AMONG THE THINGS I've brought to the Arctic is a 1917 essay titled "Art as Technique," by a Russian named Viktor Shklovsky. In it, Shklovsky argues that routines function as a kind of anesthetic in our lives. "If we start to examine the general laws of perception," he writes, "we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic....If one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us."
But art, Shklovsky says, ought to help us recover the sensations of life, ought to revivify our understanding of things—clothes, war, marriage—that habit has made familiar. Art exists, he argues, "to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known."
Sometimes you have to make yourself a stranger to your own life in order to recognize the things you take for granted. Like sunsets, or hot showers, or alphabets. My health, my family, the streams of photons sent from our star—how had I stopped actually seeing these things? The polar bear—a big male—hurried off through the broken ice north of camp. By the time I had climbed back onto the iceberg to search for him, he was just a dot loping through a golden mist.