What Is Truth?

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies FLEETWOOD MAC

According to a piece in last Saturday's Guardian, John Steinbeck's classic travelogue Travels With Charley is no factually accurate report of his famous road trip. (I'll remind you that, in this incredibly popular memoir from the early 1960s, Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley make a 10,000 mile odyssey round the US, romantically roughing it in a camper truck he names after Don Quixote's horse Rosinante.) It's now been shown that Steinbeck's narrative is completely unreliable. The van is driven on an artistic licence; the story is peppered with 'creative fictions'. Just one example: although Steinbeck makes out the trip was a solo voyage, it seems he was almost never alone. Indeed, half the time he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine, and for much of the trip stayed at luxury motels or parked up on friends' properties. He even spent one week on a cattle ranch owned by a Texan millionaire. Steinbeck spins such a good tale. You feel you're right there beside him and Charley, cooking your beans with them on a campfire under the stars. So do these embellishments, these omissions, these flirtations on the borderline between truth and fantasy, really matter?

This kind of authorial malleability is nothing new, of course. Writers have always been prone to embroider the truth in their autobiographies. Thoreau, for instance, somehow neglected to mention in Walden that his self-sufficient, hermit-style sojourn in the woods was enlivened by regular visitors, frequent excursions to the nearby village, boxes of food sent weekly by his mother or sister, and yet more emergency parcels regularly delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife. In A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway led us to believe he was living in Paris almost as a down-and-out - but this was in fact far from the case. Lillian Hellman's memoirs are notorious for their cobweb of 'factual errors' (I put it politely). And, quite recently, James Frey was exposed as being 'economical with the truth', to say the very least, in his drug-addled memoir A Million Little Pieces. But should we care about any of this too much - as long as the account's a good one, and well written, and keeps us enthralled?

Miracles, And The Glory Of The Commonplace

In 1855 an unknown American journalist, Walt Whitman, printed himself by hand (he couldn't find a publisher) a little book of 12 poems entitled Leaves Of Grass. It took America by storm. Some readers, like the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, loved it; others loathed it. Its form, its subject matter, its language - every aspect was quite unlike any other poetry that had gone before. Free verse had arrived and come to stay. Each new edition of Leaves Of Grass contained new poems until there were nearly 400 in the collection. This poem from Leaves Of Grass called Miracles is also contained in The Golden Treasury Of Poetry:

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim - the rocks - the motion of the waves - the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

For Whitman nothing was insignificant. In his poetry he witnessed and celebrated what he termed the glory of the commonplace. Some of my favourite blogs - such as Beating The Bounds, The Weaver Of Grass and Riverdaze - also attempt to do this; that is, they document and celebrate the "everyday" details of life in their own backyards (though what backyards - Morecambe Bay, the Yorkshire Dales and a river in Ohio!) Somehow, in describing day by day these local, backyard "miracles", these "miracles" are constantly being refreshed and renewed. The magical acts of writing about (and photographing) these daily "miracles" ensure they are remembered; in some miraculous way they become part of a world consciousness.

There are miracles all around us. We only have to step back occasionally from our busy, humdrum lives of deadline and routine, slow down for just a few minutes, control our breathing so that our breath is regular and even, and look...

Morning Mist

Emerson and nature philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) were both Transcendentalists and big mates in Concord, Massachusetts in mid-19th century New England. I've written before about Thoreau here. There's a charming little book I possess, Morning Mist: Thoreau and Basho Through The Seasons, published by Weatherhill of New York, which points out the similarities in outlook between Thoreau and the 17th century Japanese haiku poet, Matsuo Basho. These are some extracts from it. I hope you enjoy.

My solitude shall be my company/ and my poverty, my wealth. Basho

I never found the companion that was as companionable as solitude... Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Thoreau

A good house -/ sparrows delight in the millet/ behind the back door. Basho

Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks...to pick a dinner out of my woodpile or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass. Thoreau

At my hut/ all I can offer/ is that the mosquitoes are small. Basho

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it... flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters. These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or... the most expensive furniture. Thoreau

The bush warbler -/beyond the willow,/before the grove. Basho

I hear the bluebirds... the blue curls of their warblings thawing the torpid mass of winter - assisting the ice and snow to melt and the streams to flow. Thoreau

I am like a sick man tired of people, or someone weary of the world. What is there to say?... A morning glory/on the fence of my gate,/shut all day. Basho

I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what will I do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons? Thoreau

"Employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons..." I could think of many worse occupations...

The Sacred Integrity Of The Mind

From the Introduction to my Ward Lock edition of Emerson's Complete Prose Works: He [Emerson] was a moral and intellectual preacher for a free platform. His soul, imbibing the lessons of the ages, in communion with the springs of Nature, fervently sympathising with the aspirations of his fellow men, spoke with electric effect to his hearers as they hung on his utterances. The trammels of ecclesiastical systems, the crystallisations of formal creeds, the limitations of outward observances, of time honoured expressions he threw off, and sought truths in which all men can unite. It was not because he lacked firm convictions, or thought one sect or party as good as another, but because he felt that truth was beyond party or church, that he spoke in favour of unity of heart among men of all religions. The utter foe of slavery, white and black, the simplifier of religious ideas, the awakener and quickener of intellectual and moral life among young men, the idealist in a world continually dragged down by the material, Emerson was an inspiring seer of the highest value to his time and country. His legacy to the world is not a system, not a creed, not an observance, but a stimulus, an impulse to a perfect life.

An egalitarian, he believed that every one had a store of riches within: The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.

And that the genius and the ordinary person are connected far more closely than any deferential, class-bound, hierarchical society would have us think: In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Finally - and taken from his essay Self-Reliance once again - Emerson champions independent thought and nonconformity: Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Travelling: A Fool's Paradise?

I've been thinking about the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) ever since Cameron McNeish mentioned him in his podcast recently and I myself quoted from him in Thursday's post. I don't suppose many people apart from PhD students or biography writers read him from cover to cover these days. Indeed, it's a concentrated and time consuming task. My own second-hand edition of The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published by Ward Lock of London, runs to 656 pages of minutely typefaced, densely packed text. Yet how rewarding it is to dip into these wise and inspiring essays. Every time I do so I leave with rich rewards. We tend to think it's a given that travel must broaden the mind, that it's beneficial for its own sake. How refreshingly provoking it is to see Emerson giving an alternative view:

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

This comes from Emerson's great essay, Self-Reliance.

Surely Bob Dylan had read this essay before writing his song, Trust Yourself, for the 3rd paragraph begins: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

French Leaves

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

My photo was taken in France last year when I walked the pilgrim path of the Way Of Saint James. It shows autumn trees and volcanic rock near Belvezet on the descent from the Aubrac plateau to Saint-Chély and the wooded valley of the river Lot.