Pole

Definition and stakes

Florence Armstrong Grondal,  The music of the spheres (1926)

“ Traveling backward in imagination on the circle that our pole has taken 25,000 years to describe in the sky, and again imagining the star which we now see as our Pole Star as the Pole Star of that by-gone era, what a difference we find in the appearance of the earth! Herds of strange and savage animals are scattered here instead of thriving villages and cities, and man, in equally savage state, wanders about the hills and plains alone or in straggling bands. ”
Source: Gutenberg

Portrait of Aristophanes Aristophanes,  The Birds

“ EPOPS The clouds and the sky.
PISTHETAERUS Very well! is not this the pole of the birds then?
EPOPS How their pole?
PISTHETAERUS Or, if you like it, the land. And since it turns and passes through the whole universe, it is called, 'pole.' (1) If you build and fortify it, you will turn your pole into a fortified city. (2) In this way you will reign over mankind as you do over the grasshoppers and cause the gods to die of rabid hunger.
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Source: Gutenberg

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,  Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus

“ I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. ”
Source: Gutenberg

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