Miles Harvey > Quotes

“A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams.”
― Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

“What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113”
― Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

“He was blessed with the sort of intense curiosity that most of us experience so infrequently it often seems to come as a surprise. I’m not talking about the kind of curiosity that INVITES but about the kind that DEMANDS, not about the kind that says I WONDER but the kind that says I MUST KNOW. The kind that makes you immerse yourself in a subject, ponder it over and over until you are able to make sense of it for others and, in so doing, give your own life new meaning in some small way. Under such a spell, humans can accomplish the extraordinary.”
― Miles Harvey

“I was good with maps, plain and simple. But what obsessed me about them was never their scientific utility. I did not look on them as mere tools but as mysterious and almost sentient beings.37 Maps spoke to me. They still do.”
― Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

“Perhaps this explains why our culture uses cartographic and geographic language to express notions of sin and virtue. We speak of a moral compass. We describe good people as following the straight and narrow. We say sinners lost their way, lost their bearings. And in our fables of maps and money, characters are constantly torn between sticking to the path of righteousness and wandering into the wilderness of the soul, populated by all those wild animals.”
― Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

“James J. Strang, innocent target of religious persecution—like all his personae, this one proved to be a mask. Yet it was exactly those masks—those endless layers of ambiguity—that gave the man his charisma,”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“confidence artist to the very end.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“Today we use the word cult to describe a small group of extremists cut off from contact with the outside world by an all-controlling leader. People in antebellum America, however, struggled to find language for the phenomenon, largely because they had never seen anything quite like it before. As recent scholars have attested, “The historical record indicates that utopian and apocalyptic cults and communes first appeared as a major form in the United States during this epoch.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“In American Homicide, Roth attributes the sharp spike in murder rates during the late 1840s and 1850s to the fact that “Americans could no longer coalesce.…Disillusioned by the course the nation was taking, people felt increasingly alienated from both their government and their neighbors.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“The Castle—a man haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than he had ever wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness, and yet whose enchantment was such that one could only go on and lose oneself further…”
― Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

“Hollingsworth turns out to be a single-minded manipulator who plans to take over the colony for his own purposes. He is, in short, much like a number of real-life figures who succeeded in exploiting the utopian idealism of the era, “men of iron masquerading in Arcadian costume,” as one commentator has called them. Eventually the narrator comes to understand that such men “have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot.” In a time when, as Marx and Engels memorably put it, “all that is solid melts into air,” the Hollingsworths of the world—and the Strangs—offered firmness and strength; in a time when “all fixed, fast-frozen relations…are swept away,” they offered a sense of connection; and in a time of “everlasting uncertainty,” they offered absolute confidence.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“Heath’s letter leaves the impression of someone with an apocalyptic worldview, someone who sees himself as part of a persecuted minority deserving justice and retribution, someone whose group identity is so strong he feels lost on his own, and someone with deep anxieties about his place within that group and a desperate need to prove his loyalty to its leader. It’s the mind-set of a fanatic, a man who harbors “such indignation against the enemy” that he can justify almost any crime as legitimate self-defense of his own people, who have been chosen by God for a sacred purpose. Not all Beaver Islanders held such beliefs, of course, but for an unknown number of hardened zealots, criminal activity had become a kind of sacrament.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“Strang had already perfected his talent for telling other people just what they wanted to hear, so a dose of skepticism is in order for any belief he professed—a double dose for the ones he professed passionately.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“is my contention—my superstition, if you like—that he who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support The tale has a root there: it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words…. As he studies [the map], relations will appear that he had not thought upon.”
― Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

“I [author] was beginning to understand...the clash of cartographies. When the adventurer John Lederer had rambled down the Great Indian Trading Path in 1670...he was not just sight-seeing. Working under the auspices of Virginia's governor, Lederer was at the vanguard of a systematic effort to appropriate land--an effort in which maps often played as big a road as guns.”
― Miles Harvey, The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime

“A “businessman,” meanwhile, was not just a craftsman who made goods or a merchant who traded them, but a more fluid kind of capitalist, constantly finding new ways to turn a profit.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch

“In his book American Homicide, Roth notes that in the 1850s “aggression and vitriolic language invaded personal as well as political relationships and turned everyday encounters over debts or minor offenses like trespassing into deadly ones.” Fellow citizens, he writes, “killed each other over card games, races, dogfights, wrestling matches, and raffles.”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch