Nobody likes a thermo-wimp. Early winter's cold caught me by surprise, and I struggled to make it through the night without using heat in the RV. How could 45 F inside conquer a man? Off I went on a mountain bike ride, one cold windy sunny morning. Carelessly or deliberately I under-dressed, for the first time in years.
It turned out to be a blessing. Being chilled brings on fear first and then anger, finally leading to combat. At some point I stopped at the top of a small cliff by an old mining area and faced the foe, the cold wind.
I love visiting and writing about ridgelines, but this was different. It was bloodthirsty, vengeful, and triumphal. Maybe a book was working on me. In The Discovery of the Mind, by Bruno Snell, he talked about Homer's language being quite different from later (classical) Greek; Homer used 'skin' or 'limbs' in situations where later Greek or English would use 'body.'
"Thus the early Greeks did not, either in their language or in the visual arts, grasp the body as a unit. The phenomenon is the same as with verbs denoting sight..."Hmm. Maybe that explains why a mountain biker (or an unleashed dog, or a pony-riding Mongol of Genghis's day) relates to the outdoor world...
...differently from slow-moving hikers, couch potatoes admiring a coffee table book, or car-driving tourists whose windshield is their living room window or TV set. For years I have wondered why I felt uncomfortable around other outdoorsmen and nature-lovers; perhaps this explains some of it.
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