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# 2023-09-07 - The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham
I found this book in the Gutenberg new books feed. I am curious
about the practical aspects of living outdoors, such as how to deal
with prolonged precipitation. This book is about half pragmatic
suggestions and half poetic philosophy. I felt delighted to discover
this better half and recognized a kindred spirit in the author. I
found his biography, which was published in 2014, and would like to
read it some day.
(HTM) Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham
Below are interesting excerpts from the book.
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It is a gentle art; know how to tramp and you know how to live.
Manners makyth man, and tramping makyth manners. Know how to meet
your fellow wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of Nature and
how to be active to its wildness and its rigor. Tramping brings one
to reality.
If you would have a portrait of [a human being]... most fittingly
you will show [them] with staff in hand and burden on [their]
shoulders, striving onward from light to darkness upon an upward
road, shading [their] eyes with [their] hand as [they seek their]
way. You will show a figure something like that posthumous picture of
Tolstoy, called "Tolstoy pilgrimaging toward eternity."
So when you put on your old clothes and take to the road, you make at
least a right gesture. You get into your right place in the world in
the right way. Even if your tramping expedition is a mere jest, a
jaunt, a spree, you are apt to feel the benefits of getting into a
right relation toward God, Nature, and your fellow... You get into
an air that is refreshing and free. You liberate yourself from the
tacit assumption of your everyday life.
The tramp is a friend of society; [they are] a seeker, [they pay
their] way if [they] can. One includes in the category "tramp" all
true Bohemians, pilgrims, explorers afoot, walking tourists, and the
like. ... There is much to learn, there are illusions to be overcome.
There are prejudices and habits to be shaken off.
First of all there is the physical side: you need to study equipment,
care of health, how to sleep out of doors, what to eat... These
things you teach yourself. For the rest Nature becomes your teacher,
and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and
what is your special quest in life and whither you should go. You
relax in the presence of the great healer and teacher, you turn your
back on civilization and most of what you learned in schools...
# Chapter 4: Clothes
The privilege of the Court Fool is that [they] can tell the plain
ordinary truth to the King, even with the executioner standing by, ax
in hand, and risk not [their] head. But [they] must be wearing
[their] cap and bells. Let [them] come but dressed as a courtier and
make the same painful jest, and the [executioner] will step forth to
relieve [them of their] poor-quality thinking piece.
Class is the most disgusting institution of civilization, because it
puts barriers between [individuals]. The [person] from the
first-class cabin cannot make [theirself] at home in the steerage.
[They] can have conversations with [their] fellow ... down there, but
the fellow ... will be standing to attention like private in presence
of officer, or standing defiant like prisoner in presence of a
condemnatory court. It is not the fault of the bottom dog, the
proletarian. [They scent] a manner. Your bearing cannot be adjusted
to equality. You are not on the level with [them]. You cannot rid
your voice of its kind note. [In other words, you cannot easily
give up your privilege.]
But in the tramps' motley you can say what you like, ask what
questions you like, free from the taint of class.
It also puts you right with regard to yourself. You see yourself as
others see you, and that is a refreshing grace wafted in upon an
opinionated mind. The freedom of speech and action and judgment which
it gives you will breed that boldness of bearing which, after all, is
better than mere good manners.
# Chapter 5: Carrying Money
The less [money] you carry the more you will see, the less you spend
the more you will experience.
Tramping is first of all a rebellion against housekeeping and daily
and monthly accounts. You may escape from the spending mania, but
first of all you escape from the inhibition, that is the word, the
inhibition of needing to earn a living. In tramping you are not
earning a living, but earning a happiness.
# Chapter 6: The Companion
An ideal companion is ideal. However, we all know that companionship
prolonged may be trying even to good friends. If you live for some
time in the same room with any one you discover that fact.
But there is perhaps no greater test of friendship than going on a
long tramp. You discover to one another all the egoisms and
selfishnesses you possess. You may not see your own: you see your
companion's faults. In truth, if you want to find out about a
[person], go for a long tramp with [them].
If you do not quarrel irreparably and part on the road you will
probably find your friendship greatly increased by the experience of
the wilds together.
The richest people in life are the good listeners. If, however, you
also must talk, must reveal your life, your heart, your prejudices
and passions, it will often happen that you will express yourself to
yourself, as much as to your friend. Self-confession is growth of the
mind, an enriching of the consciousness. In talk which seems idle
enough you may be reaching out toward the infinite.
The best companions are those who make you freest. They teach you the
art of life by their readiness to accommodate themselves.
Of course, one should carry a notebook or diary or some
broad-margined volume of poems. ... you are enriching yourself
enormously by what you can write about.
It is an ideal way to begin life. For tramping is the grammar of
living. Few people learn the grammar--but it is worth while.
On the road the weak and strong points of character are revealed.
The road shows sturdiness, resourcefulness, pluck, patience, energy,
vitality, or per contra, the lack of these things.
# Chapter 8: The Art of Idleness
The virtue to be envied in tramping is that of being able to live by
the way. In that indeed does the gentle art of tramping consist. If
you do not live by the way, there is nothing gentle about it. ...
Life is like a road; you hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is
no grand crescendo from hour to hour, day to day, year to year;
life's quality is in moments, not in distance run.
You can enter a wider family if you are gentle.
Pan is indeed more truly our god than Diana. ... We will keep company
with wood nymphs and satyrs, and will help to turn the animals
another way when we hear Diana's horn resounding in the forest. She
shall go on and find the world a wilderness in front of her--the
living and the loving all slipping behind.
Nature unfolds herself slowly like a snail if you are still in front
of her. You cannot know what you are walking over till you cease
walking. [Be here now.]
It means a change in the condition of passivity. You are at home to
fairies and fancies and to the spider of happiness who spins golden
webs. It is a fallacy to think that during the siesta you do not
tramp; you are tramping, wandering in unknown parts, exploring the
primitive, opening doors, making new connections with the great unity
of which you have been a nonconscious part.
You look upon your companion still sleeping--did you ever look upon
your friend asleep--not in a bed in a hotel, or on a red sofa after
dinner, or in the dim corner of a jolting train--but in Nature's
house? There you will feel [them] nearer, more of a friend, more
kindred. The same wood sprites have hopped on you both while you
slumbered and dreamed.
Things happen hors de programme which we could never put into our
program. That is why programs of coming life should be of the most
general character, none of that "to-day I brew, to-morrow I bake"
type of miscalculation. "To-day I do not know what I shall do;
to-morrow I know less" is better.
You will discern that going tramping is at first an act of rebellion;
only afterwards do you get free from rebelliousness as Nature
sweetens your mind. ... The worship of time as a reality is such a
powerful superstition that the mind returns to it often after it has
got free.
# Chapter 9: Emblems of Tramping
There is the narrow way of the Puritans, a passage between walls of
righteousness; there is the broad way of the epicureans, so broad
they mistake the breadth for the length and lose themselves on it.
But, broad or narrow, the road seems inadequate as an emblem of the
tramping life. There shall be roads in our life but our life shall
not be always in roads.
Even the crookedest road is sometimes too straight. You learn that it
is artificial, that originally it was not made for mere tramping.
Roads were made for armies and then for slaves and laborers, and for
"transport." Few have been made for pleasure.
The road suggests God as a taskmaster who would have us work; the
river suggests [God] as a poet who would have us live in poetry.
When we wash in the stream we are washing ourselves with life. When
we swim in the stream, especially against the stream, we are joying
the heart of an unseen Mother who takes pride in us all, knowing
that, although we must at last flow out with the stream, we can
triumph over it for moments.
The starry sky is the emblem of home, the highest roof in the
universe. The sun is the mind, by whose light [humanity] seeks
[their] way; the moon is the reflection of the mind on the heart, and
is the emblem of melancholy and poetry.
# Chapter 12: The Dip
Coldness of the water is a prejudice. The coldest dip in the sea is
easier to take than the ordinary cold bath in a cramped bathroom. The
immediate activity of the body conquers the cold. In a bathroom most
people have to be painfully passive.
You scoop a coffeepot full of water from the same pool wherein you
bathe. You see the coffeepot standing on the bank like a faithful
bird awaiting your return from the water. Mother-naked, you plunge
and strive and indulge in various forms of joyous excess. The gray
dawn sky above is gentle as loving eyes. The blue smoke of your fire
has lost itself and plays with the morning air as you do with the
water.
After that, still dripping, you carry the coffeepot to the fire. You
dry as you walk.
The next item in the program may be the morning wash. You can wash
out a shirt, a pair of socks, a towel, the sugar bag, what you will,
and dry them as the morning sun warms up. This is a necessary matter
now and then.
But it is not only at dawn that one bathes. Any good stream or pool
at any time is a good pretext for a dip.
The evening swim, too, is a pleasure, taking the tiredness out of
your limbs and adding to the happiness of your relaxation when,
later, you lie with your blanket over you under the stars.
The spirit of the water has found place in the bosom of the
wanderer.
# Chapter 14: Marching Songs
[Humanity] is a singing animal, but civilization has silenced many
songs.
We so dislike random singing that we pay street musicians--to go away,
and they have learned that bad singing brings more coppers than their
better efforts.
Light-heartedness begets song. We sing as we walk, we walk as we
sing, and the kilometers fall behind. After a long spell of the
forced habit of not singing one finds oneself accidentally singing,
and there is surprise.
A slightly different temperament achieves the same happiness reciting
poetry... Songs heard are sweet, but the unheard may be sweeter.
# Chapter 15: Scrounging
One might call it by a better name; it means getting a meal for
nothing when you can. A good deal depends on your appearance.
One should endeavor to give something in return--not money--where
hospitality has been found, and so help to restore a good thing in
the world.
By one's manners, by one's talk, by a little memento or token here
and there, one pays for hospitality received. In return for
hospitality of the body--food or lodging, one should always give
hospitality of the mind or spirit, sympathy, fellow feeling,
bonhomie, a readiness to be at the disposal of your host.
The best fun is, however, amid the wild fruit, the berries, the
grapes, the plums. One lives on the kindly fruits of the earth. You
come on a hillside rusty-brown with little strawberries, and only the
birds to share them with you. One spends hours grazing on
strawberries. Wild grapes, too, one eats with the mouth from the vine
without picking them.
# Chapter 16: Seeking Shelter
You find, however, that it is more cold in a ruined or empty house
than in the open. The less ruined the house, the more cold. ... The
best place is to open the front or the back door and lie down to
sleep on the threshold, looking out upon the free spacious
rain-drenched open-air world.
# Chapter 17: The Open
The tramping life is not in caves and huts and holes and inns, but in
the open. The life opens us with its very breadth. It is not the air
alone that cures and fills, but what you breathe in with the air. You
breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the wideness of the
sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a [person] big, it
builds a [person from] within.
# Chapter 18: Tramp As Cook
[The author writes that when cooking, it is important to begin with
love!]
I feel this is also true of the most of cooking. You must bring a
loving heart to the primus or the camp fire. No soured personality
can be trusted to stir the beans, far less make the coffee. I have
not examined the psychology of good cooks, but I imagine few of them
are bitter, few of them are egoists.
# Chapter 20: Books
The tramp's library is limited, for books are heavy. It is best to
tramp with one book only. But it is a missed opportunity not to have
one book. For you can gain an intimacy with a book and an author in
that way, which it is difficult to obtain in a library or in the
midst of the rush of the books of the season.
It is good to have a book that is full of meat, one with broad
margins for scribblings and extra pages for thoughts, poems,
thumb-nail sketches. After a long tramp it is nice to see a book
which has been clothed with pencilings. It records in a way the
spiritual life of the adventure, and will recall it to you when in
later years you turn over the page again.
An ideal book to carry on a tramping expedition is undoubtedly an
anthology of your own compiling, a notebook filled with your favorite
verses.
Few novels are good tramping books. One gets through the story so
quickly, and if there is no more than story there, the book is
finished with.
Plays, however, come near to being ideal. They take up little space.
When all is said, there is one book more worth taking than all the
rest; poetry, philosophy, history, fantasy, treatise, novel, and
drama, you have all in one in the Bible, the inexhaustible book of
books. You need not take it all, take the prophecies, the Psalms, the
Gospels. It means much to tramp with one Gospel in the inner pocket
of the coat.
# Chapter 21: Long Halts
It is part of a true tramping jaunt to come back from Nature to man,
not of need to civilization, but to men and women and children. The
village children will prove as near to the wanderer's heart as the
birds in the woods--nearer, for they are wood fairies incarnate,
trapped on the edge of the forest and made to live human lives in the
villages.
Here is opportunity for learning new ways of life and new stories and
songs.
# Chapter 22: Foreigners
To the majority of [the English,] foreigners are dirty foreigners,
though, of course, to Americans, one concedes the name cousin. But
when you travel about in the world you soon find that in other
countries we also are foreigners, perhaps even "dirty foreigners."
The language difficulty is enormous. Even if we learn to speak a
foreign tongue, we are liable to make mistakes and to have a queer
accent.
Almost every variation in ways of eating is distasteful.
The tramp, the wanderer in strange lands, should at least get over
this.
There are genial sympathetic souls who have an aptitude for taking a
stranger at once to the heart. They are bright-eyed people, friendly
at once and friendly for a long while. I have a prejudice in their
favor--but, alas, there are not very many of them. ... I believe the
affectionate people take the most blows in life. But also they get
the greater rewards.
# Chapter 23: The Artist's Notebook
Self-expression is life. What gives more satisfaction to one's being
than to have expressed oneself. One builds a house and expresses
[themself], another writes a poem and expresses [themself], another
begets a large family and expresses [themself]--and looking back,
they can say "Vixi": "I have lived."
We were given the world to play with, as blocks with letters on are
given to children, for play and--for expression. The whole object of
the world is to help us to say a few words about ourselves. I think
it is Novalis says: "The world--all nature--is an encyclopædical
index of our own souls." If you would read the cypher of your soul
you must use the cypher key of Nature. If you would learn and read
the language of the heart, the world, the visible universe, shall be
your dictionary.
Why do we stare at beautiful things? Perhaps we are not using our
eyes at all. We are listening. Nature is trying to tell us something;
she is speaking to us on a long-distance wave.
Your mind is haunted. You have forgotten something, and the flower is
trying to tell you. It is reminding you of a forgotten air. Something
you cannot quite hear, cannot quite make out.
So with all our hilarity, our joyous meetings, our madcap doings,
with all the fun of the tramping expedition there is the deeper
interest underlying all. Most people will make the tramp without one
conscious deeper thought. It does not matter. Their nature is getting
something intuitively, although the mind has no knowledge of it.
The intuitive understanding rises slowly to the mind, like light
traveling from a distant planet to this earth. But you get it at last
and see.
For it is a measure of hidden honey that is being stored, and you are
seldom allowed by Nature to eat of your own store day by day.
The true beehive of inner experience is in you, and yet, of course,
there are what may be called auxiliary beehives. I believe the
conscious experience of a tramp can be greatly increased in a
pleasurable way by the use of notebooks.
Certain happenings make a day worth while and perhaps forever
memorable to you.
The artist's daybook is [their] own living gospel--something coming
after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--and should be sacred to [them].
Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. "Oh child, do you
see yourself to-day?"
The personal diary, however, that daybook of the soul, is not meant
for other gaze.
It is in description that the keeper of a diary becomes artist. All
description is art, and in describing an event, an action or a being,
you enter to some extent into the joy of art.
author: Graham, Stephen, 1884-1975
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title: The Gentle Art of Tramping
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