What Do You Do With a Literature Degree?
Walter Rhein’s travel story, Reckless Traveler
It has been graduation time of year, in a year that has left people in limbo, with compromised job situations, or no job at all, and limited opportunities to travel. Young people are either not returning to school, or are unsure about their next step.
I read Walter Rhein’s Reckless Traveler, and mourn the inability to just GO somewhere, away. And am simultaneously grateful for our literary world, which means people can share their stories and others can read and experience.
In our current, image-crazy milieu, for fleeting moments I wanted photos of the places Rhein describes…and then I recalled how in my TV-free childhood, which was blessed with books, descriptions used to be enough. So I enjoyed his thoughtful, evocative descriptions. Yes, how it should be. Further push to get out of my chair and go see for myself.
I suspect the title of this work could just as well be “What I did with my degree in Literature,” and could be handed out to recent grads as inspiration to “find your way.”
The spirit of resourcefulness and common sense — even while always reaching for wonder and experience — is what has most struck me about this read. Recklessness, not so much maybe. (Though the stories are, to my mind, infused with a healthy sense of questioning authority and adventure.) But the reality of living long-term in a place in which one starts out not knowing the language, the isolation in that, the connecting with other travelers, the lessons and stories gained…the experience of being an American in the larger world, seeing himself as such from Outside. All is in these pages, with thorough exploration and Humor!
Even in the moments of stress and distress, humor breaks out. Always. And had me laughing. The insights gained through the experiences of small actions to the challenging — crushing a cockroach to climbing mountains — make for stories that build to a narrative of growth and maturation.
It does serve to remind me that while our world is seemingly shrinking, in our immediate now and near future, our capacity to travel is so diminished, and ways in which the world has existed are quickly changing; in future we will be able to see less and less, which will make such books and stories even more important and necessary.
I plan to give copies to every recent graduate I know, and hope they are inspired to go out and explore their world!