The following is an excerpt from the Prologue to my book of essays, Zen and Artificial Intelligence and other Philosophical Musings by a Student of Zen Buddhism.
A high-school friend of mine, Adam C., and I set out to hitch-hike across the United States starting from our hometown of Rochester, New York, destination Los Angeles, California, where an uncle of his lived and where my sister lived. He was 19. I was 18. The idea was adventure, of course, inspired by (as were many then) the On the Road adventures and attitudes of the time (actually, of the previous decade or two). A few memorable events made for decent party stories—a job offer picking peaches from, plausibly, serial killer Juan Corona near Yuba City, California; police throwing cherry bombs at us from an off-ramp in Buffalo, New York; a pile of rocks in the high desert outside of Reno, Nevada, that turned out to be the dead body of an elderly black man; a maniac drunk driver screaming “turkey buzzards!!” over and over who wouldn’t let us out of his car; and a few other tales of similar nature. And some history happened, too: an assassination attempt on, then Alabama Governor, then presidential candidate, George Wallace, if I remember right; and a nasty riot took place at the state prison in Attica, New York. Of course, Neil Young’s Heart of Gold and Old Man still stir in me considerable nostalgia. Yes, but, overall, the trip to LA and eventually back to Rochester was mostly uneventful. Let’s just say that neither Adam nor I discovered the Holy Grail of self-knowledge, which, though unspoken between us, was probably the wandering Romantic’s hope, if only vaguely.
However, one experience in our journey did affect me, and in a profound way, but it wasn’t self-knowledge I discovered so much as non-self-knowledge. And that experience is one reason why I wrote these essays.
Comments