Escape literary and real…
Three books
“We read to know we’re not alone.”
— William Nicholson, Shadowlands.
May I rephrase William Nicholson’s statement?
‘We read to know we’re not alone, and to know that others have the adventures we would like to have’.
Was it when I was working in the city that I was given an assignment to write about three authors whose books inspired me when I was young? Maybe, although I’m not sure. The idea was to write a short personal piece linking the books to the influence they had on me at the time, to use personal experience the piece to stimulate others to think about the literary influences on their lives. The background theme was about how authors and their books can influence not only what we believe but the directions we take in life.
The three books that came to mind are about journeys. Why journeys? Because at the time when I was living and working in the city and I had this nagging voice somewhere deep in my psyche telling me it was time to walk away, to get out into the world beyond.
First journey
It must have been when I was in my early twenties, a while ago now for sure, that I walked into a bookshop. This was something I often did and it is something I still do. Browsing, a title caught my eye. I picked it off the shelf, read a sentence here and there, thought it intriguing and bought it.
The book appealed to me. It spoke to me at a time when I and my cohort were searching for a different path into life than that offered by society. That offered security but it appeared all-too-boring, the idea of whiling away the years, the decades, locked into a secure job and living in this same city. There was a world out there but I didn’t know how to step out of the present and into the uncertainties and chances that lay in wait. Maybe, perhaps, this book would provide and answer.
The book was called The Dhamma Bums and it was written by someone I had never heard of. But it is not the book I want to write about here although it inspired me to seek out others by the same author.
So it was back to the bookshop to peruse those shelves again. This time, I bought a paperback by the same author called On The Road. It was a tale of adventure and movement, movement by road across the USA and adventure in life. Oh, the author of those two books was a man by the name of Jack Kerouac.
Those books were my introduction to an author discovered by chance. They were the doorway to some of his other books. They appealed to the restlessness in me yet On The Road didn’t trigger my tossing it all in and setting out on the highway as it did for others. The Dhamma Bums resonated because it described a different way of life with different priorities than mainstream society valued. Its tale of spontaneous living in the city interspersed with journeys into the mountains said much to me as a member of a generation searching for different life directions. Here was my generation, brought up to believe in our parents’ values of work, home ownership and security in life, and here was a band of friends seemingly somewhere out there on the social fringe, still part of the society but sidestepping its social and moral values .
But, On The Road… it spoke to others over the decades
and I think it still might whisper its seductive message to those with ears to hear it.
I went on to read more of Kerouac’s work although none had the impact on me as those first two books, with the exception of Big Sur. That was the tale of his time living in a shack on the Californian coast, a time when he experienced a kind of enui. Those books, they transported me far-away in place and mind and into the life of an author who was sometimes wayward, sometimes self-destructive, footloose and spontaneous.
Second journey
Not long after discovering Kerouac I came across another book that inspired me. The author, Peter Matthiessen, was unknown to me as were most authors — I was not a member of the literarati. It was the title that caught my attention and it was called The Snow Leopard.
The book relates a journey by foot into remote regions of the Himalayas. It also relates a parallel journey made in the author’s mind. Matthiessen accompanied a friend who wanted to study the bharal, the Himalayan blue sheep, but for Matthiessen the journey was one of buddhist insight and to clarify personal events back home in the US.
Matthiessen’s journey by foot was into the Himalayas before the backpackers, before the tourists, before the arrival of adventure travel. It was made in a time when the Himalayas were still mysterious. Reading about places since changed by those forces produces a strange feeling of longing for what was. although I had never experienced it. That didn’t happen immediately upon reading the book. It came later, after watching a slide show at a friend’s apartment about his trek in Nepalese Himalaya and learning that there was a new industry opening, called adventure travel. Led by companies specialising in walking in distant places, the industry introduced westerners to those places and their cultures and in so doing started their transformation.
The pages of Matthiessen’s book flow with the detail of the journey, the places, the people, the mountains. It was a step-by-step reading experience that enthralled and inspired me. I suspect it had an impact not only because it was an adventure in a place far, far from home but because at that time I, too, was interested in Buddhism. Maybe, though I don’t know if it was so, I was looking for my own insights.
Third journey
Another book. Another place. This time it was not the high mountains of the Himalaya but the coast and ridges of the remote Pacific islands. The Marquesas. The Marquesas in the late 1930s. The Marquesas before they were discovered by restless westerners. The time before tourism.
Was it again a title that attracted my attention? Fatu Hiva, after all, is so uncommon a title that it is sure to attract the perceptive eye scanning the bookshop shelves. I had already read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki, so I guess the mental stage was set for Fatu Hiva.
It is the tale of Thor and Liv, his wife, and their time on one of the Marquesas. The book combines archeology and adventure. Archeology, in finding in the forest the stone structures and carvings of an earlier people on the island. Adventure of the physical, geographic kind in their crossing and recrossing of the island’s central mountain ridge.
There is discord, too. Relations with a few of the villagers go sour and leads to the couple crossing the island’s central ridge to build a shack by the sea on the other side of the island. There they live off the land and the sea, and there comes a man hostile to their presence. Their tropical idyll broken, Thor and Liv recross the island to live in a cave on the coast until they take passage in a trading vessel.
Thor and Liv’s time in the Marquesas was in the 1930s, however the subplot of how human relations force change in our lives is the story of any time. Reading it I felt the sense of adventure the couple experienced and, at the same time, a sense of sadness of how human relationships bropught it to an end.
My journey
Why were these three books inspirational to me? I think the reasons are both societal and personal.
Societal, because at the time I discovered Kerouac and Mathiessen in the early seventies, in Australian society as elsewhere in the Western world there was a mood of readiness for change. It seemed, to many younger people anyway, that the staid society of previous times was due for overhaul.
Personal, because it was a time when I was open to influence and ready for my own changes in life. The problem was that I didn’t know in which direction that change should go. The idea of movement by foot across strange landscapes, of encountering people different to those of the society in which I was immersed, was strongly appealing.
How was it that these writers made their journeys? What force propelled them on into uncertainty and life lived in the moment? Could I ever emulate their journeys? I didn’t think so.
Those books spoke of other people, other places, other ways of living. Their influence, I think, was more subtle than visceral, more to do with ways of thinking about the world and about other ways of being. Those books still resonate with me all these decades later.
Book reviews of PacificEdge…
