I’ve been rereading some Abbey and Thoreau in the process of writing Honors curricula for some of the high school students. I also got a copy of Craig Childs latest last night, House of Rain. (See here for a peak.)

He’s an exceptional author; when I first read The Secret Knowledge of Water I was blown away. Not only by the writing, but by the perspective from which he was working. His erudition makes him an academic, and yet he was living out of his truck, wandering through the deserts of the Southwest to study and sleep under a sheet.

Today’s academic model is too much in the mold of a Mark, living intellectual lives in a basement library, or a Kant, whose walks around Konigsberg were regular to the extent that housewives (reputedly) used them to set clocks. It easy to forget that Socrates spent his last hours with his wife and family, his groupies allowed back in only for the drinking itself. Or that Aristotle discovered and documented a fish living deep in the Adriatic that was only redocumented in the later half of the twentieth century. The life of the mind used to demand a rich life of the body. I suppose we can always blame Descartes.

Child’s reflections capture both. I believe that his work, like Abbey’s, has far more academic and philosophical merit than most academic readers recognize (it hides behind it’s readability). When Childs writes

Fire could free the words in my notebook just like this knife could free me. If I were to cut my tongue, I thought, sever it completely, then I would silence the weakness of my voice. Without my tongue I would never speak, never try to reduce this landscape to something conceivable. I would close off this avenue of escape from the desert, becoming even more a creature of the land.

he is making plain the link between the personal and the metaphysical, while hinting at the problematic relationship between the two. Abbey’s succinct words on this subject are the inspiration for this blog. As are Thoreau’s: “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

All of which is to say that I feel the need, increasingly, to get out. I see graphs like this and think of wet and sandy feet, and am nostalgic.

A weekend trip is in the works. Solo monsoon, the heat and the rain, the Grand Canyon in the beginning of August?! I think so.