Hope and gullibility

A good book is a gift to the soul. It becomes a companion as your read the text and the story unfolds bit by bit, character by character each struggling to make contact with your mind.Through the eyes, we have a lifeline to explore the world around us, in the case of the reader a world we haven't visited but is made no less real by the craft of the writer. Some writers have a gift to inspire, others are simply wordsmiths. Occasionally one comes across an author who so captures your mood he or she become, in a sense, interwoven with your ideas about things in general and you walk in their footsteps all the way. 

One such writer, Jonathan Raban has for me been a voyage of discovery. Angela bought me his book 'Coasting', and I wrote a blog describing my appreciation of not only the story but the story behind the story which was, in some ways my own.  Many of my thoughts and emotions were captured in the book and seeing the images on paper, so well crafted is like having a good conversation, its a pleasure you savor for a long time afterwards. 

I am currently reading his book Bad Lands a story of the immigrants to America who were cajoled by some of the finest ad-man's craft, to move out West into the Prairies and settle on the land. He describes the type of person coming from all corners of the earth drawn by a pamphlet so alluring so filled with promise that from the stunted life in the cities of Europe, Europe was such a poor second that it was no contest. As with all prospectus the problems lay in the small print or were not mentioned at all and it was only with the tenacity that human beings finding themselves in a predicament find solutions. The size of these vast stretches of land, rolling out as far as the eye could see with no identifying features to hang a mental perspective on must have been mind blowing to the cramped imagination of the European. 

The author retraces the steps of the rail road, The Great Western Pacific as it pushed its way across the prairie

giving birth to small towns with improbable names, spawning clusters of humanity to develop some sort of viability. 

His journey now is one of a ghost finder, the homesteads gone, the ruins merging back into the soil, each a dream unfulfilled and a perfect example of the mist that creative story telling in the form of the copywriters art brings and finds its epoch in today's 'consumer society'.  

The Ghosts are everywhere but their story is rich in hope and endeavour, a monument to mankind even if tinged by his gullibility!!