The Old West

[fingersweep]

Mandeville: 'I have often thought of a story I have heard, when I was young, of a worthy man of our country who went once upon a time to see the world. He passed India and many isles beyond India, where there are more than 5,000 isles, and travelled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language

Comments

[proximoception]

Four Quartets? The Planet of the Apes? The Parliament of Birds?

Also reminds me just a bit of a favorite Invisible City:

https://proximoception.livejournal.com/260926.html

[nightspore]

I was about to say Planet of the Apes. Also, I think a version of this in Pynchon's Against the Day. R.A. Lafferty's "The World as Will and Wallpaper." Possibly the Tarkovsky film version of Solaris. Maybe Lost does some of this.

[fingersweep]

I like the detail of the plowman plowing in the field ('Git up thaa! Git!' 'Whoa!').

And I think Mandeville goes on to say that, if the man had jumped just over the next hedge he would have found himself in his own garden. (His wife, alarmed by the noise in the back, rubbing the dust from the glass with her elbow and then looking out on him from indoors.)

Coming home through the back-gate --

These and nightspore's examples below are great spurs or tie-ins though. Chesterton uses the story as an illustration of his coming to belief/awareness. The vanishing distance (many years, many cities, many continents), then, between the man who's home and the man who knows he's home.

I also thought of something out of Thoreau I read a few years ago: 'I suspect that, if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he drove off.'

[proximoception]

Ktaadn! A text I wrote about in my MA, long ago - not that part but the better-known summit musings.

Have you seen “Hall of Egress”?