It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it’s clear now that we took the desert’s role for granted.
-On Browsing, Jason Guriel
Guriel here means that it is difficult to have opinions, to care about something, anything, in a sensory vaccuum, because an opinion needs a point of comparison, a thing against which to react, to compare what we are experiencing with another thing that we might instead experience. Not a real desert, a Sahrā’ or a Baydā’, like the ground we trod in those last ten days. Because after thirty days on the trail, enthusiasm for what lay at its end was growing. A soft bed. A green vegetable. A night without camels.