I'm on a new journey, this Quest of mine, and the first book for my MA is about a journey. I feel there is something – poetic, maybe – about that. Certainly it seems appropriate. Who knows where this journey, this Quest, will end?
I've therefore been thinking a lot about books about journeys, both fiction and non-fiction, recently. Of the journeys of others, the intentional and the accidental.
Conrad's Heart of Darkness, although fictional, draws heavily on Conrad's experience of captaining a steamship up the Congo river, with Marlow's evocative description of the trip. "Trip" makes it sound so – dainty, almost. Trivial, even. So not about ivory-hunters and European colonialism and empire-building. On the surface, it's Marlow's journey to find Kurtz, the Company's prized agent, and bring him home.
I mentioned the other week Nevile Shute's Pied Piper, which is about a journey through rapidly-being-occupied France in June 1940, of an old man escorting two English children back to England while German forces close in all around. Shute wrote of another WWII walk in A Town Like Alice, although this one was a forced march in Malaya, undertaken by a group of women and children taken prisoner when the Japanese took the island. This one was inspired by an almost real-life such event which happened in Sumatra, to a group of Dutch women (not a forced march, simply transported from camp to camp).
And in the non-fictional, there's been Raynor Winn's The Salt Path, about her and her husband walking the South West Coast Path due to bankruptcy and homelessness. They had nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. So they put one foot in front of the other and set off.
Or Rory Stewart's The Places In Between, of his intentional walk across Afghanistan in 2002, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. Stewart was attempting to recreate the journey of the Babur, first Emperor of Mughal India, having spent much of the previous eighteen months crossing India, Pakistan and Iran.
There is a skill in narrating journeys like this. Of finding the right words, the right rhythm of each sentence. Of finding the story in the journey of a thousand steps. The theme, I suppose.
Like the Journey of Life. It's all too easy to sit back and let Life happen, rather than consciously making a Life. To just plod along or be swept along with what other people think or expect, because that's what "normal" people do. Because these are the "normal" points of interest on the map of Life.
I'm not going to say it takes guts to live your life your way. That's twee. And rather takes away from true bravery.
But it takes energy to choose, consciously, how to live your life, and then to live it. And, of course, to withstand any negative comments from those who think they know what's best for you.
What books about journeys have you read?
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