Dave Eggers on isolation
“But dropping out of touch is still possible. It’s so easy. It doesn’t take long, just about anywhere, to get away from phones, etc. Five miles outside of any city, usually. In Iceland, which is a prosperous country, a lot of the roads get really sketchy just outside of Reykjavik, and there’s still only one road through the interior of the island, and when you’re out there it’s about 13 hours of insanely rough and winding driving without any sign of life — you’re out of touch. You go through landscapes that could be Hawaii, then Arizona, then Arctic tundra, then Scotland, and there isn’t a gas station for maybe 400 miles. Don’t ever believe anyone who says that the world’s been explored, there’s nothing left to see, all that. I mean, have you driven through Wyoming? Wyoming just makes you weep. We’re so lucky to have it, all of it.”
–Dave Eggers, from an August 2002 New Yorker interview
February 2nd, 2003 at 7:31 am
In “Blue Highways”, William Least Heat-Moon gives a tableau from an american tavern: man complains there’s nowhere pure & untouristed anymore (this in the late 70s), woman needles him & says he would tread over any untouched place for bragging rights; man takes woman out of the bar.
In “Baptism of Solitude” by Paul Bowles, he writes of the intense silence (?oxymoron?) of the Sahara, unlike any other. Tomorrow I go to Morocco to find out.
Will order your book when I get back–do you have a stop planned for Boston? Thousands of students, plenty of bookstores, and a half-dozen monolithic tour operators with plenty of travelling employees (I’m one).
February 3rd, 2003 at 8:29 am
I can relate to his Wyoming reference. That state moves me unlike most others I’ve been through. Did you get to meet him in SF?
February 3rd, 2003 at 2:03 pm
I’d love to do a Boston tour-stop, but we had a limited schedule this time. New York will be as close as I get to Boston on the book tour. But I sincerely hope to get up there for my next book!