Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to this week's episode of listening to America.

I'm in Bar Harbor, Maine. I'm now in week three, just beginning week three of the great John Steinbeck Travels of Charlie tour.

Steinbeck said at the beginning of Travels of Charlie, we do not take a trip, a trip takes

us. That certainly is the case, so I've been out for 14 full days, but the first

nine at least were to get to the starting point at Saag Harbor. I got to Saag Harbor and touch

base there and had a wonderful tour of the grounds and his writing shack, Joyous Guard.

It was amazing. Thanks to Catherine of Canio's bookstore in Sagg Harbor.

Then to do this right, you have to take the ferry three times,

which I did from Sagg Harbor, bounce, bounce, and then a long bounce across Long Island Sound to New London, Connecticut.

I did that with the rig. It was a little apprehensive, I will say.

And then went to Caroak grave which was not on Steinbeck's trip and I went to

Walden Pond which was not on Steinbeck's trip. I'm going to do things that Steinbeck

didn't do because I'm fascinated and I'm on this journey and it's somehow,

although it's focused on Steinbeck for whom I have the greatest respect, it's bigger than that. I mean, this is a chance for me to really see amazing places in America and so I intend to do it. Anyway, I had a great time at Walden, just spiritual, just amazing. And the Carebox Grave, you know, I love on the road. It's a book I've read and there are a handful of books I read every couple of years at least.

Gulliver's Travels is one of them. Huckleberry Finn is one of them.

Dickens' great expectations is one of them, Jane Austin's

sense and sensibility is one of them, Dickens' Pickwick Papers is one of them,

Hamlet is one of them, the Iliad is one of them, there are more I suppose but those come to mind but I read Walden at least

once a year and sometimes more and there was something in the middle ages called Virgilian

Sortes. What it meant was this that you could take a copy of Virgil's Ane, he wrote the great epic of Rome. You could take a copy of Virgil's Aneid, and open it at random, and put your finger at random on a passage passage and it would speak to you that you would then read it, think about it, meditate about it, absorb it, and interpret it, and that your interpretation may vary from time to time and veer from what the poet Virgil intended but

that's not necessarily the point the point is that that certain books are so

filled with extraordinary insights and provocative and challenging questions that whenever you turn to them at any point in your life in any mood

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