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I could find no relief except in physical exercise, and every evening I went for a long run on the towpath along the Isis. After running for an hour or so, I would dive in and swim and then, wet and a little chilled, run back to my mean digs opposite Christ Church. I would gobble some cold dinner (I could no longer bear to eat chicken) and then write far into the night. These writings, titled “Nightcaps,” were frenzied, unsuccessful efforts to forge some sort of philosophy, some recipe for living, some reason to go on.
Perhaps I needed a drink, several drinks, to damp down my shyness, my anxieties, my frontal lobes.
“Travel now by all means—if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space. Take the prairies, for example; you’re wasting your time visiting these unless you know the saga of the homesteaders, the influence of law and religion at different times, the economic problems, the difficulties of communication, and the effects of successive mineral finds. “Forget about lumber camps. Go to California. See the redwoods. See the
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Truckers are generally solitary men. Yet occasionally—as in a hot and crowded truckers’ café, listening to some infinitely familiar record blaring on the jukebox—they are stirred, transfigured suddenly, without words or actions, from an inert crowd to a proud community: each man still anonymous and transient, yet knowing his identity with those around him, all those who came before him, and all who are figured in the songs and ballads.
There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same
When I left UCLA, I packed all my photographs, everything I had taken between 1962 and 1965, along with my sketches and notes, in a large suitcase. The suitcase never arrived in New York; no one seemed to know what had happened to it at UCLA, nor could I get an answer from post offices in L.A. or New York.
Similar to my hrd div failure
I would be back at work on Monday mornings—shaken and almost narcoleptic—but no one, I think, realized that I had been in interstellar space, or reduced to an electrified rat, over the weekend.
I felt I needed to go to a hard, real place, a place where I could devote myself to work and perhaps discover or create a real identity, a voice of my own.
I suspect my nostalgia may be not only for the place itself but for youth, and a very different time, and being in love, and being able to say, “The future is before me.”
But it was not easy to believe that anyone cared for me; I sometimes failed to realize, I think, how much my parents cared for me. It is only now, reading the letters they wrote to me when I came to America fifty years ago, that I see how deeply they did care.
I have thought about what you said of anecdote and narrative. I think we all live in a swirl of anecdotes…. We (most of us) compose our lives into narratives…. I wonder what the origin is of the urge to “compose” oneself.
