Life gets more exciting as you grow older because along the way you learn there is so much more to learn that if you lived ten times or 100 times longer than is humanly possible, you could still never learn everything there is to know, but a book like Basin and Range could help to get you there. Basin and Range, by Pulitzer-prize winning John McPhee, was published in 1981, way after I left college. Now that I think back, a visit to The Field Museum in Chicago a few years ago introduced me to a geological time scale I had not known existed. I wasn't taught this in school. It wasn't science yet. It's a super cool exhibit you can walk through.
A friend on AR mentioned the other day she'd rather see the beauty in nature with her eyes than with science, but with science added to the vision, it explodes with clarity. It's a whole new dimension of comprehension. Without science, the meaning of life is reduced to shades of gray, there is no color, no music, no dancing, no celebration, no fireworks.
Just researching geology now makes me want to visit the University of California Museum of Paleontology at Berkeley. This fabulous museum is only an hour or so from Sacramento. I didn't know it existed. Too bad I'm leaving for my wor-cation in Hawaii in a few days. That's a trip I'll definitely make next spring.
Even if you think you don't give a flying blip about geology, I'm betting you would love Basin and Range. You can read more in my personal blog today at this link: Why Basin and Range is My New Favorite Book.
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