Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in Blue Highways, with a note of reference.

On through Lebanon, a brick-street village where Charles Dickens spent a night in the Mermaid Inn . . .

Tony listened and asked whether I had ever read Walking Through Missouri on a Mule.
“Never heard of it, but I like that title.”
“It’s about an old boy that tramped across the state a hundred years ago. Boy that walked it wrote the book. Now, that’s good reading.”

“It is waking that kills us,” Sir Thomas Browne said three centuries ago. Without desire, acting only on will, I emerged from the chrysalis of my sleeping bag and poured a basin of cold water. I thought to wash myself to life.

A brass plate indicated that the original grave lay just beyond the shoreline. “Who knows the fate of his bones?” Sir Thomas Browne asked.

Highway as analog: social engineers draw blueprints to straighten treacherous and inefficient switchbacks of men with old curvy notions; taboo engineers lay out federally approved culverts to drain the overflow of passions; mind engineers bulldoze ups and downs to make men levelheaded. Whitman: “O public road, you express me better than I can express myself.”

The privateers did not come to build a new society, for Raleigh was no utopian like Thomas More or Roger Williams; rather he was merely an intelligent man who envisioned a constitution of Elizabethan mercantile society.

Roger Williams

Many of the adventurers came infected with the European attitude toward America, expressed by a man no less than John Donne, who referred to Virginia, which then included North Carolina, as “a spleen to drain all humours of the body.”

Harriet, the expedition scientist, wrote an absorbing botanical, zoological, and anthropological account of the Pamlico-Albermarle region called A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

A monk, about sixty, in the white tunic and black scapular of the Trappist, watched me open The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of the Trappist father, Thomas Merton.

“Were you a carpenter or tradesman of some kind?”
“Tradesman. That’s it. I traded stock on Wall Street for twenty years.”
That meant he had to be nearly eighty. He seemed a character out of Lost Horizon. “Why did you give up Wall Street to become a monk?

I was uneasy about what I imagined went on in a monastery. I mean, I’ve read Chaucer. Monasteries, I knew, were remnants from the Dark Ages — dying vestiges of medievalism — and monks were religious atavisms.

“We just finished Nicholas and Alexandra. We began Understanding Media not long ago but voted it out. We vote on books to be read, then vote again one-third and two-thirds of the way through to see if we’re interested in continuing. Had trouble understanding McLuhan.”

“What do you read?”
“In the woods, some natural history, some Thoreau. Always scripture and theology. Reading about the Charismatic Movement now.” He was silent a moment. “Does any of this explain why I’m here?”

. . . the name on the statue above Emmeline’s tombstone is Evangeline. Cajuns believe Longfellow patterned his wandering heroine on Emmeline and probably he did, although the poet never visited Louisiana relying instead on information furnished by Nathaniel Hawthorne and a St. Martinsville lawyer once Longfellow’s student at Harvard

We sat down at her small table. A copy of Catch-22 lay open.

She went to wash up. I pulled out one of her books El Señor Presidente by Guatemalan novelist Miguel Asturias. At page 85 she had underlined two sentences: “The chief thing is to gain time. We must be patient.

William Carlos Williams: “ memory is a kind of accomplishment.”  Maybe. It may be too, in the end, it’s the only thing one king called truly his own. Memory is each man’s own last measure, and for some, the only achievement. 

I like to come here to read history. Reading Plutarch this trip.

After traveling 19th century America, de Tocqueville came to believe one result of democracy was a concentration of each man’s attention upon himself

Lear, daring the storm to, “strike flat in the thick rotundity of the world,” cries, “ Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!” And that’s just what they did.

Over the next hour, He talked about the Hopi Way, and showed pictures and passages from Book of the Hopi.

She longed for the true journey of an Odysseus or Ishmael are Gulliver or even a Dorothy of Kansas, wherein passage through space and time becomes only a metaphor of a movement through the interior of being.

A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end. “What’s more, as John Le Carre, in speaking of the journey of death, said, “Nothing ever bridged the gulf between the man who went and the man who stayed behind.”

Twenty-five years ago a fella wrote a book about us called The Town That Died Laughing. Stick your head out the window and listen to all that laughing. You ask me, I don’t believe one damned bit in change.

He’s a Pekingese Chinese dog. In dog years, he’s even older than I am.

I wanted to give him a Chinese name, but old what’s-her-face over there in the camper wouldn’t have it. Claimed she couldn’t pronounce Chinese names. I says, ‘You can’t say Lee?’ She says, ‘You going to name a dog Lee?’ ‘No,’ I says, no but what do you think about White Fong?’ Now, She’s not a reader unless it’s a beauty parlor magazine with the Kennedy or Hepburn woman on the cover, so she never understood the name. You’ve read Jack London, I hope. She says, ‘When I was a girl we had a horse called William, but that name is too big for that itty-bitty dog. Just call him Bill.’ That was that. She’s a woman of German descent and I decided person. But when old Bill and I are out on our own, I call him White Fong.