed the ordinary religious practices and obligations that guided other believers. For the medieval Church, this was an extremely dangerous idea. Religious authorities claimed the power to determine how human beings should approach God. Here was a woman proposing that the deepest spiritual experience could transcend those rules altogether. Her book was condemned. Sometime before 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai ordered a copy publicly burned in Valenciennes, in Marguerite's presence. She was forbidden to continue circulating its teachings. But Marguerite did not abandon her work. She sought the judgment of other religious scholars. One distinguished theologian, Godfrey of Fontaines, did not condemn the book, although he warned that its teachings could be misunderstood. Other authorities were considerably less sympathetic. Marguerite eventually found herself imprisoned and brought before the Inquisition in Paris. Twenty-one theologians examined extracts from her book and declared them heretical. Throughout much of the proceedings, she refused to answer her interrogators. The judges interpreted her silence and her continued association with the condemned work as evidence of her refusal to submit. On May 31, 1310, she was sentenced to death. The following day, June 1, Marguerite Porete was burned alive in Paris. A contemporary chronicler recorded that witnesses were deeply moved by her death. The authorities also sought to eliminate her writings. But something remarkable happened. The book survived. Copies circulated through Europe. It was translated into Latin, Italian and English. For centuries, readers encountered its ideas without knowing the identity of the woman who had written them. Sometimes it was attributed to men. Sometimes it was treated as an anonymous work of spiritual wisdom. And then, in 1946, Italian scholar Romana Guarnieri established the connection between surviving manuscripts and the woman condemned in Paris six centuries earlier. The author had finally been reunited with her book. There is a terrible irony here. A woman was executed for writing about a love that transcended human institutions. Those institutions condemned her ideas, destroyed copies of her work and helped erase her name. Yet generations of readers, including members of religious communities, preserved the very words that had led to her death. Marguerite Porete had no printing press, no powerful political allies and no means of protecting herself against the authorities who judged her. She possessed a manuscript and the conviction that its contents mattered. They burned her alive. Six centuries later, her book was still being read. Her judges are remembered largely because they condemned her.