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ahnmur 's review for:
Lands of Lost Borders
by Kate Harris
A magical journey, tugs at my hair and pulls me away, filling me with wanderlust.
Some of my favourite passages (which I've also added to the quotes)...
On the romantic pleasure of cycling:
"I'm not sure where I go when I spin wheels for hours on end like that, except into the rapture of doing nothing deeply—although"nothing," in this case, involves a tantrum of peddle strokes on a burdened bicycle along a euphemism for a highway through the Himalaya. But in the singular focus of that task, the most tantric simplicity of it—breathe, pedal breathe—I took in everything at once: the dust settling on my skin, the ache and strain and release of my quads, the river glittering far below like an artery of light, the shining silver vein..."
P 27
On the dopamine rush of curiosity and discovery:
"...I stayed up all night reading [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] with demented avidity to the final page, my empirical understanding of the world undone by Kuhn's argument that scientific theories are in essence evolutionarily selected stories, that is fictions that best fit the available facts—until the discovery of new facts forces a paradigm shift to a different and better fiction. More than that, he argues that scientist who embrace a new paradigm at an early stage—before sufficient evidence has been amassed to trigger a scientific revolution—do so not out of a sober consideration of the available facts, or at least not only that, but also with a subjective, irrational, from-the-gut leap of faith."
p 47
"Dillard's books should have prepared me for this. "What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? she asks in one of them. "Are they not both saying: Hello?""
p 48
Some of my favourite passages (which I've also added to the quotes)...
On the romantic pleasure of cycling:
"I'm not sure where I go when I spin wheels for hours on end like that, except into the rapture of doing nothing deeply—although"nothing," in this case, involves a tantrum of peddle strokes on a burdened bicycle along a euphemism for a highway through the Himalaya. But in the singular focus of that task, the most tantric simplicity of it—breathe, pedal breathe—I took in everything at once: the dust settling on my skin, the ache and strain and release of my quads, the river glittering far below like an artery of light, the shining silver vein..."
P 27
On the dopamine rush of curiosity and discovery:
"...I stayed up all night reading [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions] with demented avidity to the final page, my empirical understanding of the world undone by Kuhn's argument that scientific theories are in essence evolutionarily selected stories, that is fictions that best fit the available facts—until the discovery of new facts forces a paradigm shift to a different and better fiction. More than that, he argues that scientist who embrace a new paradigm at an early stage—before sufficient evidence has been amassed to trigger a scientific revolution—do so not out of a sober consideration of the available facts, or at least not only that, but also with a subjective, irrational, from-the-gut leap of faith."
p 47
"Dillard's books should have prepared me for this. "What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? she asks in one of them. "Are they not both saying: Hello?""
p 48