Take The Slow Journey
Gerald Murnane, Australian novelist,
and my old Fiction-Writing Professor of Literature,
used to say to us, his students of writing:
'An American Indian Chief had it that
'If you travel faster than a horse can
gallop, you leave your soul behind."
So, we, the adults in our troupe.
at least some of us, read up ahead, took
books with us, and read, and borrowed
and bought books and maps old and new,
histories, biographies, natural histories
memoirs, and we museumed our way, and asked
of all we could who had stories to tell.
And for this one reason and another (poverty)
we did not travel faster than we could read.
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