p. 31 Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God's province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent.
p. 60 Isaac was twenty-three years old in a new country in a world where anything was possible. He was in the thick of it when everyone else back home could only read about it in the newspapers and in Jules Verne and in the thousands of dime novels about Buffalo Bill Cody. Isaac was a pioneer in a new science, a prairie Dampier, at a time when an ordinary man with patience and a knack for observation could change forever the way the world saw itself. Far to the north in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory another young man, Teddy Roosevelt of New York, was busy "pioneering" along with other East Coast blue bloods like Frederic Remington and Owen Wister, later to write The Virginian, who hoped to experience the frontier life before it disappeared. Roosevelt called this way of living "the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live."
p. 69 He continued Greely's campaign to reduce public skepticism about the bureau's ability to do much beyond simply recording changes in the weather. At the time of Harrington's appointment, Isaac wrote, "weather forecasting was nothing more than a listing of probabilities." Even something as basic as predicting the temperature twenty-four hours in advance was considered so likely to result in failure and public ridicule that the bureau forbade it.
p. 228 ... Sterett said, "I would rather have seen all the vessels of the earth stranded high and dry than to have seen this child's toy standing right out on the prairie, masterless."
p. 248 There were dreams. Isaac fell asleep easily each night and dreamed of happy times, only to wake to gloom and grief. He dreamed that he had saved her. He dreamed of the lost baby. "A dream," Freud wrote, in 1900, in his Interpretation of Dreams, "is the fulfillment of a wish."
p. 266 A silence settled over Galveston. Its population stopped growing. It acquired all the sorrows of modern urban life, but none of the density and vibrance. It became a beach town for Houston.
p. 272 "Time can never be recovered," he said, "and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere."
No comments:
Post a Comment