Re: Fieldwork or bust? (Was: Stenopelix valdensis)

["Kent A. Stevens" <kent@cs.uoregon.edu>]

> Experiencing fresh air and near heat stroke is the closest that  
> most of us will ever come to experiencing a vision quest.


And there are the very personal spiritual moments when seeing and  
touching a pristine new find, and smelling the evanescent hint of  
peat and decaying plant matter that sometimes is associated with a  
fossil bone (e.g., in the Hell Creek).  One's ability to appreciate  
the particular specimen as an individual, as a living organism, is  
most profound when it is first encountered in the field.  Later it  
takes a bit more effort to reconstruct that feeling when holding the  
fully prepared specimen in a museum, and harder still when it is  
abstracted and reduced to a publication.  The writings of a Loren  
Eiseley or a Teilhard de Chardin do not fully substitute for the  
first-person spiritual experiences that can be gained in the field.

Kent