Stephen Graham

“ In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the origins of joy and pain—deep down at the heart’s core, the place from which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical shore.
Belike you have a child’s happiness into which you are unwilling to probe. You ask not whether it is more in one thing than in another. You tramp and you are happy, and halt and you are happy. ”

“ When we returned to Kingston there was a lonely but lovely walk along Thames side, seeking a bridge to give us a turning on the left, with sun and wind and rain, and ducks falling through the air with a ssh, and cunning swans sailing forward expecting food, and crying gulls. It was the towing path toward Teddington Lock. The riverside houses came down to the water with lawns and landing stages, terraces, gardens, formal beauties. The Thames is a fair stream; we have made it fair. Once it was otherwise, and England also—unnamed, unloved, wild, woody, marshy. Man has made it dear unto himself. ”

“ The road is the simplest of these emblems—with its milestones for years, its direction posts to show you the way, its inns for feasting, its churches for prayer, its crossroads of destiny, its happy corners of love and meeting, its sad ones of bereavement and farewell; its backward vista of memory, its forward one of hope.
Life certainly is like a road, or a network of roads; like a highway for some, like a pleasant country road for others, like a crooked lane for some, like a path that bends back to its beginnings for most. ”

“ You shall sing by the camp fire in the morning, and sing as you dip in the stream, sing as you climb the rugged mountain road, sing yourself to noontide and the pass, like a lark rising upward in sheer joy of living. You shall sing of home as you descend in the afternoon, and sing in the dark under the night sky by your fading fire. What is a tramping day if it does not liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky. ”

“ Your fire, in any case, has been getting hotter and hotter. You have not noticed that it is beginning to scorch your clothes and your wraps.
That is the way of drying off. It suits all weathers. But if, while you are engaged upon it, the sun breaks forth, promising natural heat, you may relax your energies from the fireside and place your hopes on the morning warmth. Nothing is more delightful than the sun bath after rain. You enjoy it, your clothes enjoy it, blanket enjoys it, knapsack enjoys it, coffee enjoys it. ”

“ The imagination wishes to be stirred with the romance of places, and is stirred. In a great city like London or New York, even though living there, certainly I for one am homesick; not for a home and an armchair, but for a rolling road and a stout pair of boots, and my own stick fire by the roadside at dawn, and the old pot which is slow to boil. ”

“ For these, and for other reasons, the artist’s notebook, the diary, the common- and uncommonplace book, the daybook of the soul are to be placed as part of the equipment of life, when faring forth, be it on pilgrimage, be it on tramp, or be it merely on the common round of daily life. Every entry is a shade of self-confession, and the whole when duly entered is a passage of self-knowledge. ”

“ It is a different matter to come from an hotel bed out to the margin of the mere and wade into early morning loveliness. That is good, but it is not the best. You miss the continuity of experience. A night with the moon and wild flowers, with fleeting clouds and seeming-fleeting stars, with cool and warm airs wandering, with wood whispers and the nightingale’s song, has its fitting envoi in twenty minutes’ plashing after dawn. Nature learns that the tramp is awake. ”

“ A night of murmurings and deepening shadows and freshness, and then, perhaps, of a gentle rain before dawn, and of glimmerings of new day and sweetness of wild flowers and birds’ songs before sunrise. You watch the boles of the great trees grow into stateliness in the twilight, and the night is over. With an arm round your fair one you go to the point where in orange and scarlet the great friend of all the living is lifting himself once more out of the east to show us the way of life. ”

“ It makes a man big, it builds a man within.
The lark sings as it rises, conquering the world; it is sheer joy in the open which causes that sweet bird breast to heave in music far in the heavens above. And as we rise, and the earth in its grandeur falls away to right and left, our being heaves in a life which is joy. Ours is a bird’s happiness.
It is a joyous moment which delivers us from the control of a narrow gorge. We wind in and out of the shadow of great rocks. Enormous cliffs hang over the way. I think, for instance, of the great gorge of Dariel in the Caucasus. ”

“ He listens for no morning hooter; he boils his eggs without a measure of sliding sand; he punches no time clock when he begins his day’s tramp, and at the end the last trump shall catch him unawares—an irrelevancy.
The most profound philosophers have been engaged for any number of years trying to explain time, and they are all agreed that it is an illusion. The universe would go on existing if all human beings were destroyed, but what we call “time” would not. Time, they are assured, must be relative. The little beetle which we tread upon feels a pang as great as when a giant dies. ”

“ Only morning is apt to be at five, and then the world is even more all right than at the bourgeois hour of seven.
The good tramp does not spend too long, however, by his morning fire. It is his best time for being on the move. All Nature’s loveliness awaits him as, with gossamer in his hair, and light burden on heart and shoulder, he fares forth for the day. He makes his coffee, and then carefully puts out the fire, so as to be sure not to start some conflagration on the waste or in the forest. ”

“ And then, of course, a village is not merely a village, not merely the broad and rutted roads and the cottages planted among the pigs and fowls. The village has its ways out, its views, its hillsides and streams, its loveliness on all sides. Your long halt is not a sitting still in a human settlement, but a starwise tour of all the country round about.
Going on and on in a line of route has its drawbacks. The world is not a straight line, not even a crooked line, not even the line of a [Pg 193] man’s steps upon it—it is an area, a broad surface. ”

“ The third emblem of life is the wilderness—that place to which wise men and poets and [Pg 94] saints are driven in the last resort. “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” wrote Byron. “There is society where none intrudes.” The wilderness tells you more, when you are attune to it. That is seldom the experience of the tramp on his first long divagation from the beaten track. The wilderness tires him, the forests blind him, the mountains wear him down, the endless plain rises under him and he smites his feet. ”

“ 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.
Fallen trees are to be sat on, laddered trees to climb, flowers to be picked, nests to be [Pg 80] looked into, song birds to hear, falcons to be watched. The river invites you to strip. You sit under the cascade in the noontide; you climb into caves to cool and dry. The green roof of the mole’s track is to be followed till you find the gentleman in velvet in his home. ”

“ 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. It allows you to walk on your heels as well as on your toes, and to eat without a finicking assortment of forks. ”

“ There are those who sing all poetry and call recitation singing. They incant and intone as they tramp. They are lifted up in an ecstasy which makes them independent of physical tiredness or difficulties or meannesses or past misfortunes or ill-treatment. Song and poetry enfranchise you in the universe. The tramp for moments becomes citizen of the universe and knows all secrets, all mysteries, all depths, all heights. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other side of the hedge that skirts the public way is an entirely different atmosphere and company. In ten minutes in our beautiful Sussex you can find yourself as remote from ordinary familiar England as if you were in the midst of a great reservation. And you may tramp a whole day upon occasion without meeting a single human being.
I want to do it in Russia some time—tramp across her by the compass, visit the hamlets which are five miles from the road, visit those which are fifty from the road, a hundred and fifty from the road. ”

“ Such happiness is explored in one’s personal repertoire of poetry and song that the tramp who makes tramping a great part of his life does well to add to what he has, taking pains to note down the words of haunting airs and verses. In Italy, in France, Spain, Germany, and Slav countries, one inevitably hears melodies one would like to remember. There is folk music, and it can only be learned in the countries where it is natural. There is something in the singing of it which escapes all notation. ”

“ 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 man. You get into an air that is refreshing and free. You liberate yourself from the tacit assumption of your everyday life. ”

“ The whole work of some writers is no more than a tramp’s notebook, Blake, for instance, a series of marvelously scrawled hieroglyphics—the story of his journey from one world to another. But one does not need to be a “writer” as it is called, or an “artist.” It is a spurious classification. We are all writers and artists from the day when we scrawl with our toy spades in the wet sand to the day when we put the seal of death to our wills. Man as such is an artist. ”

“ We were born on an invisible river which keeps gliding and singing and filling and flowing. We do not know where we go, but we know we are on the stream. We do not always perceive the movement, but we observe that the landscape has changed.
So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet—not a General or a Judge or a Master Builder ”

“ THE world is large enough, or is only too small, as takes your fancy or speaks your experience. But blue sky by day and fretted vault of heaven by night give you the foil of the infinite, making your petty exploit a brave adventure. ”

“ So much for Russia. I’d love to tramp the whole length of Japan, and peer into all the ways of the modern Japanese. There, however, speaks another interest, and that is not so much to explore strange lands as to explore strange people. Life teaches the wanderer that peoples are extra pages to geography, and the fascination can at times be irresistible. You long to be familiar with Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, Chinamen, Arabs, Americans, and the rest. ”

“ One may dream of prison in a cave, or gain a morbid fear of the narrowing walls of a ravine, but open country disenchants the mind. Freedom, room to breathe, is at least suggested to the senses. The wind does not attack in storm battalions, but comes equably and large-heartedly across the plain. The wind is a sane traveler, flicking the tops of the grasses as you do with your staff. ”

“ There is a great poetic time after the camp fire has been lit, the coffee brewed, the sleeping place laid out. You sit by the embers as the twilight deepens and talk till the stars shine brightly upon you. ”

“ A tramp from Biarritz to Carcassonne, across the ankle of the Franco-Iberian peninsula holds many picturesque sights of strange people and of feudal towns. But mountainous Nature will rule the hearts of all those who come under the influence of the sublime. This is delightful country for sleeping out, provided mosquito netting be carried. Inns, however, are not so numerous, and one should be prepared to make one’s own coffee on one’s own brushwood fire. ”