Getting Acquainted with Planet Arbre

I had a toothache and was all whiny. Fully utilized my sick leave to finish Anathem by Neal Stephenson in one sitting and chew on it. Not big on sci-fi. But Stephenson's newest book- Anathem has threads of fantasy running through it. That already sounded better than Cryptonomicon.
Nearly died reading it because my brains aren't wired for sci-fi. I'm quite enthralled by the idea of a quest. I just treated the aliens as demons. :p Even at my reading speed, I still took 4 hours to plough through it because I kept cross-referencing to other portions of the book. Effectively, I read it twice in that four hours.
Like other sci-fi/fantasty writers, Neal Stephenson has invented his own words for this particular world on Arbre. It takes a fair amount of concentration to remember them. To even begin to understand Stephenson's Arbre, Erasmas' actions and the how the balance of his world hangs on the whims of Sæcular Power, the sagely avouts, the aggressive Geometers versus the rest of the cosmos and parallel universes, this book must be ideally finished in a single sitting. Only then, would I be able to fully immerse into the trials and tribulations of Arbre.
There're many illuminating paragraphs in the book. Let me highlight this one that isn't too obscure. By the second sentence in the paragraph, I realized that I've never quite thought about clouds and their shadows that way. I must be quite silly- never once linked them together! The mountains and their shifting forms, of course. Anyone who has hiked on the trails of any mountain must have marvelled about that. Here's the inspiring extract on page 87 (Harper Fiction paperback printed in September 2009),

Protas, the greatest fid of Thelenes, had climbed to the top of the mountain near Ethras and looked down upon the plain that nourished the city-state and observed the shadows of the clouds, and compared their shapes. He had had his famous upsight that while the shapes of the shadows undeniably answered to those of the clouds, the latter were infinitely more complex, and more perfectly realized than the former, which were distorted not only by the loss of a spatial dimension but also by being projected onto terrain that was of irregular shape. Hiking back down, he had extended that upsight by noting that the mountain seemed to have a different shape every time he turned round to look at it, even though he knew it had but one absolute form and that these seeming changes were mere figments of his shifting point of view. From there he had moved on to his greatest upsight of all, which was that these two observations- the one concerning the clouds, the other concerning the mountain- were themselves both shadows cast into his mind by the same greater, unifying idea.