Outer Dark - Cormac McCarthy

The circumstances we are born into are beyond our control. While human life issues from a darkness, for some the world itself is a type of outer dark. What narrative we create out of our lives is of our own making - largely meaningless. McCarthy's story, resembling a parable, ends with a road that leads nowhere, save a tangled way.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

This time through, the story strikes me for its unity of journeys: how the narrator's intellectual journey is mirrored and given color by the landscape he moves through, by the experiences between he and Chris, by the way concepts are unified with the person. So landscape (of the world and mind), concepts, and interpersonal relationships merge into a story of the person. Perhaps that is meant to be Pirsig's synthesis. I have read the work enough that it serves as a reminder and cause for reflection on how I have changed. It remains an aspirational work to engender a hoped-for unity of work, person, and understanding. That such a path is useful, and such an outcome possible, is comforting.

From a 1974 interview with Pirsig, "The goal is just to live your life without too much fuss about it."

The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen

"Have you seen the Snow Leopard?"
"No! Isn't that wonderful."

On this re-reading, what jumps out to me most are the aspects of zen and how that can interweave with journeys mental, physical, geographic, and emotional. Matthiessen and Schaller's journey with their sherpas and porters into the Dolpo(a) region of Nepal are a reminder of the space for adventure in this world and that travel and exploration can (also) be ways of turning inwards. Peace of mind, as Pirsig reminds us, is not attained at the mountain, nor is it given by the mountain. It is either brought with us to the mountain or cannot be achieved at all. In striving we hope to learn that all we really needed was right here all along. Everything is already present, as it has ever been.

"Better tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow--it's quite enough!"

High Fidelity - Nick Hornby

Back with Rob, Dick, and Barry. This time I was struck by the parallels between Rob's life - recently adrift at the age of 35 - and my own. While these three always felt like contemporaries, only as I have gotten older can I begin to understand the creeping germs of hopelessness that come with age. It helps make sense of Barry's motivation to join his 'hip young gunslingers,' and Dick's monomania for new music. Rob looks around his apartment, his store, and his emotional life and begins to recognize a dustiness; a clutter to things that have been kept too long. Laura recognizes his inability to put one foot in front of the other and how the comfort of routine simultaneously keeps him grounded and unhappy. Rob's revisiting of his top-five, desert-island, most memorable split ups (in chronological order) are a rare case where his dwelling on the past actually catalyzes his freedom from it. Throughout the book Laura is really the only catalytic force. She moves Rob to confront himself and in doing so the possibility that they might have a life together. Laura is movement and action; Rob, Dick, and Barry are comfort and routine. Our lives need both.