The Explorer

Journeys to the ends of the earth seeking the secret of eternal life — the oldest recorded quest for truth in world literature. He returns without immortality but with wisdom, and the epic's closing image is his own city seen freshly, the philosophical gold found within.

Seven voyages undertaken by appetite rather than necessity — each time he returns rich and comfortable, rests a while, and sails again because the horizon calls. Adventure as a vocation, with abundance and big ideas as its rewards.

Runs out of his own front door without so much as a pocket-handkerchief — the homebody who discovers a can-do appetite for the road. He comes home changed, writes There and Back Again, and spends the rest of his life restless for one more journey.

Called by the horizon against every instruction to stay inside the reef. Her quest restores a suppressed truth — her people were voyagers — and she ends the story as a teacher of way-finding, leading the fleet back onto the open sea.

The teacher gift word in its purest form — every lesson becomes an expedition into a volcano, a bloodstream or the solar system. Her standing advice to take chances, make mistakes and get messy is the Explorer's can-do attitude as pedagogy.

Flew the Atlantic solo for the joy and the proof of it, then kept extending the horizon until the last flight. An enthusiast and a teacher too — she lectured, wrote and campaigned to bring others, especially women, into aviation.

On the Endurance expedition, optimism became a survival discipline — routines, songs and unshakeable can-do maintained on the ice for over a year. He brought every one of his men home, then went south again.

Seven decades of undimmed enthusiasm for the natural world, carried to every continent. The teacher-adventurer in full: wide-ranging, jovial and honest, his wonder is itself the lesson that has drawn generations toward nature and knowledge.

Proclaims missions to infinity and beyond while being, in fact, a toy in a child's bedroom. The optimism and expansiveness are genuine, but at first they run oblivious to scale, to others' pace and to reality itself.

Too much: inflated, too big, boasting, overlooking details — expansiveness untethered from the ground it stands on.

Expects the worst, stays close to his gloomy corner of the forest, and greets every adventure with the certainty that it will probably rain. Gentle and beloved, but the joy, hope and horizon of the Explorer are exactly what is missing.

Too little: pessimistic, joyless, hopeless, 'I'm only safe with what I know' — the quest energy at zero.