The journey took about a week each way, and each day had my parents both in its grip. Riding behind my father, I could see that the road had him by the shoulders, by the hair under his driving cap. It took my mother to make him stop. I inherited his nervous energy in the way I can't stop writing on a story. It makes me understand how Ohio had him around the heart, as West Virginia had my mother. Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations. And all the time that we think we're getting there so fast, how slowly we do move.
Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom__e all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you__e a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can__ go anywhere if you can__ step out onto a road_(T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it__ not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people__ ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable.
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Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom__e all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you__e a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can__ go anywhere if you can__ step out onto a road_(T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it__ not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people__ ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable.
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