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The Oregon Trail
Francis Parkman
1848
(Horses, rifles, and knives see a party of adventurers through the land of expansive plains, craggy mountains, buffalo, and the Sioux.)
“Shaw! Buddy!” Imagine a young, spontaneous Yankee calling out to his friend, both of them just out of college. He proposes that they leave the effeminate comforts of the East, and spend a summer adventuring westward into the untamed lands where life is dangerous and fascinating. Francis Parkman explains (ch.II):
“The restlessness, the love of wilds and hatred of cities, natural perhaps in early years to every unperverted son of Adam, was not our only motive for undertaking the present journey. My companion hoped to shake off the effects of a disorder that had impaired a constitution originally hardy and robust; and I was anxious to pursue some inquiries relative to the character and usages of remote Indian nations, being already familiar with many of the border tribes.”
So they did it. In 1846. Francis was 23. And the recollections of that journey, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life, remain with us as one of the best treatments of the early West that we will ever have. Parkman’s prose has the feel of a chronicle—it is obviously nonfiction, a travelogue. But it is not a ponderous journal of trivia and redundancy through which we must wade for hours to find the few interesting episodes; nor is each sunset a springboard for a forced flight of sentimental fancy in poor imitation of Byron’s Childe Harold or other Old World sketches. Rather, it is an engaging selection of vignettes, personalities, and anecdotes that admit us to the ranks of the “ragamuffin cavalcade” that was Parkman’s expedition. Parkman’s writing is like Parkman himself—the stereotypical American at his best, one might say: direct yet perceptive, practical yet romantic, hearty yet insightful.
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold
1948
(An ecologist contemplates and celebrates the land, and recommends an expansion of our moral world.)
In today’s courses on ecology, forestry, conservation, environmental philosophy or land use, three personalities are routinely introduced as the fathers of modern concern for nature, the three who first and most strongly urged us to enlarge our conception of what in this world is a proper object of moral consideration: Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. Contemporary American (and to some extent world) culture has been impacted by A Sand County Almanac, as by Thoreau’s Walden, to such an extent that we cannot yet begin to assess it. Nevertheless, I would argue that we as a culture have still not attended to the two main lessons A Sand County Almanac would teach us.
The Travels
(Il Milione)
Marco Polo
(with Rustichello of Pisa)
1299
(An Italian explorer treks fearlessly into the unknown East, and discovers astonishing cultures and kingdoms no European had ever seen).
We are fortunate that Marco Polo lived long enough and expended the energy to record the greatest travels ever performed by any man to his time and for very long afterwards. He dictated– apparently from memory– his adventures to a romance-writer Rustichello of Pisa while they were prisoners of war in Genoa. No repetitive or trivial diarizing here—this is a very entertaining work, often fascinating and at times hilarious. I am struck, as Polo was, by the variety of customs observed in the many areas through which he trekked. I am also intrigued by the amount of wealth those in power were able to amass; such wealth that Kublai Khan, for the prime example, could romp in several sumptuous palaces with manicured grounds and scenic paths like those of the richest modern European monarch. It surely seems that the book’s two repeated claims may well be true: that Marco Polo had traveled further and knew more of the world than any other man who had ever lived; and that the Mongol empire under Kublai Khan was the largest empire in subjects and geographical area ever to have existed.
Passages from the American Notebooks
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1835-1853
(The exercise of a young author’s pen creates images of the New England landscape and its people.)
Mrs. Sophia Hawthorne, after the death of her husband in 1864, respected his wish that no biography be written of him. However, in lieu of this, she released to an eager public three successive volleys of Passages from his journals. Those written in America were published first, and are perhaps the most interesting in that they focus on his home state of Massachusetts and the early years of his literary career (his thirties).
The Time Machine
October 18, 2020 / 1 Comment on The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
1895
(A push on a lever, a blurry dizziness, a clap of thunder… and a veil falls away to reveal the world of our far distant descendants.)
Breaking the rule that you have to proceed constantly forward in time at precisely one second per second is as old as the human imagination, appearing even in ancient stories where a god or a bonk on the head could slip you to another point in history. Surprisingly enough, though, the idea of a device or vessel that can carry one through time in the way that wagons and boats carry us through space is apparently less than a century and a half old. Perhaps the backwards-running clock in an 1881 Edward Page Mitchell story is the first time machine in literature; or else, if you have to be able to climb into the thing for it to count, then Enrique Gaspar’s “anacronópete” of his now little-known 1887 novel of that name narrowly beats out H. G. Wells’ 1888 story “The Chronic Argonauts”. Evidently the hyperindustrializing and engine-happy Americans and Western Europeans of the late 19th century, inspired no doubt also by the first stirrings of modern physics, were beginning to let their minds wander as to what a precisely engineered assemblage of gears and rods and bolts might be able to do. The Time Machine is the quintessence of this concept in literature, and is one of the best science fiction stories we have, even given the golden age of that genre that followed.
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