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020 - XX Books · Gentle Art of Tramping

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  Speaker 1: Chapter twenty of The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham.
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  Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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  Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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  Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Read by Shrimpfish The Gentle Art
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  Speaker 1: of Tramping, Chapter twenty. Books. You need a book, but
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  Speaker 1: you cannot carry gibbons decline and fall with you, even
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  Speaker 1: if you feel the need. The tramp's library is limited,
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  Speaker 1: for books are heavy. It is best to tramp with
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  Speaker 1: one book only. But it is a missed opportunity not
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  Speaker 1: to have one book, for you can gain an intimacy
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  Speaker 1: with a book and an author in that way which
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  Speaker 1: it is difficult to obtain in the library or in
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  Speaker 1: the midst of the rush of the books of the season.
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  Speaker 1: Each will have his choice, though many will choose alike.
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  Speaker 1: The inexperienced may pop the the latest yellow back into
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  Speaker 1: the rucksack, not grasping that it will be read through
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  Speaker 1: in two lazy afternoons, and that then he will have
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  Speaker 1: no book to fall back upon. In the trenches. In France,
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  Speaker 1: a happy habit developed of leaving red books upon dry
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  Speaker 1: ledges in the dugouts. One often came upon a treasure
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  Speaker 1: trove of the kind. But when tramping you cannot leave
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  Speaker 1: books for others with much hope of their being found.
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  Speaker 1: And rarely does one find any stray literature, unless it
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  Speaker 1: be some tract on the futility of sin. It is better, therefore,
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  Speaker 1: to take with one a whole time book. It is
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  Speaker 1: good to have a book that is full of meat,
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  Speaker 1: one with broad margins for scribblings, and extra pages for thoughts, poems,
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  Speaker 1: thumb nails, sketches. After a long tramp, it is nice
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  Speaker 1: to see a book which has been clothed with pencilings.
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  Speaker 1: It records, in a way the spiritual life of the adventure,
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  Speaker 1: and will recall it to you when in later years
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  Speaker 1: you turn over the page again. It is well to
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  Speaker 1: take a book that you do not quite understand, one
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  Speaker 1: that you have already nibbled at but have found difficult.
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  Speaker 1: I do not mean an obtruse work, but one you
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  Speaker 1: are just on the verge of understanding and making your own.
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  Speaker 1: At different stages of development, you will have different books.
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  Speaker 1: A boy just beginning to think could do worse than
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  Speaker 1: take The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, or Thoro's Wolden
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  Speaker 1: A little later comes Iruhan or eothen At eighteen Sarterrosartis
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  Speaker 1: or Carpenter's Towards Democracy or Browning's Pariscelsus. A good deal
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  Speaker 1: depends on temperament as to whether a volume of Shelley
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  Speaker 1: or Keats will keep you company all the while. You
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  Speaker 1: read and reread a poem that you like, until it
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  Speaker 1: begins to sing in your mind, it becomes your pass ession.
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  Speaker 1: They are marvelous passages lying hidden in a poem like Paracelsus.
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  Speaker 1: Ask the gear eagle, when she stoops at once into
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  Speaker 1: the vast and unexplored abyss, what full grown power informs
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  Speaker 1: her from the first? Why she not marvels strenulously beating
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  Speaker 1: the silent, boundless regions of the sky. It is a
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  Speaker 1: poem of a man seeking life, seeking away. It ought
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  Speaker 1: to move most young men who are on the threshold
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  Speaker 1: of life, unless they are dull or have been infected
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  Speaker 1: by cynicism. For my part, I look back loyally to
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  Speaker 1: the time when I was Paracelsus and could say his
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  Speaker 1: lines is from my own heart. Tis time new hopes
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  Speaker 1: should animate the world. I whispered as I walked, And
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  Speaker 1: the new hopes were my hopes much of Paracelsus should
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  Speaker 1: go into the true tramps anthology, and with it not
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  Speaker 1: contradicting it. Omar Khayam and also O Chagnesses. We are
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  Speaker 1: the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams,
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  Speaker 1: wandering by lone sea breakers and sitting by desolate streams.
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  Speaker 1: And then certain delicious lines untraced in origin, which Algernon
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  Speaker 1: Blackwood is fond of quoting. Change is as mistress chance,
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  Speaker 1: his counselor love cannot hold him duty, forge no chain.
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  Speaker 1: The wide seas and the mountains call him, and gray
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  Speaker 1: dawns know his camp fire in the rain. An ideal
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  Speaker 1: book to carry on a tramping expedition is undoubtedly an
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  Speaker 1: anthology of your own, compiling a notebook filled with your
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  Speaker 1: favorite verses. Other books which I think of as the
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  Speaker 1: tramp grows in goodness and in grace are Ibsen's peer
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  Speaker 1: Jint or Brand, preferably Peerjint. There's much more in it.
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  Speaker 1: Peer Jin is a very remarkable book. You can read
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  Speaker 1: it ten times and still fail to exhaust its poetry,
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  Speaker 1: its thought. It is a great book about life. It
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  Speaker 1: is moreover a true tramping book. Peer is a vagubond
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  Speaker 1: wandering about in the world, and it is never the
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  Speaker 1: world which is in question, but the state of his soul.
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  Speaker 1: Brand is not so much of a poem as the other,
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  Speaker 1: and is not so memorable, but it raises some of
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  Speaker 1: the eternal questions in a powerful way. If you are
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  Speaker 1: sick of towns and men, Brand will rather indulge your mood,
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  Speaker 1: for it speaks Ibsen's impatience with the petty ways and
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  Speaker 1: lives of average men and women. Socrates dialogues go well
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  Speaker 1: in the inner pocket, and so do Horace's odes, if
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  Speaker 1: you are of a Horatian turn of mind and can
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  Speaker 1: read them. There are many, especially in Scotland, who like
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  Speaker 1: to take a Homer and fancy themselves on the hills
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  Speaker 1: of Greece. For a classical scholar, there are many books
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  Speaker 1: of profound and lasting interest. A Plotinus will last you
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  Speaker 1: a long time, for you have not merely to read it,
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  Speaker 1: but to resurrect a being who lived centuries ago in
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  Speaker 1: a different civilization. The human heart was the same, but
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  Speaker 1: almost everything else had a difference. If the mind is
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  Speaker 1: just attracted to ancient philosophy, I know few books to
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  Speaker 1: compare with paters, Plato and Platonism. For inner worth. I
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  Speaker 1: do not, however, think his Marius a good tramping book.
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  Speaker 1: Nature rebels against its cold, chaste beauty. It needs, I think,
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  Speaker 1: a more artificial setting for its enjoyment. Few novels are
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  Speaker 1: good tramping books. One gets through the story so quickly,
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  Speaker 1: and if there is no more than story there, the
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  Speaker 1: book is finished with. Still, there are few knapsacks companions
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  Speaker 1: worth having, such as The Cloister and the Hearth John ingelsandt.
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  Speaker 1: Wilhelm Meister Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov all rather bulky. I'm
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  Speaker 1: afraid for ideas, though they keep other books thin, do
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  Speaker 1: swell the volume of a novel. A few ideas stated
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  Speaker 1: in conversation and bated with picturesque descriptions take three times
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  Speaker 1: the space they need in the essay. It is sometimes
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  Speaker 1: easier to understand them, but the expression is diffuse. Plays, however,
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  Speaker 1: come near to being ideal. They take up little space.
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  Speaker 1: The dramatist has to censor his own work vigorously, with
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  Speaker 1: a view to cutting down the excess of verbiage which
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  Speaker 1: his ideas naturally claim. He is forced into paradox an epigram.
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  Speaker 1: His work is full of hints and suggestions which are undeveloped.
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  Speaker 1: It is for you to develop them. As Gibson said,
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  Speaker 1: I asked the questions, it is for you to answer them.
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  Speaker 1: A Shakespeare play is a delightful library. I nearly always
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  Speaker 1: take one. A drama like Richard the Third or Othello
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  Speaker 1: can be read over and over again as you like it.
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  Speaker 1: And A Midsummer Night's Dream are the great open air plays.
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  Speaker 1: You learn more about them with the birds and the
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  Speaker 1: stars to teach you than with the aid of the
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  Speaker 1: most genial producer or inspired professor. You make your camp
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  Speaker 1: in a natural shelter, among the trees, or in an
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  Speaker 1: arena among the rocks. There is an audience, not altogether invisible.
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  Speaker 1: It waits, It has its programs. You have the book
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  Speaker 1: of the words and the brain full of moving figures.
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  Speaker 1: Sun and Moon are working the limelight from the wings.
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  Speaker 1: Your camp fire is the footlights. And toer Man and
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  Speaker 1: heer Hamlet, and your Julius Caesar, the gods, the ghost posts.
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  Speaker 1: The tramp becomes an ancient type, a magician, a mystagogue,
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  Speaker 1: with a Shakespeare in his hand, in the midst of
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  Speaker 1: the worlds. If modern drama arouses the fancy, you can
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  Speaker 1: take a pirandello or a shawl and thresh it out
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  Speaker 1: get a real opinion about it. It is worthwhile when
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  Speaker 1: you have to orientate your mind to certain writers of repute,
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  Speaker 1: to make yourself intimate with at least one of their works.
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  Speaker 1: I suppose some may prefer to read a book on
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  Speaker 1: the country through which they are tramping, and in that
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  Speaker 1: case a librarian's aid may be sought. There are now
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  Speaker 1: scores of volumes on almost every country in the world.
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  Speaker 1: It is as well to look over several of them
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  Speaker 1: before making a choice. Many proved to be slap dash,
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  Speaker 1: ill formed compositions. Does one take accounts of travel and
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  Speaker 1: lands other than that one is tramping in? I imagined not
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  Speaker 1: Unknown Arabia is out of place in a train through California.
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  Speaker 1: But a tramp's account of his own life is interesting
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  Speaker 1: reading anywhere, and one naturally thinks of W. H. Davies's
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  Speaker 1: autobiography in this connection. There are few tramp writers, but
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  Speaker 1: probably the best short story if Maxim Gorky's tells of
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  Speaker 1: his tramping life and is called The Fellow Traveler. Jack
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  Speaker 1: London's Valley of the Moon contains some tramping episodes. Jack London,
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  Speaker 1: Rudyard Kipling, Cunninghame, Graham Bellock, Chesterton, Carl Sandberg, Rachel Lindsay
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  Speaker 1: are all delightful writers in the tramping mood, and ask
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  Speaker 1: a place in the knapsack. Then there are Harry Franks
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  Speaker 1: untiring pedestrian tours in Patagonia, China and elsewhere, perhaps in
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  Speaker 1: too ponderous a form as yet for field use. I
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  Speaker 1: once met a tramping publisher, Rara Avis, a very black.
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  Speaker 1: He began his life as a coal porter of the
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  Speaker 1: British and Foreign Bible Society, and spent twenty years on
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  Speaker 1: the road, going from bibles to leaflets, which he printed himself,
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  Speaker 1: and thence to booklets, thence to books, and in office
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  Speaker 1: and a vast organization. He had a simple way of business.
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  Speaker 1: I handed him a manuscript, He opened a drawer and
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  Speaker 1: handed out a lot of notes, and the transaction was
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  Speaker 1: concluded without a word in writing. But I suppose that
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  Speaker 1: was unusual even in his business. There was savor of
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  Speaker 1: tramp meeting tramp. In the affair. The Bible coal porter
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  Speaker 1: ought at least to know one book, the better for
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  Speaker 1: his calling. When all is said, there is one book
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  Speaker 1: more worth taking than all the rest. Poetry, philosophy, history, fantasy, treatsy,
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  Speaker 1: novel and drama. You have all in one in the Bible,
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  Speaker 1: the inexhaustible book of books. You need not take at all.
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  Speaker 1: Take the prophecies, the psalms, the Gospel. It means much
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  Speaker 1: to tramp with one Gospel in the inner pocket of
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  Speaker 1: the coat. End of Chapter twenty Books,