A meme about books? How could I resist?
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
- Tag five other people to do the same
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It was one of the bleakest periods in American history, with fear of nuclear war and communism driving most Americans into the bunkers of conformity and repression. Even to argue for peace took heroic courage. To set out, as Peace Pilgrim did on the first day of 1953, with nothing more than her single outfit, whose pockets contained "a comb, a folding toothbrush, a ballpoint pen, copies of her message and her current correspondence," was astonishing. While the economy was booming and capitalism was becoming enshrined as a sacrament of freedom, se had dropped out of the money economy -- she never carried or used money for the rest of her life. She says of her lack of material possessions, "Think of how free I am! If I want to travel, I just stand up and walk away. There is nothing to tie me down." Though her models were largely Christian, her pilgrimage seems to have arisen from the same 1950s crisis of culture and spirituality that pushed John Cage, Gary Snyder, and many other artists and poets into investigations of Zen Buddhism and other nonwestern traditions and sent Martin Luther King to India to study Gandhi's teachings on nonviolence and satyagraha, or soul-force.
- Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit
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Meh, the ones who do this too would do it whether I told them to or not. BUT DO IT ANYWAYS, IT'S GOOD FOR YOU. or me. or something.