Still devastated by Etta’s disappearance, Nicholas has enlisted the unlikely help of Sophia Ironwood and a cheeky mercenary-for-hire to track both her and the missing astrolabe down. Suddenly questioning everything she’s been fighting for, Etta must choose a path, one that could transform her future. Instead, she’s blindsided by a bombshell revelation from their leader, Henry Hemlock: he is her father. When Etta inadvertently stumbles into the heart of the Thorns, the renegade travelers who stole the astrolabe from her, she vows to finish what she started and destroy the astrolabe once and for all. Now, robbed of the powerful object that was her only hope of saving her mother, Etta finds herself stranded once more, cut off from Nicholas-the eighteenth century privateer she loves-and her natural time. Etta Spencer didn’t know she was a traveler until the day she emerged both miles and years from her home.
0 Comments
"There is no life in the iron, there is no life in the phosphorus, the nitrogen does not contain me, the water that soaks my tissues is not I. And the chemicals that once gave it life. The outline of what was, the shadow of the fish, was still there. And here was a mystery, written in a "heavy and peculiar stone." He was drawn to the study of time and space and our place within it. It was then that he would tell the stories. This, as with so many things, would give him pause. Both are extinct and gone, he mused, as "our massive-faced and shambling forebears of the Ice have vanished." It could, he noted, just as well have been the long-horned Alaskan bison on his wall. He was sitting at his desk contemplating a fish fossil. Where is Loren Eiseley, now that we need him? I met him, in a manner of speaking, years ago, and then only by chance (how he would worry that word). I have been unable to shake the fragment ‘a hole is to dig’. However, this little book is the perfect example of the theory of ‘artifacts’, or things are defined by their function. This is, a rather computational, rational and logic based sort of philosophy. What something is for, what it is good for, is sufficient to explain what it is. ‘A hole is to dig’, ‘a face is for making faces’. From a philosophical point of view, this beguiling children’s book provides a breathtakingly simple and elegant example of what are called ‘artifacts’ and their functions. It is sub-titled ‘A First Book of Definitions’. Ruth Krauss’s work A hole is to dig with Maurice Sendak’s beautiful illustration has stayed deep inside my mind since childhood. As a philosopher, and after a month’s reflection, I now know this isn’t good enough. There are many people for whom this never becomes clear. There are many philosophers for whom this is an entire life’s work and writing. There was a lack of clarity about what I was becoming. The philosophical view of this could be that my purpose wasn’t clear. It had called me, and I had turned my face into the wind, to drown the calling shout. I wasn’t working at full capacity and I’d convinced myself that it was freeing me up to write. I’d been working and writing, with some mothering on the side, but none of it was going well, except the mothering, that was pretty good. Sometimes you don’t know what you want, you don’t know what things are for and you certainly don’t know what you are actually doing. |