The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
The biologist makes this statement while describing the low, gutteral moan of a mysterious creature that comes every night at sunset. The statement emphasizes the indescribable nature of the call, the incomprehensibility of it, which gestures towards the recurring notion of the sublime and the sublimity pervasive in Area X.
Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
The biologist makes this statement while describing the motivations of the Southern Reach for instructing the explorers not to compare their field notes. The idea was that if they began comparing notes, then their individual accounts would be biased and influenced by the accounts of their peers. The Southern Reach suggested that they wanted each explorer's purely individually perceived experience of the Area; in the end, we know that it really didn't matter how they decided to record their findings, because all of the journals ended up buried in a midden at the top of the lighthouse.
Something about the idea of a tower that headed straight down played with a twinned sensation of vertigo and a fascination with structure. I could not tell which part I craved and which I feared, and I kept seeing the inside of nautilus shells and other naturally occurring patterns balanced against a sudden leap off a cliff into the unknown.
The biologist describes the "tower" as they come upon it, a structure that the others view as a tunnel or a hole. The fact that the biologist is the only one who sees the structure as a tower plays on the theme of subjectivity and differing perspectives; also, the terms the biologist employs to describe the tower, comparing it to naturally occurring structures like the "inside of nautilus shells" harks to the theme of specialization. Her perspective is inextricable from her occupation as a biologist.
Inside the house, my parents did whatever banal, messy things people in the human world usually did, some of it loudly. But I could easily lose myself in the microworld of the pool.
This quote describes the biologist's early affinity for transitional environments and the comfort she found in them compared to the sense of estrangement and bafflement at mundane, "human" dramas like the ones played out between her parents. By distinguishing her parents as existing in "the human world," the biologist expressly distances herself from other humans. Her love of and fascination with biology thus contributes to her social estrangement.
There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.
The biologist refers to the feeling she gets when she has to leave one of her beloved transitional environments behind. She felt this way about the overgrown swimming pool from her childhood, about the tidal pools from her fellowship, and as she explores Area X, she feels "the flush of discovery" all over again, but she couldn't help feeling a concurrent sense of foreboding as she though she would have to, at some point, sever herself from Area X.
The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
The biologist makes this statement in reference to the ways in which the explorers' expectations were conditioned during training. The map represents yet another supposedly authoritative document that, when interrogated in the context of the actual landscape of Area X, falls short of reality. Perhaps the most important structure in Area X next to the lighthouse, the tower, goes unrepresented in all Southern Reach maps; yet, in the journals of previous explorers, it is almost always referenced.
After a while, a kind of unease came over me as I began to perceive a terrible presence hovering in the background of these entries. I saw the Crawler or some surrogate approaching in that space just beyond the thistle, and the single focus of the journal keeper a way of coping with that horror. An absence is not a presence, but still with each new depiction of a thistle, a shiver worked deeper and deeper into my spine.
The biologist describes a particularly haunting journal of a previous explorer in which the explorer focuses every single entry on a specific variety of thistle found in Area X. The journal has a incantatory, hypnotic quality, and the biologist describes terror she feels as emanating from the sense of absence in the narrative. This journal gestures towards a larger theme of absence, abyss, and terror through inexplicability.
Her head sagged downward and she lost consciousness, then came to again and stared out at the waves. She muttered a few words, one of which might have been “remote” or “demote” and another that might have been “hatching” or “watching.” But I could not be sure.
This quote describes the final moments of the psychologist's life through the eyes of the biologist. The fact that she's not sure which words the psychologist says point to the larger theme of subjectivity and emphasize the imperfect and perhaps untrustworthy quality of the narrative. The words themselves are important because they suggest such wildly disparate final thoughts; "hatching" suggests a genesis, a new beginning, whereas "watching" suggests suspicion and vigilance.
Behind me lay the increasingly solemn silhouette of what was no longer really a lighthouse but instead a kind of reliquary.
The biologist describes the lighthouse after finding the midden of journals as a reliquary. Reliquaries generally contain a body part of a deceased saint; they are both art objects and holy objects and are cherished as containers of organic material that is directly linked to God. The lighthouse may not contain the bodies of all past explorers, but it does contain their "flimsy gravestones" (110) in the form of their notebooks. These explorers who died in Area X are also known to be absorbed by Area X in death, which the biologist admits "is not the same thing here as back across the border" (144). The explorers live on in the landscape of Area X as saints are thought by Christians to live on through God. Through this reliquary metaphor, VanderMeer poses Area X to be a God-like presence in the world.
There were thousands of “dead” spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw, that had been rendered invisible because they were not “of use.”
The biologist describes the vacant lot near her house as a "dead space," and then likens it to Area X as a transitional environment. She then suggests that largely, people don't pay attention to the transitions that take place in these environments, and she wouldn't be at all surprised if organic matter and living things from Area X have been passing through its northern border and infecting the rest of the world for three decades.
