Her retelling of the trip makes for a travelogue infused with science, history, and literature stretching from sea level to the roof of the world. Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that can never fully be mapped.Kate Harris’ debut work, Lands of Lost Borders, opens with a Virginia Woolf epigraph declaring, “We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities,” which is the essential mission behind Harris’ plan to bicycle across Asia, tracing the ancient Silk Road. Like Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, Kate Harris offers a travel account at once exuberant and reflective, wry and rapturous. Lands of Lost Borders is the chronicle of Harris's odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity and a meditation on the existential need to explore-the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here. The farther she traveled, the closer she came to a world as wild as she felt within. Forget charting maps, naming peaks: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. Pedaling mile upon mile in some of the remotest places on earth, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines.
In between studying at Oxford and MIT, Harris set off by bicycle down the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel. Looking beyond this planet, she decided to become a scientist and go to Mars. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth there was nothing left to be discovered.
As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved-to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician-had gone extinct.
It's a modern classic." -Pico Iyer A brilliant, fierce writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road-an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world. Summary: Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven't felt for years.
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