Simultaneously amazing and totally unsurprising...

I wrote about the distortions of the Mercator map (and other rectangular world maps) a few weeks ago here from-a-tin-cup.ghost.io/journeys-wit...

... and Wilfred Thesiger on the same theme. Stark suggests the disregard for solitude is a kind of disease of modernity. I wonder if actually the craving for it is just a symptom of something more fundamental

It does make me think that we have no real benchmark for how much fiction we're comfortable with in supposedly "true" stories - this is a spectacular example but no doubt there are lesser ones out there, and there have always been travel writers who are, let's say, "creative"

I wonder about this: "When it comes to issues we care deeply about, a discourse of wrong / right and moral absolutism will inevitably develop." ... Wonder if it's really inevitable, and if other cultures have sometimes seen it differently. E.g. Buddhist scepticism of "views", whether right or wrong

I really liked this. Thank you! I often wonder if a more comfortable relationship with wrongness could make for a healthier public/political sphere