Travels

⬅️ Hub: 60.25 Literature

DESCRIPTION

From the bestselling author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes a deeply personal memoir full of fascinating adventures as he travels everywhere from the Mayan pyramids to Kilimanjaro. Fueled by a powerful curiosity—and by a need to see, feel, and hear, firsthand and close-up—Michael Crichton’s journeys have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling—swimming with mud sharks in Tahiti, tracking wild animals through the jungle of Rwanda. This is a record of those travels—an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton’s many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.

Highlights

• Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be (Location 87)
• reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes—with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating. (Location 87)
• Western man is so surrounded by ideas, so bombarded with opinions, concepts, and information structures of all sorts, that it becomes difficult to experience anything without the intervening filter of these structures. And the natural world—our traditional source of direct insights—is rapidly disappearing. (Location 91)
• I was obsessively thorough. I entered the museums of Paris and Amsterdam loaded down with guidebooks and commentaries. If I was in a city where an important museum was closed, I stayed an extra day. I saw everything. I ate everything. I experienced everything. In Egypt, I climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops, went inside (Location 1887)
• it, and then visited every archaeological site of importance between Saqqara and Aswan. Nothing was too small or too distant to escape my inspection; it was never too hot or too buggy; if there was any question about it, I saw it. In Madrid, I sought out obscure apartment buildings that represented the early work of Antonio Gaudí; in France, I went down a checklist of buildings by Le Corbusier. I fought the traffic of Naples in search of Caravaggios. In France and Spain, I visited every prehistoric painted cave known. I developed an interest in Romanesque cloisters. In Greece, I spent two weeks in the Peloponnese alone, looking at classical sites outlined by the Guide Bleu. (Location 1889)