Quote 1
“Geographies,” said the geographer, “are the books which, of all books, are most concerned with matters of consequence. They never become old-fashioned. It is very rarely that a mountain changes its position. It is very rarely that an ocean empties itself of its waters. We write of eternal things.” (15.37)
The geographer is both right and wrong. It’s true that mountains are pretty much stuck where they are and that oceans generally have water in them. If you’ve ever tried to move a mountain, you’ll know where we’re coming from here. In any of our lifetimes, it’s extremely unlikely that we’d see something so tremendous and monumental change that much. Something like a mountain can be catalogued by a geographer and, a hundred years later, that mountain will most likely look exactly the same.
However, even mountains and stuff like them aren’t “eternal things.” Eventually, an ocean could empty. A mountain could move. What if a volcano explodes, for example, or an earthquake takes place? Can what the geographer describes really last forever, without changing at all?