Stanley and Livingstone

Victorian newspapers thrilled their readers with tales of explorers finding the sources of tropical rivers, discovering unknown species of birds and lost tribes. Often as not the famous explorers eventually disappeared themselves, which is what happened to African explorer, Dr. David Livingstone. When Henry Morton Stanley set off to find him in the spring of 1871, Livingstone hadn't been heard from for six years. Stanley found him on November 10th, uttering the famous words "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," or so it was reported in the New York Herald. The Herald paid Stanley's expenses and the story sold a lot of papers. Livingstone had survived pneumonia, exhaustion, disorientation, kidnapping, theft and extreme conditions. At one point the natives confined him in a roped enclosure where he begged passersby for food. Though Stanley found him, he couldn't make him leave. Livingstone died in central Africa two years later, of malaria and an advanced case of dysentery. He was 60. Stanley and Livingstone both appear in A Book of Ages, as do Hernando De Soto, Hernan Cortez, Robert Falcon Scott, Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, Roald Amundsen who discovered the South Pole and Christopher Robin Milne who discovered the North Pole in a memorable expedition described in one of his father's books.

Epiphanies

One evening in September 1931, C. S. Lewis had one of those late night discussions about Christianity with his usual Oxford chums J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. The next day he had an epiphany on his way to the zoo. He was on the back of his brother's motorcycle. Lewis later tells how when he started off for the zoo “I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Lewis was 32 and had always been a skeptic.

Life is full of journeys, long and short, with and without epiphanies. But there are discoveries of one kind or another waiting just outside our door. Even the minor ones are pretty interesting. Not everyone gets to discover the Pacific from a peak in Darien or the moons of Jupiter from a hillside near Florence. Sometimes, like Graham Greene, we come across something ordinary like a reasonably priced meal when that's exactly what we need. There are a lot of discoveries in A Book of Ages. They can happen at any age.