Background Image

...

In France, A Chemist Named Pilatre De Rozier Tested The Flammability Of Hydrogen By Gulping A Mouthful And Blowing Across An Open Flame, Proving At A Stroke That Hydrogen Is Indeed Explosively Combustible And That Eyebrows Are Not Necessarily A Permanent Feature Of One's Face.

-Bill Bryson

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

In France, A Chemist

Bill Bryson

...

In France, A Chemist Named Pilatre De Rozier Tested The Flammability Of Hydrogen By Gulping A Mouthful And Blowing Across An Open Flame, Proving At A Stroke That Hydrogen Is Indeed Explosively Combustible And That Eyebrows Are Not Necessarily A Permanent Feature Of One's Face.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Bill Bryson

There Is The Odd Exception, Like Albert Einstein, But As A Breed, Scientists Tend Not Be Very Good At Presenting Themselves.

I Was Heading To Nebraska. Now There's A Sentence You Don't Want To Say Too Often If You Can Possibly Help It.

Life Just Wants To Be; But It Doesn't Want To Be Much.

Columbus Real Achievement Was Managing To Cross The Ocean Successfully In Both Directions. Though An Accomplished Enough Mariner, He Was Not Terribly Good At A Great Deal Else, Especially Geography, The Skill That Would Seem Most Vital In An Explorer.

There Is Something About The Momentum Of Travel That Makes You Want To Just Keep Moving, To Never Stop.

Not One Of Your Pertinent Ancestors Was Squashed, Devoured, Drowned, Starved, Stranded, Stuck Fast, Untimely Wounded, Or Otherwise Deflected From Its Life's Quest Of Delivering A Tiny Charge Of Genetic Material To The Right Partner At The Right Moment In Order To Perpetuate The Only Possible Sequence Of Hereditary Combinations That Could Result -- Eventually, Astoundingly, And All Too Briefly -- In You.

When I Was Growing Up I Used To Think That The Best Thing About Coming From Des Moines Was That It Meant You Didn't Come From Anywhere Else In Iowa. By Iowa Standards, Des Moines Is A Mecca Of Cosmopolitanism, A Dynamic Hub Of Wealth And Education, Where People Wear Three-piece Suits And Dark Socks, Often Simultaneously.

It Isn't Easy To Become A Fossil. ... Only About One Bone In A Billion, It Is Thought, Becomes Fossilized. If That Is So, It Means That The Complete Fossil Legacy Of All The Americans Alive Today - That's 270 Million People With 206 Bones Each - Will Only Be About 50 Bones, One-quarter Of A Complete Skeleton. That's Not To Say, Of Course, That Any Of These Bones Will Ever Actually Be Found.

I Understand Cricket - What's Going On, The Scoring - But I Can't Understand Why.

I Wish I Could Adjust My Voice, But It's Just What's Happened To Me. It's Because I've Lived Abroad For A Long Time, And My Wife Is English And My Kids All Have English Accents, And Every Voice I Hear Is English. I've Never Intentionally Changed My Accent At All.

Everywhere Throughout New England You Find Old, Tumbledown Field Walls, Often In The Middle Of The Deepest, Most Settled- Looking Woods- A Reminder Of Just How Swiftly Nature Reclaims The Land In America.

A Significant Fraction Of Thru-hikers Reach Katahdin, Then Turn Around And Start Back To Georgia. They Just Can't Stop Walking, Which Kind Of Makes You Wonder.

I Refer Of Course To The Soaring Wonder Of The Age Known As The Eiffel Tower. Never In History Has A Structure Been More Technologically Advanced, Materially Obsolescent, And Gloriously Pointless All At The Same Time.

Protons Give An Atom Its Identity, Electrons Its Personality.

The Average Southerner Has The Speech Patterns Of Someone Slipping In And Out Of Consciousness. I Can Change My Shoes And Socks Faster Than Most People In Mississippi Can Speak A Sentence.

I Sat On A Toilet Watching The Water Run Thinking What An Odd Thing Tourism Is. You Fly Off To A Strange Land, Eagerly Abandoning All The Comforts Of Home And Then Expend Vast Quantities Of Time And Money In A Largely Futile Effort To Recapture The Comforts You Wouldn’t Have Lost If You Hadn’t Left Home In The First Place.

As My Father Always Used To Tell Me, 'you See, Son, There's Always Someone In The World Worse Off Than You.' And I Always Used To Think, 'so?

I'm Quite Certain That If The Rest Of The World Vanished Overnight And The Development Of Cricket Were Left In Australian Hands, Within A Generation, The Players Would Be Wearing Shorts And Using The Bats To Hit Each Other, And The Thing Is, It'd Be A Much Better Game For It.

When You Tell An Iowan A Joke, You Can See A Kind Of Race Going On Between His Brain And His Expression.

I Mused For A Few Moments On The Question Of Which Was Worse, To Lead A Life So Boring That You Are Easily Enchanted, Or A Life So Full Of Stimulus That You Are Easily Bored.

In Three Minutes, 98 Percent Of All The Matter There Is Or Will Ever Be Has Been Produced. We Have A Universe

Out Of The Thirty Thousand Types Of Edible Plants Thought To Exist On Earth, Just Eleven—corn, Rice, Wheat, Potatoes, Cassava, Sorghum, Millet, Beans, Barley, Rye, And Oats—account For 93 Percent Of All That Humans Eat, And Every One Of Them Was First Cultivated By Our Neolithic Ancestors.

I Always Wanted To Do A Baseball Book; I Love Baseball. The Problem Is That A Very Large Part Of My Following Is In Non-baseball Playing Countries.

In Terms Of Adaptability, Humans Are Pretty Amazingly Useless.

I Think It's Only Right That Crazy People Should Have Their Own City, But I Cannot For The Life Of Me See Why A Sane Person Would Want To Go There.

The Remarkable Position In Which We Find Ourselves Is That We Don't Actually Know What We Actually Know.

English Is Full Of Booby Traps For The Unwary Foreigner. Any Language Where The Unassuming Word Fly Signifies An Annoying Insect, A Means Of Travel, And A Critical Part Of A Gentleman's Apparel Is Clearly Asking To Be Mangled.

No One Knows, Incidentally, Why Australia's Spiders Are So Extravagantly Toxic; Capturing Small Insects And Injecting Them With Enough Poison To Drop A Horse Would Appear To Be The Most Literal Case Of Overkill. Still, It Does Mean That Everyone Gives Them Lots Of Space.

Everything Seems To Be Designed For The Benefit Of The Automobile And Not The Benefit Of The Human Being.

...and It Occurred To Me, With The Forcefulness Of A Thought Experienced In 360 Degrees, That That's Really What History Mostly Is: Masses Of People Doing Ordinary Things.

Most Scientists Are Without Exception Adorably Quirky, And One Of The Ways Of Making It More Accessible Was To Try To Get Readers Interested In The Person.

I Do Find London Exciting. Much As I Hate To Agree With That Tedious Old Git Samuel Johnson, And Despite The Pompous Imbecility Of His Famous Remark About When A Man Is Tired Of London He Is Tired Of Life...i Can't Dispute It.

Britain Still Has The Most Reliably Beautiful Countryside Of Anywhere In The World. I Would Hate To Be Part Of The Generation That Allowed That To Be Lost.

Nearly A Quarter Of American Men Were In The Armed Forces. The Rest Were In School, In Prison, Or Were George W. Bush.

Because We Humans Are Big And Clever Enough To Produce And Utilize Antibiotics And Disinfectants, It Is Easy To Convince Ourselves That We Have Banished Bacteria To The Fringes Of Existence. Don't You Believe It. Bacteria May Not Build Cities Or Have Interesting Social Lives, But They Will Be Here When The Sun Explodes. This Is Their Planet, And We Are On It Only Because They Allow Us To Be.

But That's The Glory Of Foreign Travel, As Far As I Am Concerned. I Don't Want To Know What People Are Talking About. I Can't Think Of Anything That Excites A Greater Sense Of Childlike Wonder Than To Be In A Country Where You Are Ignorant Of Almost Everything. Suddenly You Are Five Years Old Again. You Can't Read Anything, You Have Only The Most Rudimentary Sense Of How Things Work, You Can't Even Reliably Cross A Street Without Endangering Your Life. Your Whole Existence Becomes A Series Of Interesting Guesses.

For Anyone Of A Rational Disposition, Fashion Is Often Nearly Impossible To Fathom. Throughout Many Periods Of History – Perhaps Most – It Can Seem As If The Whole Impulse Of Fashion Has Been To Look Maximally Ridiculous. If One Could Be Maximally Uncomfortable As Well, The Triumph Was All The Greater.

An Awful Lot Of England Is Slowly Eroding, In Ways That I Find Really Distressing, And An Awful Lot Of It Is The Hedgerows... We're Reaching The Point Where A Lot Of The English Countryside Looks Just Like Iowa - Just Kind Of Open Space.

In The Morning I Awoke Early And Experienced That Sinking Sensation That Overcomes You When You First Open Your Eyes And Realize That Instead Of A Normal Day Ahead Of You, With Its Scatterings Of Simple Gratifications, You Are Going To Have A Day Without Even The Tiniest Of Pleasures; You Are Going To Drive Across Ohio.

Hardly Anyone Ever Leaves. This Is Because Des Moines Is The Most Powerful Hypnotic Known To Man. Outside Town There Is A Big Sign That Says, Welcome To Des Moines. This Is What Death Is Like. There Isn't Really. I Just Made That Up. But The Place Does Get A Grip On You.

There Are Three Stages In Scientific Discovery. First, People Deny That It Is True, Then They Deny That It Is Important; Finally They Credit The Wrong Person.

Eating In Sweden Is Really Just A Series Of Heartbreaks.

It Sometimes Occurs To Me That The British Have More Heritage Than Isgood For Them.

Perhaps It's My Natural Pessimism, But It Seems That An Awfully Large Part Of Travel These Days Is To See Things While You Still Can.

My Favourite Fellow Of The Royal Society Is The Reverend Thomas Bayes, An Obscure 18th-century Kent Clergyman And A Brilliant Mathematician Who Devised A Complex Equation Known As The Bayes Theorem, Which Can Be Used To Work Out Probability Distributions. It Had No Practical Application In His Lifetime, But Today, Thanks To Computers, Is Routinely Used In The Modelling Of Climate Change, Astrophysics And Stock-market Analysis.

I Have A Small Tattered Clipping That I Sometimes Carry With Meand Pull Out For Purposes Of Privateamusement. It's A Weather Forecast From Thewestern Daily Mail And It Says, In Toto: 'outlook: Dry And Warm, But Cooler With Some Rain.

After Years Of Patient Study (and With Cricket There Can Be No Other Kind), I Have Decided That There Is Nothing Wrong With The Game That The Introduction Of Golf Carts Wouldn't Fix In A Hurry.

The Food Is Excellent. The Beer Is Cold. The Sun Nearly Always Shines. There Is Coffee On Every Corner. Life Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This.

Absolute Brain Size Does Not Tell You Everything Or Possibly Sometimes Even Much. Elephants And Whales Both Have Brains Larger Than Ours, But You Wouldn't Have Much Trouble Outwitting Them In Contract Negotiations.

Cheapness Is A Great Virtue.

Most Of What Has Lived On Earth Has Left Behind No Record At All.

English Grammar Is So Complex And Confusing For The One Very Simple Reason That Its Rules And Terminology Are Based On Latin, A Language With Which It Has Precious Little In Common.

English Grammar

There Are Things You Just Can't Do In Life. You Can't Beat The Phone Company, You Can't Make A Waiter See You Until He's Ready To See You, And You Can't Go Home Again.

It Is Always Quietly Thrilling To Find Yourself Looking At A World You Know Well But Have Never Seen From Such An Angle Before.

Finding Yourself

I Love Everything About Motels. I Can't Help Myself. I Still Get Excited Every Time I Slip A Key Into A Motel Room Door And Fling It Open.

Black Bears Rarely Attack. But Here's The Thing. Sometimes They Do. All Bears Are Agile, Cunning And Immensely Strong, And They Are Always Hungry. If They Want To Kill You And Eat You, They Can, And Pretty Much Whenever They Want. That Doesn't Happen Often, But - And Here Is The Absolutely Salient Point - Once Would Be Enough.

In France, A Chemist Named Pilatre De Rozier Tested The Flammability Of Hydrogen By Gulping A Mouthful And Blowing Across An Open Flame, Proving At A Stroke That Hydrogen Is Indeed Explosively Combustible And That Eyebrows Are Not Necessarily A Permanent Feature Of One's Face.

I Can't Fix The World. If You Want To Make A Difference In Life, You Have To Direct Your Energies In A Focused Way.

Making A Difference

I Ordered A Coffee And A Little Something To Eat And Savored The Warmth And Dryness. Somewhere In The Background Nat King Cole Sang A Perky Tune. I Watched The Rain Beat Down On The Road Outside And Told Myself That One Day This Would Be Twenty Years Ago.

And Before Long There Will Be No More Milk In Bottles Delivered To The Doorstep Or Sleepy Rural Pubs, And The Countryside Will Be Mostly Shopping Centers And Theme Parks. Forgive Me. I Don't Mean To Get Upset. But You Are Taking My World Away From Me, Piece By Little Piece, And Sometimes It Just Pisses Me Off. Sorry.

If You Were Designing An Organism To Look After Life In Our Lonely Cosmos, To Monitor Where It Is Going And Keep A Record Of Where It Has Been, You Wouldn't Choose Human Beings For The Job. But Here's An Extrememly Salient Point: We Have Been Chosen, By Fate Or Providence Or Whatever You Wish To Call It. As Far As We Can Tell, We Are The Best There Is. We May Be All There Is. It's An Unnerving Thought That We May Be The Living Universe's Supreme Achievement And Its Worst Nightmare Simultaneously.

Making English Grammar Conform To Latin Rules Is Like Asking People To Play Baseball Using The Rules Of Football.

It Is A Slightly Arresting Notion That If You Were To Pick Yourself Apart With Tweezers, One Atom At A Time, You Would Produce A Mound Of Fine Atomic Dust, None Of Which Had Ever Been Alive But All Of Which Had Once Been You.

Physicists Are Atoms' Way Of Thinking About Atoms.

I Don't Know Whether I'm Misanthropic. It Seems To Me I'm Constantly Disappointed. I'm Very Easily Disappointed. Disappointed In The Things That People Do; Disappointed In The Things That People Construct. I Want Things To Be Better All The Time.

Because Time Moves More Slowly In Kid World ... It Goes On For Decades ... It Is Adult Life That Is Over In A Twinkling.

Maine Is Wonderful. It Can Be Very Hard. I Mean, If You Look At The Profile Maps It Doesn't Look It, But Somehow When You Get Out There It's Really Steep And Hard.

Every Kid I Knew Had A Father With A Little Stash Of Men's Magazines Which The Father Thought Was Secret And Which The Kid Knew All About.

I See Litter As Part Of A Long Continuum Of Anti-social Behaviour.

Entirely Incidentally, A Little-known Fact About Shakespeare Is That His Father Moved To Stratford-upon-avon From A Nearby Village Shortly Before His Son's Birth. Had He Not Done So, The Bard Of Avon Would Instead Be Known As The Rather Less Ringing Bard Of Snitterfield.

We Used To Build Civilizations. Now We Build Shopping Malls.

It's Hard Not To Be Kind Of Pessimistic About Human Beings Generally, Because We Do Tend To Mess Things Up. If You Just Look At The History Of Extinctions, We've Killed Off An Awful Lot Of Animals - And I Don't Think We're Doing A Very Good Job Of Looking After The Planet.

When You Sit In A Chair, You Are Not Actually Sitting There, But Levitating Above It At A Height Of One Angstrom (a Hundred Millionth Of A Centimetre), Your Electrons And Its Electrons Implacably Opposed To Any Closer Intimacy.

Your Pillow Alone May Be Home To 40 Million Bed Mites. (to Them Your Head Is Just One Large Oily Bon-bon). And Don't Think A Clean Pillow-case Will Make A Difference... Indeed, If Your Pillow Is Six Years Old--which Is Apparently About The Average Age For A Pillow--it Has Been Estimated That One-tenth Of Its Weight Will Be Made Up Of Sloughed Skin, Living Mites, Dead Mites And Mite Dung.

There Is Always A Little More Toothpaste In The Tube. Think About It.

There Is No Such Thing, Incidentally, As One Kudo.

I Became Quietly Seized With That Nostalgia That Overcomes You When You Have Reached The Middle Of Your Life And Your Father Has Recently Died And It Dawns On You That When He Went He Took Some Of You With Him.

At The Foot Of The Mountain, The Park Ended And Suddenly All Was Squalor Again. I Was Once More Struck By This Strange Compartmentalization That Goes On In America -- A Belief That No Commercial Activities Must Be Allowed Inside The Park, But Permitting Unrestrained Development Outside, Even Though The Landscape There May Be Just As Outstanding. America Has Never Quite Grasped That You Can Live In A Place Without Making It Ugly, That Beauty Doesn't Have To Be Confined Behind Fences, As If A National Park Were A Sort Of Zoo For Nature.

South Dakota... Is Like The World's First Drive-through Sensory Deprivation Chamber.

The Real Problem You Get With Humour Is That You Only Have So Many Kinds Of Jokes Within You, And You Mine That Vein A Lot. This Isn't Just Common To Me; It's Anybody Who's Funny.

It Was The Kind Of Pure, Undiffused Light That Can Only Come From A Really Hot Blue Sky, The Kind That Makes Even A Concrete Highway Painful To Behold And Turns Every Distant Reflective Surface Into A Little Glint Of Flame. Do You Know How Sometimes On Very Fine Days The Sun Will Shine With A Particular Intensity That Makes The Most Mundane Objects In The Landscape Glow With An Unusual Radiance, So That Buildings And Structures You Normally Pass Without A Glance Suddenly Become Arresting, Even Beautiful? Well, They Seem To Have That Light In Australia Nearly All The Time.

All The Things That Are Part Of Your Heritage Make You British - That Makes This Country What It Is. It's Part Of Your History. And Here, Unlike America, It's Still Living History.

It Was An Odd Situation. For A Century And A Half, Men Got Rid Of Their Own Hair, Which Was Perfectly Comfortable, And Instead Covered Their Heads With Something Foreign And Uncomfortable. Very Often It Was Actually Their Own Hair Made Into A Wig. People Who Couldn't Afford Wigs Tried To Make Their Hair Look Like A Wig.

Suddenly, In The Space Of A Moment, I Realized What It Was That I Loved About Britain - Which Is To Say, All Of It. Every Last Bit Of It, Good And Bad - Old Churches, Country Lanes, People Saying 'mustn't Grumble,' And 'i'm Terribly Sorry But,' People Apologizing To Me When I Conk Them With A Careless Elbow, Milk In Bottles, Beans On Toast, Haymaking In June, Seaside Piers, Ordnance Survey Maps, Tea And Crumpets, Summer Showers And Foggy Winter Evenings - Every Bit Of It.

Not Writing The Same Kind Of Book Over And Over Again Is To Me The Real Pleasure Of What I Do.

I Hadn't Realized Quite How Extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's Achievement Was In Flying The Atlantic Alone. He Had Never Flown Over Open Water Before, But He Flew Straight To Dingle Bay In Ireland And Then On To Paris, Exactly As Planned.

Most Of The Time I Am Sunk In Thought, But At Some Point On Each Walk There Comes A Moment When I Look Up And Notice, With A Kind Of First-time Astonishment, The Amazing Complex Delicacy Of The Words, The Casual Ease With Which Elemental Things Come Together To Form A Composition That Is—whatever The Season, Wherever I Put My Besotted Gaze—perfect.

Being A Pessimist Is Just Such A Gloomy Way Of Looking At Things, So I Have To Hope For The Best - Life Wouldn't Be Worth Living If We Didn't Have Hope. And I Also Do Think That Human Beings Often Do Do Wonderful, Correct, Brilliant Things. So, On Balance, I'd Like To Be Optimistic About The Future.

If You Go Out On The Appalachian Trail, You Have To Bring So Much More Equipment - A Tent, Sleeping Bag - But If You Go Hiking In England, Or Europe, Generally, Towns And Villages Are Near Enough Together At The End Of The Day You Can Always Go To A Nice Little Inn And Have A Hot Bath And Something To Drink.

We Are So Used To The Notion Of Our Own Inevitability As Life's Dominant Species That It Is Hard To Grasp That We Are Here Only Because Of Timely Extraterrestrial Bangs And Other Random Flukes. The One Thing We Have In Common With All Other Living Things Is That For Nearly Four Billions Years Our Ancestors Have Managed To Slip Through A Series Of Closing Doors Every Time We Needed Them To.

Every Twenty Minutes On The Appalachian Trail, Katz And I Walked Farther Than The Average American Walks In A Week. For 93 Percent Of All Trips Outside The Home, For Whatever Distance Or Whatever Purpose, Americans Now Get In A Car. On Average The Total Walking Of An American These Days - That's Walking Of All Types: From Car To Office, From Office To Car, Around The Supermarket And Shopping Malls - Adds Up To 1.4 Miles A Week, Barely 350 Yards A Day.

I Don't Want To Go And Start Trying To Make Jokes In Places Like India, Tanzania Or Iraq. Afghanistan Is Not A Funny Place.

Science Has Been Quite Embattled. It's The Most Important Thing There Is. An Arts Graduate Is Not Going To Fix Global Warming. They May Do Other Valuable Things, But They Are Not Going To Fix The Planet Or Cure Cancer Or Get Rid Of Malaria.

There Seemed To Be A Mystifying Universal Conspiracy Among Textbook Authors To Make Certain The Material They Dealt With Never Strayed Too Near The Realm Of The Mildly Interesting And Was Always At Least A Long-distance Phone Call From The Frankly Interesting.

You Don't Have To Know Anything About Baseball To Respond To Babe Ruth Because He's Just This Magnificent Human Being. And A Really Good Story Because He Was This Kid Who Grew Up Essentially As An Orphan, You Know, Had A Tough Life, And Then He Became The Most Successful Baseball Player Ever. But He Was Also A Really Good Guy.

You May Find That Your Parents Are The Most Delightful People, But You Don't Want To Live With Them.

In The Countryside, Litter Doesn't Have A Friend. It Doesn't Have Anybody Who's Saying, 'wait A Minute, This Is Really Starting To Get Out Of Control.'

Those Who Sniff Decay In Every Shift Of Sense Or Alteration Of Usage Do The Language No Service. Too Often For Such People The Notion Of Good English Has Less To Do With Expressing Ideas Clearly Than With Making Words Conform To Some Arbitrary Pattern.

He Had The Sort Of Face That Makes You Realize God Does Have A Sense Of Humor.

America Is A Great Disappointment To Me. As I Said In One Of My Books, Other Societies Create Civilisations; We Build Shopping Malls.

Strange As It May Seem, Wrote Richard Feynman, We Understand The Distribution Of Matter In The Interior Of The Sun Far Better Than We Understand The Interior Of The Earth.

Richard Feynman

Language Is More Fashion Than Science, And Matters Of Usage, Spelling And Pronunciation Tend To Wander Around Like Hemlines.

The Upshot Of All This Is That We Live In A Universe Whose Age We Can't Quite Compute, Surrounded By Stars Whose Distances We Don't Altogether Know, Filled With Matter We Can't Identify, Operating In Conformance With Physical Laws Whose Properties We Don’t Truly Understand.

Still, I Never Really Mind Bad Service In A Restaurant. It Makes Me Feel Better About Not Leaving A Tip.

The Taipan Is The One To Watch Out For. It Is The Most Poisonous Snake On Earth, With A Lunge So Swift And A Venom So Potent That Your Last Mortal Utterance Is Likely To Be: "i Say, Is That A Sn--

For Most Of Us The Rules Of English Grammar Are At Best A Dimly Remembered Thing. But Even For Those Who Make The Rules, Grammatical Correctitude Sometimes Proves Easier To Urge Than To Achieve. Among The Errors Cited In This Book Are A Number Committed By Some Of The Leading Authorities Of This Century. If Men Such As Fowler And Bernstein And Quirk And Howard Cannot Always Get Their English Right, Is It Reasonable To Expect The Rest Of Us To?

The Human Diet Consists Of Just Nine Plants: Corn, Rice, Wheat, Potatoes, Cassava, Sorghum, Millet, Beans, Barley, Rye And Oats.

Take A Moment From Time To Time To Remember That You Are Alive. I Know This Sounds A Trifle Obvious, But It Is Amazing How Little Time We Take To Remark Upon This Singular And Gratifying Fact. By The Most Astounding Stroke Of Luck An Infinitesimal Portion Of All The Matter In The Universe Came Together To Create You And For The Tiniest Moment In The Great Span Of Eternity You Have The Incomparable Privilege To Exist.

For A Long Time It Puzzled Me How Something So Expensive, So Leading Edge, Could Be So Useless. And Then It Occurred To Me That A Computer Is A Stupid Machine With The Ability To Do Incredibly Smart Things, While Computer Programmers Are Smart People With The Ability To Do Incredibly Stupid Things. They Are, In Short, A Perfect Match.

I Come From Des Moines. Someone Had To.

I Had To Drive To Minneapolis Once, And Went On A Back Road Just To See The Country. But There Was Nothing To See. It's Just Flat And Hot, And Full Of Corn And Soybeans And Hogs. Every Once In A While You Come Across A Farm Or Some Dead Little Town Where The Liveliest Thing Is The Flies.

Four Times I Was Honked At For Having The Temerity To Proceed Through Town Without The Benefit Of Metal.

It Is Not True That The English Invented Cricket As A Way Of Making All Other Human Endeavors Look Interesting And Lively; That Was Merely An Unintended Side Effect... It Is The Only Sport That Incorporates Meal Breaks. It Is The Only Sport That Shares Its Name With An Insect. It Is The Only Sport In Which Spectators Burn As Many Calories As Players - More If They Are Moderately Restless.

Disassemble The Cells Of A Sponge (by Passing Them Through A Sieve, For Instance), Then Dump Them Into A Solution, And They Will Find Their Way Back Together And Build Themselves Into A Sponge Again. You Can Do This To Them Over And Over, And They Will Doggedly Reassemble Because, Like You And Me And Every Other Living Thing, They Have One Overwhelming Impulse: To Continue To Be.

... It Occurred To Me That Never Again Would He Be Seven Years, One Month And Six Days Old, So We Had Better Catch These Moments While We Can.

It Is Unthinkable To Have A British Countryside That Doesn't Have Actual Functioning Farmers Riding Tractors, Cows In Fields, Things Like That.

People Don't Talk Like This, Theytalklikethis. Syllables, Words, Sentences Run Together Like A Watercolour Left In The Rain. To Understand What Anyone Is Saying To Us We Must Separate These Noises Into Words And The Words Into Sentences So That We Might In Our Turn Issue A Stream Of Mixed Sounds In Response.

There Are Only Three Things That Can Kill A Farmer: Lightning, Rolling Over In A Tractor, And Old Age.

Tune Your Television To Any Channel It Doesn't Receive And About 1 Percent Of The Dancing Static You See Is Accounted For By This Ancient Remnant Of The Big Bang. The Next Time You Complain That There Is Nothing On, Remember That You Can Always Watch The Birth Of The Universe.

Boston's Freeway System Is Insane. It Was Clearly Designed By A Person Who Had Spent His Childhood Crashing Toy Trains.

It Is A Curious Feature Of Our Existance That We Come From A Planet That Is Very Good At Promoting Life But Even Better At Extinguishing It.

I Can't Think Of Anything That Excites A Greater Sense Of Childlike Wonder Than To Be In A Country Where You Are Ignorant Of Almost Everything.

Taking A Scenic Route In Southeast Iowa Is Like Talking About A Good Barry Manilow Album. You Have To Make Certain Allowances.

I'm Not A Natural Story-teller. Put A Keyboard In Front Of Me And I'm Fine, But Stand Me Up In Front Of An Audience And I'm Actually Quite Shy And Reserved.

A World Without Newspapers Or A World Where The Newspapers Are Purely Electronic And You Read Them On A Screen Is Not A Very Appealing World.

It Was One Of Those Sumptuous Days When The World Is Full Of Autumn Muskiness And Tangy, Crisp Perfection: Vivid Blue Sky, Deep Green Fields, Leaves In A Thousand Luminous Hues. It Is A Truly Astounding Sight When Every Tree In A Landscape Becomes Individual, When Each Winding Back Highway And Plump Hillside Is Suddenly And Infinitely Splashed With Every Sharp Shade That Nature Can Bestow - Flaming Scarlet, Lustrous Gold, Throbbing Vermilion, Fiery Orange.

It's An Unnerving Thought That We May Be The Living Universe's Supreme Achievement And Its Worst Nightmare Simultaneously.

Worst Nightmares

Energy Is Liberated Matter, Matter Is Energy Waiting To Happen.

You Don't Need A Science Degree To Understand About Science. You Just Need To Think About It.

Of All The Things I Am Not Very Good At, Living In The Real World Is Perhaps The Most Outstanding.

So, If People Didn’t Settle Down To Take Up Farming, Why Then Did They Embark On This Entirely New Way Of Living? We Have No Idea – Or Actually, We Have Lots Of Ideas, But We Don’t Know If Any Of Them Are Right. According To Felipe Fernández-armesto, At Least Thirty-eight Theories Have Been Put Forward To Explain Why People Took To Living In Communities: That They Were Driven To It By Climatic Change, Or By A Wish To Stay Near Their Dead, Or By A Powerful Desire To Brew And Drink Beer, Which Could Only Be Indulged By Staying In One Place.

Every Dog On The Face Of The Earth Wants Me Dead.

Human Beings Would Split The Atom And Invent Television, Nylon, And Instant Coffee Before They Could Figure Out The Age Of Their Own Planet.

England Was Full Of Words I'd Never Heard Before - Streaky Bacon, Short Back And Sides, Belisha Beacon, Serviettes, High Tea, Ice-cream Cornet.

18th Century Scientists, The French In Particular, Seldom Did Things Simply If An Absurdly Demanding Alternative Was Available.

I Wanted To Quit And To Do This Forever, Sleep In A Bed And In A Tent, See What Was Over The Next Hill And Never See A Hill Again. All Of This All At Once, Every Moment, On The Trail Or Off.

The Best That Can Be Said For Norwegian Television Is That It Gives You The Sensation Of A Coma Without The Worry And Inconvenience.

To Me, The Greatest Invention Of My Lifetime Is The Laptop Computer And The Fact That I Can Be Working On A Book And Be In An Airport Lounge, In A Hotel Room, And Continue Working; I Fire Up My Laptop, And I'm In Exactly The Same Place I Was When I Left Home - That, To Me, Is A Miracle.

99.99 Percent Of All Species That Have Ever Lived Are No Longer With Us.

There Is No Reason Why We Shouldn't Be Able To Split An Infinitive, Any More Than We Should Forsake Instant Coffee And Air Travel Because They Weren't Available To The Romans.

On The Dashboard Of Our Family Car Is A Shallow Indentation About The Size Of A Paperback Book. If You Are Looking For Somewhere To Put Your Sunglasses Or Spare Change, It Is The Obvious Place, And It Works Extremely Well, I Must Say, So Long As The Car Is Not Actually Moving. However, As Soon As You Put The Car In Motion ... Everything Slides Off ... It Can Hold Nothing That Has Not Been Nailed To It. So I Ask You: What Then Is It For?

I'm Not Funny In Person. I Mean I'm Really Not. I'm One Of Those People Who Always Screw Up Anecdotes.

The Number Of People On Whose Cooperative Efforts Your Eventual Existence Depends Has Risen To Approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, Which Is Several Thousand Times The Total Number Of People Who Have Ever Lived.

The Great Failure In Education, Much Of The Time, Is The Lack Of Excitement And Stimulus

I Can Wear A Baseball Cap; I Am Entitled To Wear A Baseball Cap. I Am Genetically Pre-disposed To Wear A Baseball Cap, Whereas Most English People Look Wrong In A Baseball Cap.

Look At A Globe And What You Are Seeing Really Is A Snapshot Of The Continents As They Have Been For Just One-tenth Of 1 Per Cent Of The Earths History.

When I Awoke It Was Daylight. The Inside Of My Tent Was Coated In A Curious Flaky Rime, Which I Realized After A Moment Was All Of My Nighttime Snores, Condensed And Frozen And Pasted To The Fabric, As If Into A Scrapbook Of Respiratory Memories.

In My Day, The Principal Concerns Of University Students Were Sex, Smoking Dope, Rioting And Learning. Learning Was Something You Did Only When The First Three Weren't Available.

University Students

Every Living Thing Is An Elaboration Of A Single Original Plan. As Humans We Are Mere Increments - Each Of Us A Musty Archive Of Adjustments, Adaptations, Modifications And Providential Tinkerings Stretching Back To 3,8 Billion Years. Remarkably We Are Even Quite Closely Related To Fruit And Vegetables. About Half The Chemical Functions That Take Place In A Banana Are Fundamentally The Same As The Chemical Functions That Place In You. It Cannot Be Said Too Often: All Life Is One. That Is, And I Suspect Will Ever Prove To Be, The Most Profound True Statement There Is.

It Was An Especially Wonderful Time To Be A Noisy Moron.

English Grammar Is So Complex And Confusing For The One Very Simple Reason That Its Rules And Terminology Are Based On Latin - A Language With Which It Has Precious Little In Common. In Latin, To Take One Example, It Is Not Possible To Split An Infinitive. So In English, The Early Authorities Decided, It Should Not Be Possible To Split An Infinitive Either. But There Is No Reason Why We Shouldn't, Any More Than We Should Forsake Instant Coffee And Air Travel Because They Weren't Available To The Romans.

I'm Definitely An American, Because I Grew Up Here. But I've Lived Very Happily In Britain.

As James Surowiecki Noted In A New Yorker Article, Given A Choice Between Developing Antibiotics That People Will Take Every Day For Two Weeks And Antidepressants That People Will Take Every Day For Ever, Drug Companies Not Surprisingly Opt For The Latter. Although A Few Antibiotics Have Been Toughened Up A Bit, The Pharmaceutical Industry Hasn't Given Us An Entirely New Antibiotic Since The 1970s.

More Than 300 Million People In The World Speak English And The Rest, It Sometimes Seems, Try To.

A Sign In The Yard Of A Church Next Door Said Christ Is The Answer. (the Question, Of Course, Is: What Do You Say When You Strike Your Thumb With A Hammer?)

Woods Are Not Like Other Spaces. To Begin With, They Are Cubic. Their Trees Surround You, Loom Over You, Press In From All Sides. Woods Choke Off Views & Leave You Muddled & Without Bearings. They Make You Feel Small & Confused & Vulnerable, Like A Small Child Lost In A Crowd Of Strange Legs. Stand In A Desert Or Prairie & You Know You Are In A Big Space. Stand In The Woods And You Only Sense It. They Are Vast, Featureless Nowhere. And They Are Alive.

Book Tours Are Really Kind Of Fun. You Get To Stay In Nice Hotels, You Are Driven Everywhere In Big Silver Cars, You Are Treated As If You Are Much More Important Than You Are, You Can Eat Steak Three Times A Day At Someone Else's Expense, And You Get To Talk Endlessly About Yourself For Weeks At A Stretch.

Traveling Is More Fun - Hell, Life Is More Fun - If You Can Treat It As A Series Of Impulses.

I Tell The Kids That, Even In A Childhood Marked By Despair And Deprivation, I Knew That No Matter What Happened, I Still Had My Family, Or At Least The Remnants Of A Family Ripped Apart By Divorce And Then Glued Back Together In Various Odd Arrangements Through A Series Of Ill- Advised Remarriages. It Was Good To Know I Had A Solid Foundation.

A Cough So Robust That I Tapped Into Two New Seams Of Phlegm.

If You Can Imagine A Man Having A Vasectomy Without Anesthetic To The Sound Of Frantic Sitar-playing, You Will Have Some Idea Of What Popular Turkish Music Is Like.

I Could Spend My Life Arriving Each Evening In A New City.

Roads Get Wider And Busier And Less Friendly To Pedestrians. And All Of The Development Based Around Cars, Like Big Sprawling Shopping Malls. Everything Seems To Be Designed For The Benefit Of The Automobile And Not The Benefit Of The Human Being.

We Forget Just How Painfully Dim The World Was Before Electricity. A Candle, A Good Candle, Provides Barely A Hundredth Of The Illumination Of A Single 100 Watt Light Bulb.

Most Big Companies Don't Like You Very Much, Except Hotels, Airlines And Microsoft, Which Don't Like You At All.

Everything That Has Ever Lived, Plant Or Animal, Dates Its Beginning From The Same Primordial Twitch. At Some Point In An Unimaginably Distant Past, Some Little Bag Of Chemicals Fidgeted To Life. It Absorbed Some Nutrients, Gently Pulsed, Had A Brief Existence. This Much May Have Happened Many Times Before. But This Ancestral Packet Did Something Additional And Extraordinary. It Cleaved Itself And Produced An Heir. A Tiny Bundle Of Genetic Material Passed From One Living Entity To Another, And Has Never Stopped Moving Since. It Was The Moment Of Creation For Us All.

Taxonomy Is Described Sometimes As A Science And Sometimes As An Art, But Really It’s A Battleground.

This Was 1990, The Year That Communism Died In Europe And It Seemed Strange To Me That In All The Words That Were Written About The Fall Of The Iron Curtain, Nobody Anywhere Lamented That It Was The End Of A Noble Experiment. I Know That Communism Never Worked And I Would Have Disliked Living Under It Myself But None The Less It Seems That There Was A Kind Of Sadness In The Thought That The Only Economic System That Appeared To Work Was One Based On Self Interest And Greed.

I Have Long Known That It Is Part Of God's Plan For Me To Spend A Little Time With Each Of The Most Stupid People On Earth.

Think Of A Single Problem Confronting The World Today. Disease, Poverty, Global Warming... If The Problem Is Going To Be Solved, It Is Science That Is Going To Solve It. Scientists Tend To Be Unappreciated In The World At Large, But You Can Hardly Overstate The Importance Of The Work They Do. If Anyone Ever Cures Cancer, It Will Be A Guy With A Science Degree. Or A Woman With A Science Degree.

Clearly, Some Time Ago Makers And Consumers Of American Junk Food Passed Jointly Through Some Kind Of Sensibility Barrier In The Endless Quest For New Taste Sensations. Now They Are A Little Like Those Desperate Junkies Who Have Tried Every Known Drug And Are Finally Reduced To Mainlining Toilet Bowl Cleanser In An Effort To Get Still Higher.

You Can Be A Scientist And Believe In God: The Two Can Go Hand In Hand.

The People Are Immensely Likable— Cheerful, Extrovert, Quick-witted, And Unfailingly Obliging. Their Cities Are Safe And Clean And Nearly Always Built On Water. They Have A Society That Is Prosperous, Well Ordered, And Instinctively Egalitarian. The Food Is Excellent. The Beer Is Cold. The Sun Nearly Always Shines. There Is Coffee On Every Corner. Life Doesn't Get Much Better Than This.

If You Believe In God, It's Much More Fantastic To Believe That He Created This Universe Billions Of Years Ago And Set In Motion This Long Train Of Activities That Eventually Resulted In Us. I Think That's So Much More Satisfying, More Thrilling, Than The Idea That It Was All Done In Seven Days.

There Is More Difference Between A Zebra And A Horse, Or Between A Dolphin And A Porpoise, Than There Is Between You And The Furry Creatures Your Distant Ancestors Left Behind When They Set Out To Take Over The World.

Beulah Has A Husband?' I Know. It's A Miracle. There Can't Be More Than Two People On The Planet Who'd Be Willing To Sleep With Her, And Here We Are Both In The Same Town.

By The Time I Had Finished My Coffee And Returned To The Streets, The Rain Had Temporarily Abated, But The Streets Were Full Of Vast Puddles Where The Drains Where Unable To Cope With The Volume Of Water. Correct Me If I'm Wrong, But You Would Think That If One Nation Ought By Now To Have Mastered The Science Of Drainage, Britain Would Be It.

I Come Des Moines. Somebody Had To.

Distance Changes Utterly When You Take The World On Foot. A Mile Becomes A Long Way, Two Miles Literally Considerable, Ten Miles Whopping, Fifty Miles At The Very Limits Of Conception. The World, You Realize, Is Enormous In A Way That Only You And A Small Community Of Fellow Hikers Know. Planetary Scale Is Your Little Secret.

The First Book I Did - The First Successful Book - Was A Kind Of A Travel Book, And Publishers In Britain Encouraged Me To Do More.

I Turned To My Own Bunk And Examined It With A Kind Of Appalled Fascination. If The Mattress Stains Were Anything To Go By, A Previous User Had Not So Much Suffered From Incontinence As Rejoiced In It. He Had Evidently Included The Pillow In His Celebrations.

Yes, U.s. Travelers Dress Better. The British Are Always So Conspicuous In Hot Climates. They Don't Seem To Wear Shorts. American Men Seem To Be Comfortable Wearing Hot-weather Clothing.

The Universe Is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose; It Is Queerer Than We Can Suppose

Anyone Who Has Read My Books Will Know That I Don't Tend To Use Guides When I Am Travelling. It's Not A Pride Thing, But It Is Certainly A Fact.

Finally, This Being America, There Is The Constant Possibility Of Murder.

Physics Is Really Nothing More Than A Search For Ultimate Simplicity, But So Far All We Have Is A Kind Of Elegant Messiness.

To An American The Whole Purpose Of Living, The One Constant Confirmation Of Continued Existence, Is To Cram As Much As Sensual Pleasure As Possible Into One's Mouth More Or Less Continuously. Gratification, Instant And Lavish, Is A Birthright

The Whole Of The Global Economy Is Based On Supplying The Cravings Of Two Per Cent Of The World's Population.

Geologists Are Never At A Loss For Paperweights.

To My Mind, The Only Possible Pet Is A Cow. Cows Love You. They Will Listen To Your Problems And Never Ask A Thing In Return. They Will Be Your Friends Forever. And When You Get Tired Of Them, You Can Kill And Eat Them. Perfect.

Why Is It, I Wondered, That Old People Are Always So Self-centered And Excitable? But I Just Smiled Benignly And Stood Back, Comforted By The Thought That Soon They Would Be Dead.

Where I Grew Up, In Des Moines, Iowa, There Is Hardly Any Downtown Economic Activity Now. Everybody Shops In Malls - You Don't Find A Sense Of Community In Malls.

My Mother Only Ever Said Two Things. She Said,'i Don't Know, Dear.'and She Said,'can I Get You A Sandwich, Honey?

There'd Never Been A More Advantageous Time To Be A Criminal In America Than During The 13 Years Of Prohibition. At A Stroke, The American Government Closed Down The Fifth Largest Industry In The United States - Alcohol Production - And Just Handed It To Criminals - A Pretty Remarkable Thing To Do.

I Don't Know Whether I'm Misanthropic. It Seems To Me I'm Constantly Disappointed. I'm Very Easily Disappointed.

Australians Are Very Unfair In This Way. They Spend Half Of Any Conversation Insisting That The Country's Dangers Are Vastly Overrated And That There's Nothing To Worry About, And The Other Half Telling You How Six Months Ago Their Uncle Bob Was Driving To Mudgee When A Tiger Snake Slid Out From Under The Dashboard And Bit Him On The Groin, But That It's Okay Now Because He's Off The Life Support Machine And They've Discovered He Can Communicate With Eye Blinks.

If This Book Has A Lesson, It Is That We Are Awfully Lucky To Be Here-and By 'we' I Mean Every Living Thing. To Attain Any Kind Of Life In This Universe Of Ours Appears To Be Quite An Achievement. As Humans We Are Doubly Lucky, Of Course: We Enjoy Not Only The Privilege Of Existence But Also The Singular Ability To Appreciate It And Even, In A Multitude Of Ways, To Make It Better. It Is A Talent We Have Only Barely Begun To Grasp.

Romans Park Their Cars The Way I Would Park If I Had Just Spilled A Beaker Of Hydrochloric Acid On My Lap.

Des Moines Is Like Your Typical American City; It's Just These Concentric Circles Of Malls, Built Outward From The City.

I Had Always Thought That Once You Grew Up You Could Do Anything You Wanted - Stay Up All Night Or Eat Ice-cream Straight Out Of The Container.

Trending Author

Linda Evangelista

Category