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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3676 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 19, 2023

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Count Zero. It lacks the unbearable tension and intellectual fervor of Neuromancer, but it somehow feels more workmanlike. It's considerably more heavy on the jargon, and with little explanation. A pleasant read so far.

I'm rereading Christopher Columbus, Mariner by Samuel Eliot Morison. Morison is a mariner himself, and sailed the routes Columbus took on his four voyages to the Americas. Morison's experiences in seamanship give him insight where book-learning is likely to fail, such as in this anecdote, from just before the actual sighting of America:

At 10 P.M. ... Columbus and a seaman, almost simultaneously, thought they saw a light, "like a little wax candle rising and falling." Others saw it too, but most did not; and after a few minutes it disappeared. Volumes have been written to explain what this light was or might have been. To a seaman it requires no explanation. It was an illusion, created by overtense watchfulness. When uncertain of your exact position, and straining to make a night landfall, you are apt to see imaginary lights and flashes and to hear nonexistent bells and breakers.

Morison's characterization of Columbus, aided no doubt by their shared experience on the open water, is generally favorable. Columbus was guided by strong religious sentiment, ambition, and greed -- motivations shared in varying proportions by nearly every European explorer during the period of discovery following the Reconquista. Morison plainly discuss the sufferings inflicted on the American Indians. But unlike many modern retellings of this story he doesn't allow this to dampen the feelings of admiration toward Columbus' courage, nor to obscure the obvious fact of how immense and profitable Columbus' discovery was.

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