BOOK REVIEW

ISBN 0-385-49269-3

[This book is available for purchase at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble]

Table of Contents

- Preface
- Forest Light
- Charts and Other Fiction
- The Ocean Experience
- Cathedral of the World
- The Flight of Seabirds
- The Tunnel
- On Living in the Present
- Day Twenty-Two
- Encounters with Leviathans
- Varuna
- Feeding the Sea Gods
- The Breath of Being
- If you See the Buddha, Kill Him
- Wandering
- Ukivik Island
- Landscape and Humanscape
- Darwin
- A Lesson in Simple Geometry
- Water Colors
- Poems in the Lap of Death
- Bibliography and Further Reading

Text on Dust Jacket

"Taken individually, the travel notes that follow recount many separate voyages.  Taken together, they describe a single voyage--the same one that millions of us make as week seek to learn how this planet works and what our place in it should be."

-- From the Preface

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The curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness.  This physical and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to understand his world and himself.

Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles.   During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire.

What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean.  In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.

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"An enchanted journey across an interior sea."
-- Daniel Quinn, Author of Ishmael

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MYRON ARMS is a teacher, writer, and professional sailor who contributes regularly to Cruising World, Sail, and many other sailing and adventure magazines.  Educated at both Yale and the Harvard Divinity School, he taught high school English for seven years before founding a sailing program for teenagers.  As a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed ocean master since 1977, he has voyaged more than 100,000 sea miles and has led seven sail-training expeditions to northern Canada, Greenland, and the Arctic.  He lives with his wife, Kay, on a farm overlooking the Sassafras River on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

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From Cathedral of the World:

"That evening in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, my shipmates and I waited in silence as the last of the twilight disappeared from the western horizon.   The wind dropped to a whisper, and the sailboat ghosted at a knot or two across glassy seas.  Somewhere ahead a deep, guttural rush of air sounded in the darkness.   Then another, closer by.  And a third, dead ahead.  Finally in the black of night the breathing of whales came to seem like something more: a world breath, a spiritus mundi signaling from the depths of the abyss, a sound not unlike the breathing of the sea itself, rising and falling like a living membrane of the planet it surrounds."

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© 1999 by Mark T. Melchior  --   All Rights Reserved

Revised:  20 Dec 2007 16:28:40 -0500

"In a powerboat, you get there in a hurry . . .
in a sailboat, you are already there."