ColumnRead a book. Sustain your mind.

In yet another new chapter of “What’s Going on Upstairs,” it seems that scientists have had a virtual breakthrough in figuring out what fiction does to our brains. Recent studies show that reading about a made-up event can trigger the same neuro-bells and whistles as does taking part in an actual event. That is to say, when we read, “See Spot run,” we in some ways experience Spot running. With this in mind, given that it’s Earth Month, let us consider how certain stories can make us feel as if we’re soaring through the air, splashing in the sea or, for the more grounded among us, happily playing in the dirt.

But first, let’s agree with our friends in the lab (no deniers here). There’s no doubt that certain words and well-crafted sentences can have a similar effect on our minds as does the smell of fresh-baked bread, taking us to a time and place far beyond where we are when the reading experience occurs. And that’s the point, right? We often read books to escape our current experience and trade it in for another. Moreover, in many of the best novels, place functions as a character in and of itself, complete with attributes that go beyond backdrop to both embody and tease all five senses; whether it be Paris or Pi’s pontoon, the venue of a novel informs how we “feel” about a story and allows us to “go along” with the action.

So let’s celebrate novels that take us outside – tales that get our tails off the couch, out of the library and up from our lounge chair (yes, a beach read implies that you’re outside, but you know what we mean) and take us someplace else—namely, someplace without a roof. Enclosed please find deserts, jungles and mountains, oceans and rivers, blue skies and lush valleys…

1. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (1927)

A natural and majestic silence pervades Willa Cather’s story of Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Josh Vaillant’s humble mid-19th century journey from the Midwest to a newly established Catholic diocese in New Mexico Territory. From the onset, as the two travel first to the Gulf of Mexico before heading out into the Native American frontier, Death Comes for the Archbishop captures a feeling that is pristine, nascent and dry – a pure presentation of the American West on the eve of conquest. Reading the novel, you get a deep sense of (mis?)guided faith as you witness the two men’s plodding entrance into a new and largely undisturbed world. Every village, mesa, path and stone along the way is offered up for examination and contemplation. In contrast to later, typical Western novels where the outward thrust is violent and clumsily unobservant, Cather allows us to clearly see the trail upon which our nation was to tread.

2. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac (1958)

Dash, gallop and hop-skip from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada with Ray Smith (Kerouac) and Japhy Ryder (based on the author’s friend, Zen Buddhist and Beat poet Gary Snyder) as they whoop and hike their way out of city life in a search of transcendence. Booted and ruck-sacked, these are perhaps Kerouac’s most “holy” characters. The plot of The Dharma Bums rises up, almost panting, as Kerouac’s signature freestyle prose is ideal for delivering the air and sounds of those epiphanies that only happen in nature. Even at rest, you’re there with them to catch your breath: “The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.”

3. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach (1970)

“It was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a gentle sea.” This is the poetic and unforgettable opening to this beautiful tale of rebellion, self-seeking and joyous aerial defiance. Jonathan Livingston Seagull flies both with and against the wind, and has touched millions of readers in that unforgettable, “I remember exactly where and when I read it” way. Richard Bach’s simple tale of the young hero bird is perhaps the closest you’ll ever to come to flying without leaving the ground. Each time he ascends from the confines of the earth, he takes us along with him to feel the assistance and challenge of every breeze and gust that affects his every… single… feather.

4. The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel (1980)

Twenty-thousand years fail to distance us from the rich natural textures and challenges described by Jean Auel in her story of a chance coming together of a Cro-Magnon girl and a tribe of Neanderthals. You can almost smell the dank caves, primal mud and lush forests of the prehistoric landscape that hosts Ayla and her adoptive clan, as they navigate the edge of the era’s Ice Age. The first of the author’s Earth’s Children series, The Clan of the Cave Bear was based, according to Auel, on a great deal of research, with resulting language that allows us to trust (some have said too much so) the story’s historical backdrop and crawl into the cave of prehistory to enjoy a page-turning plot that, given the success of the series’ ensuing novels, may likely leave you craving more.

5. Water Music, T.C. Boyle (1982)

The first novel of the always funny and insanely observant T. Coraghessan Boyle, Water Music is an historical and satirical examination of two sadly misguided, yet somehow majestic and even glorious tragic heroes—conman Ned Rise and the great adventurer Mungo Park. Taking place largely in Imperial British West Africa, the novel’s lavish language and plot are as twisted as its main characters who come together in the late-1770s/early-1800s in a quest to find fame and fortune—and the source of the Niger River. Tapping into the imagination of discovery, the relationship between the reader and the novel’s landscape—notably the river itself—is cemented early on and lasts through to the (fabulously) bitter end. Guaranteed you’ll find yourself more than once wiping the sweat off your brow in heat of the African day.

6. Galápagos, Kurt Vonnegut (1985)

Back to the sea. That’s where our “big brains” have gotten us in this ghostly accounted, post-apocalyptic tale of the last humans (among them Mick Jagger and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and the evolutionary de-evolution that follows our gravest mistakes. What have we become? Wiser perhaps, but mercifully less brainy, the new humans of Galápagos are flippered creatures who hunt with their snouts, and are generally less capable than their ancestors who were, needless to say, occupied with ill-advised tasks like bomb making and facilitating global warming. Like all great Vonnegut tomes, we’re treated here to his rare form of fanciful pessimism, which in some weird way rings optimistic. A maestro of simplicity and irony, the author’s language transports us ethically and emotionally in terms of our relationship with our natural world.

7. Ishmael, Daniel Quinn (1992)

With the natural world embodied in the form of a giant Gorilla/Socratic instructor, Ishmael is Daniel Quinn’s philosophical manifesto as much as it is a novel. The story retells history through a stunningly fresh and clear lens that exposes, point-by point, the illusion of human greatness and superiority as a fantastic and cataclysmic lie. Zeroing directly in on the Bible and the great stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the book’s teacher unfurls for the narrator new explanations and interpretations of events and roles that allow him (and us) to rethink humanity’s relationship with the environment. While this story doesn’t so much take us outside, per se, it offers a new view of who we are here on this earth and our role in sustaining what is not ours.

8. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer (1996)

A biography that reads like a mystery (sorry for foray out of fiction here, but you can file this one under “you cannot make this stuff up”), the great chronicler Jon Krakauer invites us to join him in his effort to understand the life of Christopher McCandless. Later made into a truly great movie (in 2007), Into the Wild takes us along on the 24-year-old’s life walkabout, which culminated in his disappearing into the Alaskan wilderness with a 10-pound bag of rice. The journey is one of self-actualization attained by pushing, poking and prodding the natural world a in way that calls upon the painful alchemy of exposure and danger. Somehow this cautionary tale both beckons and warns, presenting the dichotomy of risk and reward in a way that leaves us breathless and wondering what self-discovery is worth.

9. Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving (2009)

Probably too often (and sloppily) referred to as the American Charles Dickens (and a more symbolic and postmodern writer than he would like to admit), John Irving is known for plot brilliance and character development nonpareil. His powerful talents, when turned upon the natural world and how we negotiate it – namely here, New Hampshire’s Androscoggin River and the logging professionals who work on its shores and in its waters – are a literary force to be reckoned with. Last Night in Twisted River’s time on and along the water drives the story forward with Irving’s characteristic power and engagement. While there, we are inside the camps, towns and forests of the Northeast for the plot-developing twists and turns of the author’s 12th and perhaps most natural world-oriented novel.

10. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett (2011)

Reading this story of a Minnesota physician who chases her past and future up the Amazon River, one cannot help but think of the great Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (if you haven’t read it, think Apocalypse Now without the napalm). Indeed, we feel in our guts the upriver suction that possesses Marina Singh as she searches for answers surrounding the fever-caused death of a colleague who succumbed while searching for a mysterious and brilliant pharmaceutical specialist who has disappeared into her “research.” Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is a page-turner (the plot flows as deliberately as the river itself), and you’re sure to feel the heat and bugs and hot rain as you see “civilization drop away again and again” into a jungle that breathes a single color: “The sky, the water, the bark of the trees: everything that wasn’t green became green.”

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly feature, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

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Top image: Zach Welty

The post InPRINT: 10 Novels That Make You Want to Play Outside appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column(Re)read a book. Sustain your mind.

I first read On the Road when I was 20. It was, as they say, the right time. I had just returned from yet another leave of absence (“leaves of presence,” I would later call them) from my East Coast university. That year, I had managed to cover ground cross-country to San Francisco, north to the Arctic working tugs, back to the lower 48, overseas to Europe, and finally to Africa, where I headed up the Nile as far as my body could stand it. Now here I was, happily weathered and back in Boston, way wined up and sitting across a barroom table from my favorite (and at the moment incredulous) professor: “Are you f***ing kidding me?” he slurred. “You never read Jack?!” “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I moaned. “Kerouac. The Beat God. [Jazz hands.] Alright, alright.” The next day I bought a used paperback. It had a picture of a blazing sun on the cover.

The book sang to me. Being on the backside of many journeys, it was more of an uncanny companion (had Jack been with me?) than an inspiration. But there it was, a perfect, almost musically rendered travelogue of bar stories and holy road tales – the kind I had been gathering and was just beginning to learn how to tell. It was what the road sounded like. It was how it felt.

The novel, largely based on Kerouac’s real-life experiences, is the first-person reminiscence of the 20-something Sal Paradise (Jack). It takes place over the waning years of the 1940s, during which time Sal meets and then “absorbs” his pal Dean Moriarty (based on Jack’s real-life companion Neal Cassady). Dean is an iconic symbol of the fading American frontier. Raised in the rail yards of the West by a now-lost alcoholic hobo father, he’s wired to explore with abandon a world whose post-war boundaries are closing in (“a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles”), making him a maniac by society’s standards and a winged, yet sad, Beat hero, saint and angel by Sal’s. Together and apart, they crisscross the highways of America (mostly blue at the time), intersecting on and off with their sometimes like-minded crew of contemporaries (almost all based on Kerouac’s circle of friends, including soon-to-be notables such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs).

The story is of adventure nonpareil. It’s a bop-and jazz-infused, abstract Huck Finn meets Moby Dick on wheels—a purely American tale complete with an intrepid search for a lost father, fearless in its exploration of time (everything is epic; a few hours passing through a meaningless town is worthy of its own mythologizing) and space (no heretofore secret place is off-limits, from the darkest bar at dawn to the dankest Mexican brothel). And the characters know it’s all pure life and they embrace it every inch of the way. Sal’s oft-quoted whoop:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’

Like I said, I was 20 and the time was right. As it had been for untold millions of young Americans, On the Road was perfect fodder for me as I set out to explore life unknown. I saw it as an anthem, really, for brave, invincible and outward-bound youth. And now I wanted to be a writer.

I decided that I would spend my last year as an undergraduate buttoning down a lit degree and writing a thesis on Jack’s book (and his more experimental Visions of Cody). As part of my “research,” I found myself a dropout once more and headed back to San Francisco, in part to explore the Great Man’s haunts and dives. Reading my own shoddy poems, drinking to excess and listening to anyone who would tell me a Jack story, it quickly became apparent that the now-dead writer was buried under a mountain of hangers-on and cultural noise. The hype was as immeasurable in the 1980s as it was when the book was first published in 1957. Worse, in fact. And from what I could gather, Kerouac never did get used to his own celebrity, and his work and life suffered greatly.

Though some intermittently great achievements did come—The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, a few others – he never achieved the success or creative reach of these two books (On the Road and Cody, respectively). Jack eventually drank himself back full circle, seemingly unlearning the world, surrendering whatever claims to enlightenment he may have achieved, and dying a pitiful alcoholic’s death in 1969. His final days were clouded by all-too-public rants of bigotry and self-obsession.

So I focused my work on the words, setting out to examine the purely literary aspects of the novels. I brattily teased out the influence of Proust, Joyce and Céline. I fought with a professor who refused to read my thesis (while Kerouac’s female characters can be thin and leave something to be desired on every front, I never bought the misogyny charges). I avoided the bloated and self-aggrandizing I-knew-the-Beats biographies. I protected Jack’s words at every turn. I needed his books to be legitimate. I thought the world did too.

And when I was done I put On the Road away. While I did keep traveling for a number of years (I was a real pro for a while), eventually I got married, returned to my hometown of Detroit and had kids, got a dog and gave up the road. The book (now a first edition purchased to celebrate the completion of my thesis) was consigned to a shelf. Jack was in my past. I did become a writer, though. A journalist. But I never wrote a novel about my travels. One day, I always thought.

II.

My kids are both off to college now, having their own great adventures. My oldest has read On the Road. My youngest (whom I named Cody, incidentally) says he’ll get around to it one day. Meanwhile, I’m wondering what my 50s are going to look like, sitting back to catch my post-parenting breath (like it ever really ends) and thinking of what it would be like to be on the road again. I do live in the San Francisco area, though I seldom go to Jack’s beloved North Beach bars. In fact, I don’t go to bars much at all.

Last weekend, I reread the book. Again I heard music, although it sounded a little bit different than it did a quarter-century ago. I’m a hell of a better reader now than I was then, and I know my jazz (I get the references to Miles and Bird and Billie). I also know what happened to poor Jack, who passed at 47, a year younger than I am today. (I may not be a famous novelist, but I’m alive. I no longer drink.) And interestingly, maybe sadly, this time I couldn’t read the words without hearing Jack’s actual voice. (I’ve heard endless tape recordings of his readings since I first read him.) It’s that signature Lowell, Mass. slur, with its boozy Beat rhythms and accentuations. Unmistakable.

But here’s the rub: This time around, I saw the road from a very different angle. Without the roar of youth, the sentences popped. It’s as if I first read the book while singing along at a rock show and today, well, it’s clearer now – clearer, even, than when I struggled so hard to give Jack his academic due. It speaks of becoming the weather (“The atmosphere and I became the same”) and the whoops scream “we are here now” – be here now. A portend, perhaps, of the Buddhist philosophies that would entrance and perhaps save some of that generation, including its most noted survivors, Ginsberg and the great poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums.)

I missed this quote the first time around. It’s Dean talking to Sal about a couple of  “squares” they traveled with for a short spell, who were in the front seat:

Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! 

Today, I realize something new about Jack’s road. Or maybe I just have to see it differently. Now the book is no longer about being brave and hip and Beat – and it’s not about getting somewhere. It’s about being present. It’s about “it,” as Sal and Dean discover together. And though I may have thought I got “it” back then, I didn’t.

Revisiting On the Road, I see something that I couldn’t know as a young man – and certainly not as the young man who judged and tormented his older self for so long for choosing a road less dangerous than the one he traveled in his younger days. I see that the road never ends and I know this is good news for an older person who, unlike Jack, survived his own life to live and work and read another day. My road today no longer calls for the wild whoop! of a daredevil, but rather for the measured and accepting smile of an adult allowing himself to experience new things as each day unfurls. Know this about Jack’s book: Whether you’ve read it before or wisely decide to read it for the first time, it’s not just for the young. It’s a tome for seekers – no matter your age.

And now, I still think of On the Road. And I still think of Dean Moriarty. Maybe I’ll write that book.

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly feature, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

ALSO CHECK OUT:

InPrint: Les Histoires De Paris & Two Novel Additions

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Top Image: Caveman Chuck Coker

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