Rating

★★★☆☆

Category

non-fiction

Read

2018-11-26

Pages

258

Took me ages to get through, never felt like reading it. But did do a pretty good job of capturing solo hiking. Only worth the read if you’ve some of that. Good last chapter wrapping it all up.

“In late afternoon I passed a Park boundary sign, and a little later it occurred to me quite casually that I had just accomplished what I set out to do: I had traveled on foot from one end of Grand Canyon National Park to the other. It did not seem to mean very much. The journey had succeeded for quite different reasons.”

“I remembered an insight of Emerson’s that I had read just before I began my journey: There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.… The hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours. [..] You cannot escape the age you live in: you are a product of it. You have to stand back from time to time and get your perspectives right. But then you have to come back and resume the task of contributing in your own way to your own age. And this was why the world had suddenly caught up with me. I had seen the ages; now it was time to come back to the hours. It was time to use what I had seen. Time to apply the ages to the frail, overwhelmingly important little time span that was my life, that is all our individual lives. It was time to be out and doing. Out and contributing.”

“Organisms themselves are relatively transient entities through which materials and energy flow and eventually return to the environment.”