Great book if you’ve spent any time in the forest / on the mountain around St. Helens. Really enjoyed learning about the different phases of the eruption and it inspired me to pay more attention to my surroundings when I’m on a hike or climb. Quote:

" The tree’s immensity begs a close, tactile inspection. Its bark is tough and thick but flaky, like a pastry. It testifies to great age almost as much as the tree’s size does. Swanson leans back and gazes toward its crown, which he can just make out through the overstory. "What is the Andrews?" he muses. "I have a friend who says, ‘It is a portal to other ways of knowing.’" With that he falls silent. I wait for him to go on before I realize he is not going to say anything more. We stand still and listen to the forest. One minute stretches into two, to three, to five, and then Swanson ambles off. I watch him leave in his bright yellow rain slicker and wonder if he is testing me in some way. I feel a flare of discomfort: I am unpre-pared, exposed. Then I realize maybe I am not being tested so much as welcomed. Swanson is welcoming me to this old forest, this wood he knows so well. In his quiet wake is a question: What is this place saying?
Among the trees I hear faint sounds: fat drops of water striking the earth, the breeze, branches sweeping the air, small birds chittering. But the quiet overwhelms. It is too total, too loud. Out comes my notebook, and I start scribbling a list of every noise. There is a chestnut-backed chickadee in the understory, a Hammond’s flycatcher calling overhead, the resonant whumps of a sooty grouse from deeper in the trees, the nasal monotone of a red-breasted nuthatch, the sweet warble of a Swainson’s thrush that sounds a thousand miles away. I broaden my attention some and hear a mosquito’s irksome whine, a plane high in the sky, two scolding chipmunks, all over a light patter of rain."

(tags: earthsciences nature geology forests conservation ecosystem pacific-northwest )

Fascinating book, should be required reading for econ / world government courses. Recommended by my dad. Quotes:

• "The need to belong is a basic human motivation.’ That’s one of the most enduring conclusions of psychologists, strongly validated by decades of research. You don’t have to be an expert to know that. You feel it when you’re at a stadium supporting your team, when you walk into a party, and when you sit around the table with your childhood friends. The motivation to develop positive, emotionally supportive, and stable group relationships is so natural that we label anyone lacking it as a psychopath. The urge to belong is generally good for us and for society. But as with any fundamental need, the emotions and mental biases that drive our pursuit of it can betray us. One of the most common dysfunctions is undue favoritism toward members of our in-group, which can lead to prejudice toward members of the out-group. Many believe that favoritism and prejudice must be rooted in some kind of historical, economic, or social collective interest—and thus somehow "rational." But that’s not the case. Lab experiments show what happens when you divide people into random groups without even revealing who else is in those groups. The group to which people are assigned is totally artificial and doesn’t mean anything to them, but they’ll still assign more rewards to their own group and more penalties to the other. If those impulses are strong enough to arise in a contrived laboratory setting, imagine how much stronger they are when they involve deeply felt issues like cultural identity, economic well-being, and the national interest."

(tags: immigration culture prejudices government politics citizenship refugees identity migration )

Found via Kottke.org, probably should read "Paddling My Own Canoe" as well. Great book, made me want to learn to surf. Quotes:

• "But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around. Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else.
  Waves were the playing field. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration. At the same time, they were your ad-versary, your nemesis, even your mortal enemy. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness—a dynamic, indifferent world. At thirteen, I had mostly stopped believing in God, but that was a new development, and it had left a hole in my world, a feeling that I’d been abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure. And yet you were expected, even as a kid, to take its measure every day. You were required-this was essential, a matter of survival-to know your limits, both physical and emotional. But how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed the test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning. As a kid, too, your abilities were assumed to be growing. What was unthinkable one year became thinkable, possibly, the next. My letters from Honolulu in 1966, kindly returned to me recently, are distinguished less by swaggering bullshit than by frank discussions of fear. "Don’t think I’ve suddenly gotten brave. I haven’t." But the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, fitfully edging back for me."
• On a doctor (fellow surfer) he was writing a story about: ""I’m interested in people’s response to it. A lot of cancer patients and survivors report that they never really lived till they got cancer, that it forced them to face things, to experience life more intensely. What you see in family practice is that families just can’t afford to be superficial with each other anymore once someone has cancer. Corny as it sounds, what I’m really interested in is the human spirit—in how people react to stress and adversity. I’m fascinated by the way people fight back, by how they keep fighting their way to the surface." Mark clawed at the air with his arms.
  What he was miming was the struggle to reach the surface through the turbulence of a large wave.
  I asked Geoff Booth, an Australian journalist, surfer, and physician, for his professional opinion. "Mark definitely has the death wish in him," Booth said. "It’s some extreme driving force, which I really think only a handful of people in the world would understand. I’ve only met one other person who had it-Jose Angel." Jose Angel was a great Hawaiian big-wave surfer who disappeared while diving off Maui in 1976.
  Edwin’s theory was that Mark was driven to surf big waves by the rage and futility that he felt when his patients died. Mark said that was ridiculous."

(tags: )

Probably will have to read it again. Too many quotes to write them all down but some that struck hard:

• "Sroufe also learned a great deal about resilience: the capacity to bounce back from adversity. By far the most important predictor of how well his subjects coped with life’s inevitable disappointments was the level of security established with their primary caregiver during the first two years of life. Sroufe informally told me that he thought that resilience in adulthood could be predicted by how lovable mothers rated their kids at age two."

(tags: psychology body mind brain therapy resilience trauma mental-health )

Enjoyed this, relevant quotes.

• Page 11: "Robbins’s early years were the trainwreck that often breeds felons and drunks. Luckily for "RR," he found climbing, a way out of his hardscrabble youth, and he threw himself at the rock with abandon. As his climbs got harder, so increased the commitment, risk, and fear. Perhaps during his second ascent of the North Face of the Sentinel (he and his partners were still teenagers) in 1953, or four years later, on the first ascent of the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome, Robbins realized the great truth that Viktor Frankl had discovered during his captivity in Nazi concentration camps. As Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, which details his ordeal, when a person has a reason to live, they can face almost any travail. Such an approach, commonly born from trials by fire, goes directly against our instinctual response to avoid pain and seek pleasure and security. Problem is, we all have an expiration date, which leaves us wondering what anything means. Since our aversion to suffering runs so deep, few come to know, as an existential fact, that purpose and meaning accrue from facing difficulties, all while exploring what we can bring to the adventure. Not easy. Life happens. Dreams unravel. Friends and family drop away as we hurtle toward the vanishing point. And that’s where Royal’s legacy has paid the richest dividends. Learning that we are strangely saved by meeting life on its own terms, embracing the whole catastrophe, and discovering what grit and passion we can muster for the task. Remembering that, in any set of circumstances, no matter how grave, we can follow Robbins’s example and choose our own way. Anything less leaves us underutilized."
• Page 222: "Royal had reflected often upon death, even as a young man. As Liz observed, he neither surrendered to nor resisted its inevitability, but acted like death was a kind of summit that could be reached by digging deeper, trying to make it just a few more feet, to live through another day. When he could no longer speak, Royal continued to read. Max Gammon, who knew nothing of Royal’s loss of faith, sent him regular letters. "I said to him that he needed to look at what was happening as a difficult climb," said Gammon, "and that the last move was utterly impossible, unless he trusted in Christ’s rope." What Royal thought of this advice will never be known. Royal wrote one of his last missives on a postcard of the Salathé Wall that he sent to Max Gammon’s young son, Matthew. "Live, so that when you die," wrote Royal, "you are a great loss." "It had always been so important to Royal to die well," said Liz, "[and] in the act of dying, to not be cowardly but honorable. We all know you’re going to have to do it, and very deeply within himself, Royal knew he wanted to do it well." And so, on March 14, 2017, at 10:10 in the morning, in his bedroom on Magnolia Avenue, with the California sun shining on his face through the branches of the giant redwood, the light slipped from Royal Shannon Robbins. He went off to some place none of us have ever seen, and it was a great loss. "His greatest climb," wrote Liz, "was to die in the manner that he did… so stoic.""
• Page 225: ""Royal was a very complex person," wrote Joe Fitschen in a presentation he later gave at the Oakland Climber’s Festival. "Not a chameleon, not one who changed his personality to suit the occasion like one might change clothes, but one who couldn’t be put in a box, one whose behavior was not a function of habit but was an attempt to deal honestly with the situation at hand." Max Gammon compared Royal to a massive, multifaceted rock wall: all routes were difficult; all routes were mysterious. "Our road trips, his love of adventure," wrote Tamara, "Tintin and Asterix, the way he would laugh, his sportsmanship. These are what we who knew him miss. I think his story is less about the forces which shaped it and more about how consciously and deliberately he shaped it. That is an unusual thing." "One is never hard at the center," Royal wrote in his notebooks, bringing us closest to the source of his being. "At the center is that little boy, open and flower-like, who screams to be listened to, who cries to escape, to be let out, to not be so deeply imprisoned, who would prefer to submit before God, yet is forced by the repeated blows of life to retire deeper, safer from the wounds, to retire so deep and so safe that he appears to be not there at all." The notion that American climbing’s greatest moments can be traced to the aftermath of unresolved childhood trauma inflicted by toxic father figures and poverty bears consideration. Abuse not only failed to extinguish Royal’s hunger for joy, transcendence, and ecstasy but heightened it to a perhaps unusual level. But recent historians have shown that in America, the line between being outdoors recreationally and out of necessity (i.e., homeless because of poverty or mental health issues) is much thinner than many might suppose. Squalor revealed that Royal, more than most people, was built for wonder. "

(tags: inspiration explorers mountaineering biographies california rock-climbing el-capitan big-wall-climbing )

Recommended by Greg… need to read before Italy this summer. Done! Read before the Italy trip, gave me confidence that hanging with my oldest on a hike for 1.5 weeks wouldn’t be a big deal… and it wasn’t.

(tags: travel family adventure hiking fatherhood spain perseverance endurance camino-de-santiago )

No idea how I found this book (probably grabbed it from my Dad’s pile of read books) but it was a fun adventure read.

(tags: family adventure western montana historical-fiction american-west )

I think I found this by way of ChatGPT recommendations based on other mountaineering / outdoor books I’ve read… it was a slog, not sure why I finished it other than I feel bad giving up on books. Wouldn’t recommend. Quotes:

• Page 245: "My foot slips on a narrow ledge: in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to as "the precision and openness and intelligence of the present." The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is "to paint eyeballs on chaos." When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present-even while I think of it-is gone."

(tags: mountaineering adventure wildlife meditation non-fiction quest nature-writing )

Introduced to the book by Clayton, from work. Really enjoyed this as someone who spent a bunch of time in church and religious schools growing up. Quotes:

• "He taught, as great teachers teach, by example. It was not his manner to try to talk anyone into anything. Preachers err, he told me, by trying to "talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery."
• On visionaries and leaders: "They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either can you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experiences for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed."
• "All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow – loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it…. I don’t believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is all of creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all… Moyers: But if you accepted that as an ultimate conclusion you wouldn’t try to form any laws or fight any battles or… Campbell: I didn’t say that… that is not the necessary conclusion to draw. You could say "I will participate in this life. I will join the army. I will go to war." and so forth. I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful wonderful opera – except that it hurts."
• "Moyers: In classic Christian doctrine the material world is to be despised, and life is to be redeemed in the hereafter, in heaven, where our rewards come. But you say that if you affirm that which you deplore, you are affirming the very world that is our eternity at the moment. Campbell: Yes, that is what I am saying. Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in termporal terms cuts off. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere…. The experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life. Moyers: This is it. Campbell: This is it." Reminds me of DFW, "this is water".
• "What does it mean to have a sacred place? … This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know ath you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen."
• "The New Testament teaches dying to one’s self, literally suffering the pain of death to the world and its values. This is the vocabulary of the mystics. Now, suicide is also a symbolic act. It casts off the psychological posture that you happen to be in at the time, so that you may come into a better one. You die to your current life in order to come to another some kind. But, as Jung says, you’d better not get caught in a symbolic situation…. Moyers: But it seems so foreign to our experience today. Religion is easy. You put it on as if you are putting on a coat and going out to the movies. Campbell: Yes, most churches are nice for social gatherings. You like the people there, they are respectable people, they are old friends, and the family has known them for a long time. Moyers: What has happened to this mythic idea of the self-sacrificing savior in our culture today? Campbell: During the Vietnam War, I remember seeing on the television young men in helicopters going out to resuce one or another of their companions, at great risk to themselves. They didn’t have to resuce that greatly endagnered young man. And so there I saw this same thing working, the same willingness of which Schopenhauer wrote, of scarificing one’s own life for another. Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly, in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain, life is suffering; and life is horror, but by God, you are alive."
• "… if he doesn’t recognize it, it may turn him into Darth Vader. If the person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for."
• "I can’t think of any that say that if you’re going to live, you won’t suffer. Myths tell us how to confront and bear and interpret suffering, but they do not say that in life there can or should be no suffering. When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered, and affirmative. Even with suffering? Exactly. The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva – the one who knows immorality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world. And this means not only experiencing sorrows oneself but participating with compassion in the sorrows of others. Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self interest to humanity. "

(tags: philosophy culture folklore religion mythology legends symbolism storytelling humanity )

Fun book, no quotes.

(tags: family sheep agriculture community landscape environmentalism farming lake-district nature-writing )

Marcelo at work mentioned that he was reading this book, sounded good. Took awhile to complete, felt like it repeated a lot of the same topics but a good one to understand global politics over the last 20 years and for the next 50. Quotes:

• "In social psychology, distinctiveness theory holds that people define themselves by what makes them different from others in a particular context… a woman psychologist in the company of a dozen women who work at other occupations thinks of herself as a psychologist; when with a dozen male psychologists, she thinks of herself as a woman…. As increased communications, trade, and travel multiply the interactions among civilizations, people increasingly accord greater relevance to their civilizational identity. Two Europeans, one German and one French, interacting with each other will identify each other as German and French. The same two, interacting with two Arabs, will define themselves as Europeans and Arabs."
• The most obvious, most salient, and most powerful cause of the global religious resurgence is precisely what was supposed to cause the death of religion: the processes of social, economic, and cultural modernization that swept across the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Longstanding sources of identity and systems of authority are disrupted. People move from the countryside into the city, become separated from their roots, and take new jobs or no job. They interact with large numbers of strangers and are exposed to new sets of relationships. They need new sources of identity, new forms of stable community, and new sets of moral precepts to provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Religion, both mainstream and fundamentalist, meets these needs. As Lee Kuan Yew explained for East Asia:
  We are agricultural societies that have industrialized within one or two generations. What happened in the West over 200 years or more is happening here in about 50 years or less, It is all crammed and crushed into a very tight timeframe, so there are bound to be dislocations and malfunctions. If you look at the fast-growing countries – Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore – there’s been one remarkable phenomenon: the rise of religion. The old customers and religious – ancestor worship, shamanism – no longer completely satisfy…. This is associated with periods of great stress in society."
• "Apart from Russia the most populous and most important former Soviet republic is Ukraine. At various times in history Ukraine has been independent.
  Yet during most of the modern era it has been part of a political entity governed from Moscow. The decisive event occurred in 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnyt-sky, Cossack leader of an uprising against Polish rule, agreed to swear allegiance to the tsar in return for help against the Poles. From then until 1991, except for a briefly independent republic between 1917 and 1920, what is now Ukraine was controlled politically from Moscow. Ukraine, however, is a cleft country with two distinct cultures. The civilizational fault line between the West and Orthodoxy runs through its heart and has done so for centuries. At times in the past, western Ukraine was part of Poland, Lithuania, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Historically, western Ukrainians have spoken Ukrainian and have been strongly nationalist in their outlook. The people of eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly Orthodox and have in large part spoken Russian. In the early 1990s Russians made up 22 percent and native Russian speakers 31 percent of the total Ukrainian population. A majority of the elementary and secondary school students were taught in Russian.’ The Crimea is overwhelmingly Russian and was part of the Russian Federation until 1954, when Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine ostensibly in recognition of Khmelnytsky’s decision 300 years earlier."

(tags: history conflict civilization foreignpolicy worldpolitics identity ideology international-relations )

Two thumbs up.

(tags: terraforming colonization future science-fiction dystopia environmentalism biodiversity posthumanism genetic-engineering climate-change interplanetary-travel human-evolution )

Two thumbs up. Quote I appreciated:

• "Then comes September and the sun tilts to the south. Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of winter or summer, but for that glorious slant of the light, that feeling that in certain moments lances in on that tilt – that you had been thinking you were living in a room and suddenly with a view between buildings out to the rivers, a dappled sky overhead, you are struck by the fact that you live on the side of a planet – that the great city is also a great bay on a great world. In those golden moments even the most hard bitten citizen, the most oblivious urban creature, perhaps only pausing for a WALK sign to turn green, will be pieced by that light, and take a deep breath and see the place as if for the first time, and feel, briefly, but deeply, what it means to live in a place so strange and so gorgeous."

(tags: adventure capitalism future science-fiction dystopia environmentalism resilience climate-change speculative-fiction climate-fiction global-warming )

Great book for someone looking to understand soccer if you didn’t grow up in Europe and weren’t taught how it should be played or coached. Better than Inverting the Pyramid.
(tags: soccer coaching sports strategy tactics world-cup european-football catenaccio tactical-periodisation )

• Page 12: "As it crashes out of high peaks, it also draws a line of demarcation between the two highest mountain ranges on the planet – the Himalaya to the south and the Karakoram to the north. In find them to be the most imposing and splendid results of the natural processes taking place on planet Earth. In a life in which I have never, in the traditional sense, found God, these are places that, for me, represent the holy."
• Page 63: "Kaj explained that, for years, he had been operating under what he described as the 100 year plan. The idea was that any decision made in the mountains was placed against his overarching goal to live to be a centenarian."

(tags: mountaineering exploration adventure mindfulness perseverance personal-growth alpinism )

• Page 110: On the Penguins of Madagascar movie: ".. I also love it because it captures, and makes the gentlest possible fun of, something about myself I find deeply troubling. Like the adult penguin who stays in line and announces, "I question nothing,", I mostly follow the rules. I mostly try to act like everyone else is acting, even as we all approach the precipice. We imagine other animals as being without consciousness, mindlessly following the leader to they-know-not-where, but in that construction, we sometimes forget that we are also animals."
• Page 128: On news: "The word news tells a secret on itself, though: what’s news isn’t primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new. So much of what actually changes in human life isn’t driven by events, but instead by processes, which often aren’t considered news. We don’t see much about climate change on CNN, unless a new report is published, nor do we see regular coverage of ongoing crises, like child mortality or poverty."
• Page 132: on CNN: "Good journalism seeks to correct for those biases, to help us toward a deeper understanding of the universe and our place in it. But when we can’t read the writing on the plywood but still think we know what it says, we are spreading ignorance and bigotry, not the peach and friendship Turner promised."
• Page 176: "There are so many problems with Monopoly, but maybe the reason the game has persisted for so long – it has been one of the world’s bestselling board games for over eighty years – is that it’s problems are our problems. Like life, Monopoly unfolds very slowly at first, and then becomes distressingly fast at the end. Like life, people find meaning in its outcomes even though the game is rigged toward the rich and the privileged, an insofar as it isn’t rigged, it’s random. And like life, your friends get mad if you take their money, and then no matter how rich you are, there’s an ever expanding void inside of you that money can never fill, but gripped by the madness of unregulated enterprise, you nonetheless believe that if you just get a couple more hotels or take from your friends their few remaining dollars, you will at least feel complete."
• Page 264, on history and time: "And so, for me, it’s a picture about knowing and not knowing. You know you’re on your way to a dance, but don’t know you’re on your way to a war. The picture is a reminder that you never know what will happen to you, to your friends, to your nation. Philip Roth called history ‘the relentless unforeseen.’ He said that history is where ‘everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.’ In the faces of these young farmers, we glimpse how profoundly unexpected the coming horror was. And that reminds us there is also a horizon that we cannot see past."

(tags: history technology science culture society humanity non-fiction )

Dragged on at the end but a good read overall. Quote:

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea."

(tags: ecology nature environment wildlife wilderness conservation )

Fun Christmas present read, had some good stories I had never heard.

(tags: history sports baseball americas-pastime )

Enjoyed this book, lots of quotes:

• "… the defining quality of a wild place is that it make us somehow ‘stumble.’ It removes a step from our stairs, and thereby draws attention to the ‘narrow impetuosity’ of human schedules. ‘It is precisely because the regimes of light and time in the Arctic are so different,’ he writes, ‘that it is able to expose in startling ways the complacency of our thoughts about land in general.’"
• "… And confronted by an unknown landscape, what happens to our sense of wealth? What does it mean to grow rich? Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a fortune, which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north? Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland?… Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?"
• "Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent."
• "Suddenly in the middle of winter and without warning a huge piece of sea ice surges hundreds of feet inland, like something alive. The Eskimo call it ivu. The silent arrival of caribou in an otherwise empty landscape is another example. The long wait at a seal hole for prey to surface. Waiting for a lead to close. The Eskimo have a word for this kind of long waiting, prepared for a sudden event: quinnuituq. Deep patience."
• "I settle myself in a crease in the tundra, out of the wind, arrange my clothing so nothing binds, and begin to study the far shore with the binoculars. After ten or fifteen minutes I hae found two caribou. Stefansson was once asked by an Eskimo to whom he was showing a pair of binoculars for the first time whether he could ‘see into tomorrow’, with them…. What the inuk probably meant was, Are those things powerful enough to see something that will not reach you for another day, like migrating caribou? Or a part of the landscape suitable for a campsite, which you yourself will not reach for another day?"
• "In the 1930s a man named Benjamin Lee Whorf began to clarify an insight he had had into the structure of the Hopi language. Hopi has only limited tenses, noted Whorf, makes no reference to time as an entity distinct from space, and, though relatively poor in nouns, is rich in verbs. It is a language that projects a world of movement and changing relationships, a continuous fabric of time and space. It is better suited than the English language to descibing quantum mechanics. English divides time into linear segments by making use of many tenses. It is a noun-rich verb-poor tongue that contrasts fixed space with a flow of time. It is a language of static space, more suited, say, to architectural description. All else being equal, a Hopi child would have little difficulty comprehending the theory of relativity in his own language, while an American child could more easily master history. A Hope would be confounded by the idea that time flowed from the past into the present…. He made people see that there were no primitive languages; and that there was no pool of thought from which cultures drew their metaphysics. ‘All observers,’ he cautioned, ‘are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe.’"
• "The literature of arctic exploration is frequently offered as a record of resolute will before the menacing fortifications of the landscape. It is more profitable I think to disregard this notion – that the land is an adversary bent on human defeat, that the people who came and went were heroes or failures in this. It is better to contemplate the record of human longing to achieve something significant, to be free of some of the grim weight of life. That weight was ignorance, poverty of spirit, indolence, and the threat of anonymity and destitution. This harsh landscape become the focus of a desire to separate oneself from those things and to overcome them. In these arctic narratives, then, are the threads of dreams that serve us all…. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a companion of Robert Scott, said that exploration was the physical expression of an intellectual passion." Emphasis mine.
• "…. Our difficulty lies in part, I think, with our insistence on defining completely the terms of our encounter with new-found wealth. We do no like to be countermanded in our categories by having something define itself. We seem vaguely uneasy, too, with the notion that a flock of snow geese rising like a snowstorm over Baffin Island is as valuable or more to mankind than the silver, tin, and copper being dug out of the Bolivian Andres and Potosi. These are not modern misgivings; they date in North America from the time of Columbus and John Cabot. What every culture must decide, actively debate and decide, is what of all that surrounds it, tangible, and intangible, it will dismantle and turn into material wealth. And what of its culture wealth, from the tradition of finding peace in the vision of an undisturbed hillside to a knowledge of how to finance a corporate mere, it will fight to preserve.… It seemed clear to me that we need tolerance in our lives for the worth of different sorts of perception, of which the contrasting Umwelten of the animals on the island are a reminder."
• "The European culture… .has yet to understand the wisdom, preserved in North America, that lies in the richness and sanctity of a wild landscape, what it can mean in the unfolding of human life, the staying of a troubled human spirit. The other phrase that comes to mind is more obscure. It is the Latin motto from the title banner of The North Georgia Gazette: per freta hactenus negata, meaning to have negotiated a strait the very existence of which has been denied. But it also suggests a continuing movement through unknown waters. It is, simultaneously, an expression of fear and of accomplishment, the cusp on which human life finds its richest expression."
• Very end of the book had a picture of a map of the Arctic that I hadn’t seen previously, fascinating perspective if you like maps.

(tags: ecology nature environment exploration adventure wilderness environmentalism arctic climate-change indigenous-cultures )

Fun book, would read again.

(tags: adventure survival friendship science-fiction space scifi humanity astronaut extraterrestrial )

Probably should have bought it used or gotten it at the library, but worth it learn about Christine’s story, her relationship with Portland, more about women’s soccer.

(tags: soccer canada portland thorns nwsl )

Sad story, great book. Looking forward to seeing the movie although I’ve heard it’s better done as three 1 hour sittings via streaming.

(tags: history crime corruption fbi oil oklahoma greed )