Language of the Land: Journeys Into Literary America
Introduction

What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing.

Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America

America is neither a land nor a people,
A word's shape it is, a wind's sweep—
America is alone: many together
Many of one mouth, of one breath.

Archibald MacLeish, "It is a Strange Thing to Be An American"

I . . . got out my book of maps. And suddenly the United States became huge beyond belief and impossible ever to cross.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

And if we keep
Our love for this American earth, black fathers,
O black mothers, believing that its fields
Will bear for us at length a harvesting
Of sun, it is because your spirits walk
Beside us as we plough; it is because
This land has grown from your great, deathless hearts.

Robert Hayden, "We Have Not Forgotten"

I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures. . . .

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it. . . .

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

From Paumanok I fly like a bird,
Around and around to soar to sing the idea of all
To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs, (they are inimitable;)
Then to Ohio and Indiana to sing theirs, to Missouri and Kansas and Arkansas to sing theirs,
To Tennessee and Kentucky, to the Carolinas and Georgia to sing theirs,
To Texas and so along up toward California, to roam accepted everywhere;
To sing first (to the tap of the war-drum if need be,)
The idea of all, of the Western world one and inseparable,
And then the song of each member of these States.

Walt Whitman, "From Paumanok Starting I Fly Like a Bird"

The woods were as still, and apparently . . . as much untenanted, as when they came fresh from the hands of their Almighty Creator. The eye could range in every direction through the long and shadowed vistas of the trees; but nowhere was any object to be seen that did not properly belong to the peaceful and slumbering scenery. . . . Across the tract of wilderness . . . it seemed as if the foot of man had never trodden, so breathing and deep was the silence in which it lay.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

I wished to see that seashore where man's works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing. . . . the roaring of the breakers, and the ceaseless flux and reflux of the waves [which] did not for a moment cease to dash and roar, with such a tumult. . . .

Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod

I had never been away from home, and that word "travel" had a seductive charm for me. . . . I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri River.

Mark Twain, Roughing It

I drove into the street, around the corner, through the intersection, over the bridge, onto the highway. I was heading toward those little towns that get on the map if they get on at all -- only because some cartographer has a blank space to fill: Remote, Oregon; Simplicity, Virginia; New Freedom, Pennsylvania; New Hope, Tennessee; Why, Arizona; Whynot, Mississippi; Igo, California (just down the road from Ono), here I come.

William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways