{"id":28820,"date":"2015-04-23T06:30:03","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T18:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=28820"},"modified":"2015-04-22T21:45:05","modified_gmt":"2015-04-22T09:45:05","slug":"road-trips-in-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2015\/04\/23\/road-trips-in-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Road Trips in Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve just been on a busman’s holiday, masquerading as a road trip…<\/p>\n

\"On<\/a>Possibly two of the most famous literary expositions of the road trip are Jack Kerouac’s On The Road<\/em><\/strong> (1957) which the New York Times described (contemporarily) as:<\/p>\n

“…the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.” <\/em><\/p>\n

\"Narrow<\/a>The second that immediately springs to mind, for me, is the Japanese poet, Matsuo Bassho’s Oko no Hosomichi<\/em><\/strong>: in English, The Narrow Road To the Deep North<\/em><\/strong>. The journey is composed of haibun, a prose poem form that is always illustrated by and\/or juxtaposed with haiku. According to the 1966 Penguin edition, it is considered “one of the major texts of classical Japanese literature.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Anabasis\"<\/a>But as soon as I began writing, I immediately remembered another personal favourite, Xenophon’s Anabasis<\/em><\/strong> (translated as The March Upcountry<\/em><\/strong>), which US writer Will Durant (1885-1981) described as “one of the great adventures in human history.” <\/em>Xenophon was a 5th century BC Athenian soldier and writer whose Anabasis<\/em><\/strong> records the famous march of 10,000 Greek mercenaries—once the Persian prince who hired them (Cyrus the Younger) died in battle—from the heart of the Persian empire, i.e. through hostile territory, to the coast where they could take (er, extort) passage home.<\/p>\n

\"Travels<\/a>Yet another personal favourite is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the C\u00e9vennes<\/b><\/i> (1879.) I used to own a beautiful, A4 scale, illustrated edition of this book but lost it somewhere in the course of my own travels — but it’s a wonderful record of a cross country trek (with Modestine, the eponymous donkey) that has remained enduringly popular.<\/p>\n

\"As<\/a>Last but not least, I also possess a battered edition of Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning<\/em><\/strong> (1969), a fascinating account of his journey through Spain on the eve of the 1930’s civil war. He leaves as the war breaks out, evacuated with other British citizens on a destroyer sent from Gibraltar:<\/p>\n

“All I’d known in that country \u2013 or had felt without knowing it \u2013 seemed to come upon me then; lost now, and too late to have any meaning, my twelve months’ journey gone. Spain drifted away from me, thunder-bright on the horizon, and I left it there beneath its copper clouds.<\/i>”<\/p>\n

All wonderful accounts, and wonderfully written, from Xenophon in the 5th century BC through to Lee’s 20th century narrative.<\/p>\n

My own brief trip is by no means of the same order, but I shall be posting a few photos and accompanying words from time to time over the next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve just been on a busman’s holiday, masquerading as a road trip… Possibly two of the most famous literary expositions of the road trip are Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957) which the New York Times described (contemporarily) as: “…the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-what-im-doing","category-recommended-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28820"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28836,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28820\/revisions\/28836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}