Cathedral of the World: Sailing Notes for a Blue Planet - Softcover

Arms, Myron

 
9780385494762: Cathedral of the World: Sailing Notes for a Blue Planet
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385494769 ISBN 13: 9780385494762
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

The curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself. Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire.

What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean. In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Myron Arms is a teacher, writer, and professional sailor who contributes regularly to Cruising World, Sail, and many other sailing and adventure magazines. Educated at both Yale and the Harvard Divinity School, he taught high school English for seven years before founding a sailing program for teenagers. As a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed ocean master since 1977, he has voyaged more than 100,000 sea miles and has led seven sail-training expeditions to northern Canada, Greenland, and the Arctic. He lives with his wife, Kay, on a farm overlooking the Sassafras River on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself. Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire.
What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean. In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.

Aus dem Klappentext

ines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself. Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questio

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Charts and Other Fiction

Some of my earliest memories are of games I used to play with my father on long winter evenings, the two of us hunched over a table in our living room studying the charts for the next sailing trip he was always planning for the family during his upcoming holiday. Armed with a pencil and a set of parallel rules, we would set sail on imaginary voyages across the bays of summer, marking off distances and estimated times of arrival, checking depths and the location of buoys, poking into coves, making plans.

The thing I remember most about my father's charts was the way they set us free. They were like novels without characters: settings in which we were the actors and the creators of our own episodes. They contained fabulous worlds, and we lived in them like supermen, traveling through their benign geography as if we were invincible.

There seemed no reason, then, to worry about the dangers that might have been lurking somewhere within the games we played. The games themselves seemed harmless enough. In fact, they seemed a perfect way for a little boy and his father to share a few pleasant hours together. I wasn't concerned at the time about the inconsistencies between the charts and the actual geography they were intended to represent. I wasn't thinking about the real bays of summer: the ones with uncharted ledges and misplaced buoys and currents that flowed in opposite directions to the ones predicted by the cartographers.

As a child I learned to roam across the worlds of my father's charts careless and free. But I didn't learn about their limitations. I didn't realize that nautical charts, like all maps, are only guidebooks: fictitious renderings of a world perceived by imperfect human beings, never identical with the actual places they describe. I learned about the wealth of information the charts contained. But I didn't learn that they were also filled with oversights and half-truths and miscalculations. This realization has taken many years to learn--years of trial and error, summers of close calls, winters of near catastrophe when I've made the mistake of trusting the chart spread out before me, only to discover that the cartographer must have been half asleep the day he drew this line or marked that shoal or measured such and such a distance.

Nautical charts suffer from a basic flaw: the flaw of scale. They are complicated, often powerful abstractions of the actual world, but they are not--cannot be--identical with that world. The terrain they attempt to map is too large and too complex. To be useful at all, they must reduce and simplify.

The Polish-American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot once asked an odd question whose implications may have forever changed the face of modern mathematics: "How long is the coast of Britain?" The answer, he argued, is not to be found on any chart. In fact, the answer is not to be found in any conclusive way at all, at least not with the tools of measurement that we have presently available to us.

The reason for this apparent dilemma has to do with scale. Imagine a cartographer armed with a measuring device one meter in length. He paces off the coastline in question one meter at a time, traveling in and out of bays, across rocky headlands, over river deltas, until he comes up with a total number of meters. Now imagine the same cartographer with a much shorter measuring device, say one centimeter in length. This time as he remeasures the distance, his total will include more detail. His new "coastline" will include pebbles and rocks that were ignored in his first calculation, and the resulting answer will be somewhat greater.

What Mandelbrot discovered was that there seemed to be no limit to the length of the coastline, providing only that the scale of measurement could be made smaller each time. A microscopic measuring stick would reveal as yet undetected bays and promontories that would, when measured on a smaller scale, contain ever smaller bays and promontories, all the way down to subatomic scales (and possibly beyond). The point he was trying to convey, as a mathematician, had to do with the tendency of certain apparently chaotic natural phenomena (such as "coastlines") to repeat complex patterns across scale. But what he also managed to show was the impossibility of anyone's ever drawing a perfectly accurate chart of any real coastline anywhere on Earth.

Chart makers, all of them, are the purveyors of our collective nostalgia for order and simplicity. They are players in a con-game whose performance is so convincing that we are, at least momentarily, blinded to the underlying dishonesty of their craft. Each line a chart maker draws is an approximation. Each location is a calculated guess. Each measurement is a hypothetical proposition whose accuracy is based partially on the calibration of the measuring device, partially on the attentiveness of the one who reads the scale.

Even when we know such things, however, we seem willing to suspend our disbelief. We want things simple. We want to think that we can comprehend the world that the chart represents. So we accept the chart maker's fiction--we welcome his lie.

I remember the first time I was forced to question the chart maker's world. I was eleven years old. For two summers I'd been learning how to sail with my father and uncles and older cousins in a small wooden dinghy in the river in front of my grandmother's house. Finally, I was given permission to sail the boat on my own. I wasn't allowed to venture out around Stone Point into Buzzards Bay--the seas were too rough out there, my father warned, and the afternoon winds were too strong. But I could sail in the river and investigate its creeks and coves to my heart's content. I was given the key to the boathouse where the dinghy was kept and a chart of the river, and I was set free to unravel the mysteries of a miniature world that seemed to me as large as all the seven seas.

The river, at first, felt strange and dangerous. Directly in front of my grandmother's house, between her beach and the cottages on Cromeset Point, was an irregular heap of broken granite rubble called the Channel Rocks. A quarter mile upriver was Indian Cove, marked on its southern flank by a sentinel boulder and surrounded by a series of shallow underwater ledges. In the first bend of the river was a low, muddy island of eelgrass flats that I had visited several times in a skiff to collect fiddler crabs for fishing. Beyond the island lay a series of shallow bays fringed with scrub pine and marsh grass, and beyond these were the twin highway bridges, a broken pier, and a half dozen gray shingle buildings: the last signs of human habitation before the river narrowed and twisted into a dark, unruly forest of pine and beech and pin oak.

My first attempts at navigating the river were tentative in the extreme. I studied my chart and kept as well as I could to mid-channel. All the obvious dangers--the Channel Rocks, the boulders and ledges at Indian Cove, the eelgrass shallows near the muddy island--were marked on the chart, and I gave each one a wide berth. I sailed on mornings when the weather was clear and the winds were light, increasing the range of my travels only as I grew familiar with major landmarks and with the look and feel of the river.

Familiarity is the enemy of care, however, and my boldness grew with the summer. The inevitable day of reckoning came in the last week of August when a cousin arrived at my grandmother's house for a visit. He had seldom sailed the river and knew even less than I did about its secrets, yet his presence gave me courage. He took the chart, I took the tiller, and we set off on the bottom of a flood tide one windy afternoon to explore all the way to the river's headwaters, promising our parents only that we would be home by...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385494769
ISBN 13 
9780385494762
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
176
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780385492690: Cathedral of the World: Sailing Notes for a Blue Planet

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0385492693 ISBN 13:  9780385492690
Verlag: Doubleday, 1999
Hardcover