-- from Travels with Charley: In Search of America, 1962
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Quote: John Steinbeck ...
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blow-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only when do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand.
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Just wondering as I meandered through, have you also read "Blue Highways" by William Least Heat Moon? It's my other 'travel' book. I think you'd like it.
ReplyDeleteActually, I have a quote from that book in the queue for the Daily Montana blog! I think it's coming up in the next day or two.
ReplyDeleteIt was an interesting book, but from a completely different perspective than Travels with Charley, and I definitely liked the Steinbeck more.
That said, though, I love travel books with a passion! I'll read as many of them as I can.
I just got a book from the library called "Incognito Street: How travel made me a writer", by a woman named Barbara Sjoholm. Don't even remember where I read about it...will let you know what I think.
ReplyDeleteLeast Heat Moon wrote about my father-in-law's prospecting partner Leo in his book,(the one legged Merchant Marine, after meeting him in the bar at Frenchman Station, NV. He took a picture of the owners at the time for the book, (before the government bought them out, for megabucks). If F-I-L and Leo had lived long enough the gov. would have bought them out too...they had over 100 prospecting claims in the hills south of Frenchman.