I would prefer one hour of conversation with a native
of terra australis incognita to one with the most
learned man in Europe.

—Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, 1740

Before satellites eyed the earth’s whole surface
through the peephole of orbit, before
we all were tracked by numbers trailing from us
like a comet’s tail—O if only,
they’d say in quaint accents and obscure
sentence structures—if only the unsullied
could be discovered, if only, once found,
it could speak its own nobility and let us
empathize. Poignant, the despair that itched
beneath their powdered wigs, their longing to touch
the unspoiled, their sense that the world was already ruined.