The joy of reading old books

“It was astonishing,” Dr Bramble explains. “Even though the horse has long legs and four of them, David had a longer stride.” David was in great shape for a scientist, but as a medium-height, medium-weight, middle-of-the-pack runner, he was perfectly average. That left only one explanation: as bizarre as it may seem, the average human has a longer stride than a horse. The horse looks like its taking giant lunges forward, but its hooves swing back before touching the ground. The result: even though biomechanically smooth human runners have short strides, they still cover much more distance per step than a horse, making them more efficient. With equal amounts of gas in the tank, in other words, a human can theoretically run farther than a horse.

Christopher McDougall, Born to Run (p.222)

First published in 2009

“Moon-Eye, let me tell you something. I can outrun you if I have to. These Utah cowboys would laugh themselves sick if I ever mentioned it out loud but it’s a fact and you ought to know it. Over the long haul, say twenty or thirty miles, it’s a known fact that a healthy man can outrun a horse.”

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (p.147)

First published in 1968

It is humbling and wonderful and also sad to read books that remind me how much knowledge has been “a known fact” at one point in history, and then sunk into obscurity and been forgotten, only to be, years later, the kind of thing that gets described as “astonishing” and “one of their first big discoveries” (Born to Run, p.221).

Silence, solitude and mosquitoes: Desert Solitaire

For there are bad moments, or were, especially at the beginning of my life here, when I would sit down at the table for supper inside the housetrailer and discover with a sudden shock that I was alone. There was nobody, nobody at all, on the other side of the table. Alone-ness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) that the one thing better than solitude, the only thing better than solitude, is society.

…

Strange as it might seem, I found that eating my supper out back made a difference. Inside the trailer, surrounded by the artifacture of America, I was reminded instantly of all that I had, for a season, left behind; the plywood walls and the dusty venetian blinds and the light bulbs and the smell of butane made me think of Albuquerque. But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountains than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to the human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes in the sand I made contact with that larger world – an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak – there were no other people around and still are none – but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountain and I felt, as I feel – is it a paradox – that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (p.97)