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Searchology Directory 19
Page 04
Edward FitzGerald once said that a fault of modern writing was that it tried to compress too many good things into a page, and aimed too much at omitting the homelier interspaces. We must not try to make our lives into a perpetual feast; at least we must try to do so, but it must be by conquest rather than by inglorious flight; we must face the fact that the stuff of life is both homely and indeed amiss, and realise, if we can, that our happiness is bound up with energetically trying to escape from conditions which we cannot avoid. When we are young and fiery-hearted, we think that a tame counsel; but, like all great truths, it dawns on us slowly. Not until we begin to ascend the hill do we grasp how huge, how complicated, how intricate the plain, with all its fields, woods, hamlets, and streams is; we are happy men and women if in middle age we even faintly grasp that the actual truth about life is vastly larger and finer than any impatient youthful fancies about it are, though it is good to have indulged our splendid fancies in youth, if only for the delight of learning how much more magnificent is the real design.
It was cold, especially at night. Nearly all my instruments had been badly damaged in our many accidents in Brazil, and I was unable to replace them either in Para or Manaos. Owing, therefore, to the lack of self-registering thermometers, I could not keep an accurate daily record of the maximum and minimum temperatures. After leaving Camp 93, we went over a really fearful trail, my mules being all the time chest-deep in mud. It was extremely hard work for the animals to get along. As is well known to any traveller, all animals of a caravan when on a narrow path step in the footprints of their predecessors, so that on that trail they had sunk a long series of deep holes in the soft clay, which were constantly being filled by water sliding from the mountain-side. In that particular part the mud had highly caustic qualities, which burnt the skin and caused irritation each time you were splashed. The muleteers who were walking had their feet badly burnt by it, one man suffering agony from his blistered feet.
In these days geography, in the form known as anthropo-geography, is putting forth claims to be the leading branch of anthropology. And, doubtless, a thorough grounding in geography must henceforth be part of the anthropologist's equipment.[3] The schools of Ratzel in Germany and Le Play in France are, however, fertile in generalizations that are far too pretty to be true. Like other specialists, they exaggerate the importance of their particular brand of work. The full meaning of life can never be expressed in terms of its material conditions. I confess that I am not deeply moved when Ratzel announces that man is a piece of the earth. Or when his admirers, anxious to improve on this, after distinguishing the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere or water, the lithosphere or crust, and the centrosphere or interior mass, proceed to add that man is the most active portion of an intermittent biosphere, or living envelope of our planet, I cannot feel that the last word has been said about him.
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