[pct-l] Who Are Our Heros and Truth

[cmkudija at earthlink.net (cmkudija@earthlink.net)]

Hey, Switchback, I'm not even apologizing.  Thanks for a wonderful essay on
the metaphysics of hiking, and heroes and truth.  I give you carte blanche
on the prayer & meditation topic.

I once took a poetry class at UCSB where my final project was to compare and
analyze two poems by Wallace Stevens, a great 20th-century American poet.
The poems dealt very much with reality and one's impressions of what was
real - and how those impressions altered "reality," so to speak - how what
is real to us is framed by how we perceive it, and that we make things
"realer" by paying attention.

Problem was, my professor hated the word "reality."   So even though all the
secondary sources I used mentioned how Wallace Stevens wrote of "reality,"
(and so I consciously chose to use the term), my professor cringed a little
reading my paper, and told me so in the notes on the final effort.  He was
perceptive (ahem) enough to give me a decent grade, though.

Dragging this post into PCT-land, do we make the trail more "real" by our
experience of it?  I think so.

Christine "Ceanothus" Kudija
PCT partially '94

www.pcta.org
Join Now!

Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached its top.  Then
you will know how low it was.
                                                                     Dag
Hammarskjold