Читать книгу On the Animal Trail - Baptiste Morizot - Страница 6

Where are you going tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe next week, once you’ve reached the last pages of this book? Perhaps you’ll be one of those readers who will have the wonderful experience of being touched, contaminated, infected by the impulses that animate it. I could have written: ‘by the adventure that impels it’, but I’m a little wary of the epic exoticism or predictable storyline which the word ‘adventure’ can convey. I could probably more accurately describe what Baptiste Morizot is proposing by the evocative term ‘initiation’. Being (or becoming) initiated involves the idea of getting to know something or, more precisely, getting to know the art which makes this knowledge possible; and this idea itself takes us back through the centuries to the experience of participating in the Mysteries as practised in ancient paganism.

Thus, this book proposes to initiate us into a very particular art, which could briefly be defined as the art of doing geopolitics by tracking down the invisible. Certainly, put like that, it might seem scary – and you might well wonder if it is really sensible to ask someone to write this preface who hesitates at the word ‘adventure’ but has no qualms about combining ‘geopolitics’ with ‘the invisible’.