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Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

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I asked him: “Did your talk with Duffy and the other monks change your mind? Today, do you see Christianity, or Roman Catholicism specifically, with a similar critique? I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” On some maps, highways marked in red are designated as fast-transit lanes, while "blue highways" are far slower, not always continuous roads, with limited gas stations & other services. The author's stated intent was to uncover places where "change did not mean ruin and where time & deeds connected". And in so-doing, the foreword to the book tells us, Heat-Moon hoped to have a "Nikon-level observation of the meaning of age, loss & change." Which then led me to ask my author, perhaps impertinently: “Mr. Heat-Moon, do you believe? What do you believe? Is that too personal?” Trogdon’s research did not include traveling the route Trennant and Nicodemus take, but, he says, there is no place they visit that he has not. Heat-Moon told me, “As much as I admired the monks’ quest and almost envied the comfort it brought them, they only enlarged my consideration of their existential views.”

Blue Highways and Forbes: Listed as number nine of fifteen travel books that "will change the way you see the world." [5] Why was I bothering? Sometimes a book lives a life far outside the confines of its author. But I didn’t want to give up just yet. Throughout the book, there is a sense of a fading past, of ways of life and modes of thought slowly vanishing from human ken. If one were to attempt a present day retracing of Least Heat Moon's journey, no doubt at least some of these towns would be gone completely, swallowed up either by time or encroaching suburbs. Heat-Moon told me: “Probably not a life such as many people imagine. I, as do we all, come from cosmic dust which, sooner or later, will be my destination. But dust is also a temporary destination, one more way station in what may be eternal movement.” Heat-Moon does spend more time than I would have liked writing about the random people he meets along the way. The interactions some times are only a few minutes while others might be hours. Some are memorable, some are just sad. Here is one of the more memorable interactions with the country bumpkins.

L’ho letto con piacere, ma troppo velocemente, dovendolo terminare entro il 20 giugno per una sfida libresca. Gli ho fatto un torto, perché questo è un libro che ha bisogno di lentezza. Lo rileggerò e mi farò perdonare. Bellissimo! Amid the coronavirus, let us consider how the cornerstone text of Western literature is about a ruler discovering himself while confronting an epidemic. These people, incidents, attitudes and details include, indeed highlight, the many manifestations of early democracy’s struggles and often brutal failings.

While rereading his book for the third or fourth time, I really wanted to talk with him. A writer recently said to me when I told him who was the subject of my latest writing, “The younger me learned much about traveling and writing from that book that I still use today.” He expressed my own feelings. I had heard that Heat-Moon was famously reluctant to grant interviews—to my surprise, he agreed. However, curiously, Heat-Moon himself was not then, and is also not now, a religious person. His laconic answers to my questions put a damper on my enthusiasm. Entertainment & Arts Why L.A.’s beach ban hurts: The meaning of public spaces amid social distancing This is about as good as road trip travelogues get. It is a series of daily vignettes remarkably absent of self-indulgence, a hard thing to steer clear of in a memoir. His stories feel a little dated not because of the writing but because the country has after all changed quite a bit in the past forty years. When Heat-Moon writes about the landscapes his writing is very captivating. The humor in the book comes infrequently so the book feels serious but rarely pretentious. The history of various towns when he chooses to write about them is also top-notch. Ghost Dancing: The Blue Highways Van". Museum of Anthropology. Archived from the original on 2016-06-23 . Retrieved 2017-09-19.

When he's talking with strangers and listening to and telling their stories, it can have its moments. And these moments are what made me finish the book. The hope that there were more of these coming (though, the longer I read, the more these weren't interesting either).

William Least Heat-Moon meets some interesting characters as he travels through the small towns of America. He seems to be a bit of a character himself. The entire time I'm reading this, I'm thinking "He sleeps in his van all across the US? Is that a seventies thing? Could someone do that now? What about bathing? Is that why sometimes people look at him askance? What would I think if I saw him today on this journey? Would I be a nice stranger or one of those that gave him a weird look?" The personal atmosphere of loss is soon overwhelmed by the people Heat-Moon encounters, including a Trappist monk who had been for 20 years a high-profile Wall Street trader, together with another monk, a former New York City policeman, both a part of a monastic community near Conyers, Georgia causing the author to ask, "what spirit burned in those men that did not burn in me?" The Blue Highways are on tour at the end of March and April – and I’ve already put in my diary the date of the gig nearest to me. If they can do live – and there are videos on YouTube that suggest this won’t be a problem – what they do on this album, they have a great year ahead of them. I’d add, if they can build on this second album as they’ve built on the first, they have a great career ahead of them. Having listened to the book, I’m now on the hunt for a hard copy. I heard many more quotable bits than GR has in its quotes database. I laughed out loud on numerous occasions and a few scraps of memory and talk moved me to misty, and I didn’t find those available to “like.” It’s interesting to me how much a reader can learn about the author from what they focus on, and what they don’t., what they offer to the reader for consideration, and when. . . . .you learn far more about the writer than you do the story, narrative or characters. I lived in the days and many of the places traveled through and it amazed me how familiar it felt – genuine authenticity sitting there.

An Osage Journey to Europe 1827-1830: Three French Accounts. University of Oklahoma Press, October 2013. ISBN 0806144033 PrairyErth: A Deep Map (1991) is an account of the history and people of Chase County, Kansas. This work introduced the concept of a deep map. Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories from the Road. Little, Brown and Company, January 8, 2013. ISBN 0316110248 Though it no longer serves that role, for a while this book was my vade mecum, a term that I incidentally learned while reading this.

Ralph Waldo Emerson advised that one should not go where the path may lead but instead should go where there is no path and leave a trail. The erstwhile Bill Trogdon, who transformed himself into William Least Heat-Moon in observation of his Native-American heritage did just that in his book, Blue Highways: A Journey Into America, using travel as a cleansing ritual after the breakup of his marriage & the loss of his college teaching position, always endeavoring to take the "roads less traveled by", as Robert Frost put it. Writing 'Blue Highways' (2014) is an account of how Least Heat-Moon wrote his best-selling book Blue Highways. In reflecting on the journey, he also discusses writing, publishing, personal relationships, and many other aspects that went into writing the book. It won an award for Distinguished Literary Achievement, Missouri Humanities Council, 2015. Mr. Heat-Moon crossed the country twice. When he heads home for the Midwest, with the towns increasingly more familiar, he sees his hometown as if for the first time. “I can’t say, over the miles, that I had learned what I had wanted to know because I hadn’t known what I wanted to know,” he writes, “but I did learn what I didn’t know I wanted to know.” And I think that's the root of the issue with BH. Take the title alone -a certain sense of holier-than-thou I-won't-travel-on-your-interstates-ness.Anti-democratic tendencies have been there since the beginning,” Trogdon says. “There were 19 slaves at Jamestown. But too much of our history has been covered up.” Albert Camus’ “The Plague,” read in quarantine for the first time, warns us to reset our own priorities I confess that maybe because I am somewhat older now, I would never venture into some of the bars (taverns) that the author dropped into meeting some of the less savoury local denizens. Duffy said a lot of things, almost avoiding the question, until coming out with, “I began to want a life—and morality—based not so much on constraint but on aspiration toward a deeper spiritual life.” He had worked with aspiration as a cop in New York, and by helping some Franciscan friars in their ministries. One aspect of Blue Highways as a travel narrative is that it is a snapshot of American culture that echoes the sentiments of Beat Generation writings and even Romantic Era travelogues, but does so in the late 1970s. His decision to strike out on the open road in search of spiritual truths continued a tradition that captured the cultural outlook of a certain era in U.S. history (the 1950s–1970s). To a certain extent this tradition has been lost. [9]

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