Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

Product Information

Anti-democratic tendencies have been there since the beginning,” Trogdon says. “There were 19 slaves at Jamestown. But too much of our history has been covered up.” I started writing the book during Trump’s presidential campaign, when it became clear that he was bent on division,” Trogdon says. “And a division that only works if you don’t understand American history or if you have a very distorted version of it, if you’re ignorant of what slaves went through. It’s one thing to think, ‘Oh she had to work hard.’ It’s another to find out that that woman not only worked hard but she had two toes cut off and an eye blinded just to mark her. That’s our history.” I know spiritual directors, pastors, religious educators and spiritual writers for whom Blue Highways was a formative book. It felt aspirational to the spiritual quest, and in the way that Heat-Moon records simple conversations with ordinary people, it speaks with a moral conscience about what most of us miss or have always missed. He showed us how to live deeply in a place with roots, or simply how to find connections when the progress of life seems to promote only fragmentation. A Curious Interview Still later, he meets a very interesting character who has been "claimed by Jesus, a fellow "hitching for Yahweh & enrolled by Christ" as a contemporary evangelist, someone en route to El Salvador to get married but in no hurry to arrive. Oddly enough, the people Heat-Moon randomly connects with seem to represent deeply moving voices. The reason this is a problem is there is no other reason for Moon to be out where he is, having the conversations he's having other than for the purpose of the book.

Still, he wasn’t able to come out with a clear answer to Heat-Moon’s question. And then, “I was moving away from things and myself, toward concerns bigger than me and my problems, but I didn’t really find a harmony until I came here.” I felt like I understood him perfectly. I was here out of curiosity, a spiritual voyeur, an ecclesiastical window peeper. What’s more, such cloistered spirituality made me suspicious. Dubious about men who sought changelessness to release them from uncertainty and turmoil, I questioned a faith that has to be protected by illusory immutability. Every travel book is ultimately about the traveler. The act of being on the road — visiting unfamiliar places, interacting with strangers — helps to puts him in context. The journey becomes a mirror that reflects the traveler to himself, and to the readers of his travelogue. Whether or not a reader enjoys his book, therefore, hinges on whether the reader enjoys the author’s company. Those were the directions. I was looking for an unnumbered road, named after a nonexistent town, that would take me to a place called Nameless, that nobody was sure existed.” I read a recent review of Heat-Moon's new book, Road to Quoz, that mentioned how it's a shame to see how cynical he'd gotten, that he'd lost his whimsy.Religion then was of interest to me only when I met someone who could elaborate logically his views.” Trogdon’s research did not include traveling the route Trennant and Nicodemus take, but, he says, there is no place they visit that he has not. a b c Levin, Jonathan (2000). "Coordinates and Connections: Self, Language, and World in Edward Abbey and William Least Heat-Moon". Contemporary Literature. 41 (2): 214–251. doi: 10.2307/1208760. JSTOR 1208760. Tra i tanti criteri per valutare un libro il più forte è la sensazione che provi una volta girata l'ultima pagina. Se la prima cosa che ti chiedi è "e adesso?" vuol dire che quel libro ti ha un po' rivoluzionato e messo sottosopra. Potremmo dire che è proprio un bel libro.

Blue Highways and Forbes: Listed as number nine of fifteen travel books that "will change the way you see the world." [5] William Least Heat-Moon meets some interesting characters as he travels through the small towns of America. He seems to be a bit of a character himself. The entire time I'm reading this, I'm thinking "He sleeps in his van all across the US? Is that a seventies thing? Could someone do that now? What about bathing? Is that why sometimes people look at him askance? What would I think if I saw him today on this journey? Would I be a nice stranger or one of those that gave him a weird look?"

I’ve been carrying “Blue Highways” around for months, toting it with some embarrassment, the sort you feel when wearing a tasseled suede coat. It’s a product of a particular time. Yet I have been absorbed in the narrative, which now offers the same sort of hope it did readers the first time around. The personal atmosphere of loss is soon overwhelmed by the people Heat-Moon encounters, including a Trappist monk who had been for 20 years a high-profile Wall Street trader, together with another monk, a former New York City policeman, both a part of a monastic community near Conyers, Georgia causing the author to ask, "what spirit burned in those men that did not burn in me?" Heat-Moon told me, “As much as I admired the monks’ quest and almost envied the comfort it brought them, they only enlarged my consideration of their existential views.”

On some maps, highways marked in red are designated as fast-transit lanes, while "blue highways" are far slower, not always continuous roads, with limited gas stations & other services. The author's stated intent was to uncover places where "change did not mean ruin and where time & deeds connected". And in so-doing, the foreword to the book tells us, Heat-Moon hoped to have a "Nikon-level observation of the meaning of age, loss & change."Do you remember road atlases? The roadways in blue were the older roads that had been made somewhat unnecessary by the appearance of red ones, according to the maps. But it was the blue highways that connected American towns before those interstates allowed us to bypass them. Heat-Moon’s book was about not bypassing people, but truly meeting them, another very Catholic idea. Heat-Moon told me: “Probably not a life such as many people imagine. I, as do we all, come from cosmic dust which, sooner or later, will be my destination. But dust is also a temporary destination, one more way station in what may be eternal movement.” Celestial Mechanics: A Tale for a Mid-Winter Night (2017) is William Least Heat-Moon's debut novel. I have spent a lot of time at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit myself,” I explained some more. “Many monks there were friends of mine, particularly 10 or 15 years ago. One of them, Father Anthony Delisi, you also quote by name in Blue Highways. He was a character. Sicilian. I was once involved in publishing a book of his about prayer. He’s also now gone. But I can easily imagine him answering your questions in the roundabout ways that Father Duffy did.”