Рецензия на книгу

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  sergeybp22 декабря 2020 г.

  Путешествие как способ задуматься о жизни

  Впервые прочитал эту книгу пол жизни назад. Даже на тот момент много чего изменилось в Америке с 1960-го, когда Джон Стейнбек совершил свое путешествие. А что уж говорить о 2020-м? Но это лишний раз подчеркивает, что настоящие книги, даже в жанре путевых записок, это не о новых местах, а о взгляде на мир вокруг нас.
  Много чего поменялось в Америке и в мире с тех пор - какие-то проблемы перестали существовать, вместо них появились новые, но не поменялись общечеловеческие ценности, и для меня эта книга - возможность взглянуть на мир и людей и задуматься над жизнью вместе с Автором.

  (Написал и вспомнил, как три года назад в одиночку путешествовал по Ликийской тропе в Турции. Это опыт, который сделал меня ближе к себе самому!)

  Несколько цитат себе на память (которые, кстати, я неоднократно вспоминал все эти годы!)

  The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

  I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.

  The actual time on the way from Chicago was short, but the overwhelming size and variety of the land, the many incidents and people along the way, had stretched time out of all bearing. For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events to give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.

  I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

  We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

  Рецепт кофе повторить: I went into my house and set coffee to cooking <...> I doubled the dosage, two heaping tablespoons of coffee to each cup and two heaping for the pot. I cracked an egg and cupped out the yolk and dropped white and shells into the pot, for I know nothing that polishes coffee and makes it shine like that. The air was still very cold and a cold night was coming, so that the brew, rising from cold water to a rolling boil, gave the good smell that competes successfully with other good smells.

  In the beginning of this record I tried to explore the nature of journeys, how they are things in themselves, each one an individual and no two alike. I speculated with a kind of wonder <...> that people don’t take trips—trips take people. <...> Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

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