B U R N

I do not believe we can know anything merely through science; it is too precise, too rigid a tool. The world has a thousand tendernesses into which we must lean so that we may understand them before we learn what the sum of their parts represents… Only the sailor knows the archipelago.

-Jean Giono, L’eau vive

PS. Excerpt stolen from Jean Malaurie’s The Last Kings of Thule. As mentioned earlier, if you have yet to read this book, your literary life is far from complete. And while I am at it, Ultima Thule is, as the name indicates, the most comprehensive introduction to Arctic life and exploration.

Who would have thought that hydrogen cars were in fact highly developed 30 years ago. It begs the question why nothing more has happened since then.

Er du trist og har du sorg i sinde
så tag med mig ned til Lundeborg
for det er det bedste sted på jorden
her jeg tror at verdens ende går
her er skov og strand
her er havn og vand
her er fiskerpige
her er fiskermand
er du trist og har du sorg i sinde
så tag med mig ned til Lundeborg

-Ove Bager

Imagine this: It is 7am at Heathrow, and the departure lounge is crowded with business people waiting to take off. In the brightly lit electronics shop, lots of shoppers compare prices and feel the texture of all the most recent gadgets; DSLRs, mini speaker systems, noise canceling headphones, and so on. In one corner, three Buddhist monks giggle and chat as they pass around an iPhone. It looks like a guilty pleasure.

Darn, I was too shy to ask if I could take a picture of them. Motives do not come better than this…

Writing the obligatory methods section is an attempt to make sure that no-one, except for the truly hopeless, actually enjoys doing or reading scholarly work. A filtering mechanism. It is, in other words, a way of equipping any piece of academic writing with a built-in mechanism for putting readers to sleep before they reach the interesting bits. The interesting bits, also referred to as ‘empirical’ or ‘analytical’ chapters, are those that differ ever so slightly from the millions of other books and articles on the very same topic using a couple of different wordings here and there. Of course, no-one actually reads a methods chapter in its entirety, but, for those who have not understood the argument or failed to read the thing in its entirety, which is the rule rather than the exception, it provides a convenient excuse for pointing out all the grave mistakes that have been committed along the way. Secondly, the vast amounts of literature available on methodology, the thrust of which can be summarised in, say, 12 sentences, provide a never-ending source of income for academics who have given up on conducting their own research or become paranoid about leaving the safe confines of their office.

Did I mention that I am working on my methodology section right now?