Boone: A Biography

by Robert Morgan

It could be said that in that doubleness, seeing the world at once from two or more points of view and acting on that multiple vision, lies the very essence of originality and greatness. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-up, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

In “Song of the Open Road,” published in the 1856 second edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman evokes an image of freedom and wandering as a way of life as thrilling as Thoreau’s metaphor of walking. The open road is the way of beauty and freedom, a life of discovery and wonder, a path to the shining future, the Edenic west of brotherhood. From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. I inhale great draughts of space. The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.