Three books, three journeys
The assignment was this: Write about a book that inspired you when you were young. Describe a life-changing experience with a book.
We read to know we’re not alone.
— William Nicholson, Shadowlands.
MAY I add to 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.
That bring me to three books that inspired me when young. They are books quite different but they are all about journeys.
First journey
It must have been when I was at the end of my teens or just a few years later that I walked into a bookshop. This was something I often did. It is something I still do. Browsing that day, a title caught my eye. I picked it off the shelf, read a sentence here and there, thought it sounded intriguing and bought it.
The book spoke to me at a time when I and my cohort were searching for a different path into life than that offered by society. The book was called The Dhamma Bums and it was written by someone I had never heard of.
That is not the book I want to write about here although it inspired me to seek out others by the same author. When I was ready to do that it was back to the bookshop to peruse those shelves again. This time, I bought a paperback called On The Road. It was a tale of adventure and movement, adventure in life by living in the moment, and movement by road across the USA.
I was a little uncertain of the life the author spoke of. Being young, my suburban upbringing still exerted a strong pull on my expectations of how life should be lived. This book was about people living not the regular urban life I was brought up in but one spontaneous, one without any substantial thought of the future, one where the notion of a life-long career was completely absent. I hadn’t thought much about a career anyway. Unless you were among the fortunate few with wealthy middle class parents and the prospect of a university education it was not something that preoccupied you. Nor do I recall it occupying my friends at school or later, either. Sure, I though of what sort of work I would like to do in life, however I came up with little by way of an answer. I was not alone.
Like The Dhamma Bums before it, the book spoke to me.
It has spoken to so many others over the decades too, and I think it might still whisper its seductive message to those with ears to hear it. Oh, the author of those two books was a man by the name of Jack Kerouac.
Second journey
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 in mind.
Some years after discovering Kerouac I came across another book that inspired me. The author, Peter Matthiessen, was unknown to me, not that I knew of many authors at all. It was the title that caught my attention — 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.
The pages flow with the detail of their journey, the places, the people, the mountains. It was a step-by-step reading experience that enthralled and inspired me. I suspect it had that impact not only because it was an adventure in a place far, far from home (this was the Himalayas before the backpackers, before the tourists) 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.
Over previous years I had spent a lot of time bushwalking in the mountains and forests of Tasmania. A man in our bushwalking coterie had just returned from several weeks hiking in the Nepalese Himalayas. That was something new then, the early days of what came to be called adventure travel when it really was that rather than the beating of a well-worn track between backpackers’ hostels. Finding a book that was about walking in the mountains weas something else that attracted me to the tale of Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard adventure.
What did I get out of Matthieesen’s book? I couldn’t have answered that very well at the time. I need time to pass before I can identify how a book affects me. Now I know it was the parallel adventures he experienced, one crossing rugged mountain landscapes, the other the landscapes of the mind.
Third journey
Another book. Another place. This time it was not the high mountains of the Himalaya but the coast and ridges of a remote Pacific island. The Marquesas. The Marquesas of the late 1930s. The Marquesas before they were discovered by footloose westerners. The time before tourism.
Was it the 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 that set the mental stage for Fatu Hiva.
It is the tale of Thor and wife Liv’s time in 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 went sour and this led to the couple crossing the range to build a shack by the sea on the other side of the island. There they lived off the land and the sea, and there came a man hostile to their presence. Their tropical idyll broken, they recrossed the island to live in a cave on the coast until they took passage on a trading vessel.
Thor and Liv’s time in the Marquesas was in the 1930s, however the subplot of how human relations force change is the story of any time.
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 Methiessen, the late sixties and well into the following decade, in Australian society as elsewhere in the Western world, there was a 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 change in life. 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. Both would eventuate, but not yet.
How was it that these writers made their journeys? What force propelled them into uncertainty? 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 ways of being.
Book reviews
Small boat, big seas — the Voyage of the Cormorant
https://medium.com/by-road-track/small-boat-big-seas-the-voyage-of-the-cormorant-f98107b5616b
Shelter and beyond
https://medium.com/by-road-track/r-t-shelter-and-beyond-8a4dff6ba31a
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