Читать книгу Mankind and Deserts 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 10

Each desert, considered as an object of study, may be dissected, qualified and quantified. However, this does not result in a homogeneous and unique scientific concept of deserts. A desert cannot be reduced to a concrete, simple and universal formula. To each their own desert, which seems to them more “desert-like and true” than another’s concept. There are, therefore, physical deserts that are objective and measurable by a certain degree of aridity, and then there are psychic deserts, subjective and experienced as a sensation of emptiness and the absence (or, at least, the apparent absence) of human life, and the “true desert” is, in fact, a combination of these two. For Monod, the “true” desert is the “experienced” desert, which one has walked oneself, lived through, feared and admired.