Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"For a time in the history of the West, lack of technology held in check human desire to modify the land. Wilderness was the beneficiary. [In Alaska] ...technological progress had largely removed these restraints."

""Armchair" tourists, intellectual importers of Alaska's wilderness, were among the most vocal in defending land they never expected to see."

"There was nothing out there. Nothing at all.. If this was a religious value, as Abbey implied, it differed greatly from the simple, if sincere pantheism of John Muir."

"For some people at least taking risks and responding to challenges in wilderness situations were principal ingredients of health and happiness."

"It is no accident that characterizations of scholarship like "pathfinding", "trailblazing", and "pioneering" originated in a wilderness context."

"In the 1840s the Mormons also found freedom in wilderness, and so did some counterculture communities in the 1960s."

"an American insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilised man who has renewed himself in the wild."

"In the 1960s and 1970s "environment" and "ecology" became household words. They as much about that time as faith does about the Puritans, efficiency about Progressives, and security about the generation that experienced the Great Depression."

"Given its general orientation, the counterculture inevitably found value in wilderness which was, after all diametrically opposed to a civilization many had come to distrust and resent."

"The point was that American civilization, in Faulkner's estimation had shamed the death of the American wilderness."

"We are a great people," he said, "because we have been so successful in developing and using our marvelous natural resources, but also we Americans are the people we are largely because we have had the influence of the wilderness on our lives."

"What," he asked, "of the too-old, the too-young, the timid, the inexperienced, the frail, the hurried, the out-of-shape or the just plain lazy...?"

"two thousand years of occupation have produced a landscape more beautiful, productive and ecologically balanced than the primeval forest Neolithic settlers encountered."

"...any contact with unmodified nature left man with "scratches, bites, torn clothes, and grime""

"Modern druids", Fraserburgh said "worship trees and sacrifice humans to those trees".

"The kings of ancient England lost their royal hunting preserves to farms and factories, he concludes, and today's wilderness will and should give way to civilization." - invocation of elitist evil.

"I had come to the slow acknowledgement that the mind altering substance of choice in a pressured, successful middle life is alcohol." - McEwan mounts a defence of booze :)

"There were no constraints of theological nicety or religious observance, no social sanction or congregational calling to account, none of the moral framework that made religions viable, however failed their cosmologies." - the interesting questions becomes why do they hang on their cosmologies? Why did they need them in the first place? cf Plato's vision of final judgement.

"'You think you can read your way out of this". She was suddenly angry and no longer crying. 'Don't you realise you've got a problem?'"

"He seems unaware that his arguments are no more than ravings, they are an aberration and they have a cause."

"Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially the years of practical striving were irrelevant. The Theory [of Relativity] was already in the textbooks from the twenties onwards. It's integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist."

"Like a self in a dream I was both first and third person"

So that's it, the terrible thing has happened.. or perhaps not. So glad to be back in the world of old adult fiction.

"Such a display of death - how could it be considered a victory?" - the only memorable sentence in the book!

"I bet you could [ride a bicycle] without thinking. But do you remember learning to ride one?' - referring to the implant in her brain?

The final judgement, purgatory, heaven and hell: 350 years before Christ.

"...our soul is immortal and never perishes..." - and this why psyche is translated as soul all through Plato.