The Nomadic Alternative – Page 30

coast, but the night is clear and the stars shine. Providing the

navigator has a nautical almanac, a chronometer and a sextant, he

can do equally well. He informs himself from the almanac compiled

by others that a particular named star will rest at so many degrees

above the horizon at a given time. He measures this angle with his

sextant, takes another compass bearing, and can again pinpoint his

position. The star replaces the second lighthouse.

Now if the ship is trailing a nautical log astern, the navigator

knows how many nautical miles he has travelled in the past hour,

and as long as the wind blows from the same direction at the same

force, he can assume he will cover the same distance in the hours

to ne [illegible]

to come. This ability to estimate his future position assures the

safety of the ship. The navigator can then set a course to clear

a reef of sunken rocks, know when they are well astern and then

head for his home-port.

Modern navigation equipment makes the operation much simpler,

and this extended metaphor must seem banal to the experienced navi-

gator. The point I would like to make is this. The brain of the

navigator selects two named but unrelated and intrinsically useless

phenomena to determine the third unknown – the position of his

ship. Once he knows this fixed point, he can anticipate the future

by referring to the past.

“And whatsoever thing Adam named, that was the name thereof…”

God may have planted and stocked the Garden, but Man named the

Things in it. Man is a born classifier and lexicographer. The

simplest societies orientate themselves to their land and its

resources by naming everything there, subjecting its content –

useful and useless – to a classification of Linnaean complexity.

Beyond their territory lies the Unknown – a frightening place

because it is unnamed. Only by plunging themselves in Nature did

men come to realize their own uniqueness.

In all ages the contemplation and mental ordering of the things

in the Earth and the Heavenly Bodies has been a recognized technique

to achieve that calmness of mind the Epicureans called ‘ataraxy’