Nobody called it that at the time, but the first realistic English novel was a genuine “beach read.” Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” published in 1719, is a tale of exotic adventure literally set on a beach. Three hundred years later, a lot has changed, but we still crave stories with waves crashing on the shore.
My first “beach read” was a shameful, illicit affair. A middle school classmate with a wild older brother had gotten a hold of a copy of “Jaws.” In my lily-white innocence, the naked swimmer on the cover of Peter Benchley’s thriller was just as terrifying as the shark soaring up to eat her. Sitting cross-legged in my friend’s attic, I tore through those pages, ricocheting between Thanatos and Eros.
While thought experiments are as old as philosophy itself, the weight placed on them in recent philosophy is distinctive. Even when scenarios are highly unrealistic, judgments about them are thought to have wide-ranging implications for what should be done in the real world. The assumption is that, if you can show that a point of ethical principle holds in one artfully designed case, however bizarre, then this tells us something significant. Many non-philosophers baulk at this suggestion.
I was heading to the Northwest Angle – the northernmost point of the continental US – to research a book about the country’s northern border. The Angle is a blip on the boundary – an isolated pocket in Minnesota set 100 miles north of the line of the main border. It is the northland of the northland – surrounded by Lake of the Woods on three sides and Canada on the other. To get there by road, you have to drive through Manitoba.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The Angle was a mistake, made at the time of the Treaty of Paris, the accord that ended the American Revolution in 1783. The map that the delegates used, made by a London physician-botanist and amateur mapmaker named John Mitchell, marked the source of the Mississippi, a key landmark on the proposed northern boundary, as 150 miles north of where it actually is.
“In Praise of Paths” is at its best when Ekelund deals in specifics, such as the narratives of Amsrud and Gatewood, or the strange fact that when we’re lost in the wilderness we tend to walk in a circle for various reasons: One leg is generally longer than the other; one eye more dominant; heavy packs tend to throw off our balance. And the book is at its most emotional and poignant when Ekelund describes his own paths: the one he remembers from early childhood, the ones he and a friend take their children hiking on.
All day in shelter
on a granary floor, rain