Among those Men Whom I Have Known, the Love of Books and the Love of Outdoors, have Usually Gone Hand in Hand...

"There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other men who love books but to whom the great book of nature is a sealed volume, and the lines written therein blurred and illegible. Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand. It is an affectation for the man who is praising outdoors to sneer at books." - Teddy Roosevelt

We continue further along on our lovely sojourn into the world of autobiographical reads of diverse hues and shades, from off various times and climes! Indeed, autobiographical novels have been such a rage and sensation across time and place for ages! Right from Angelou’s to Baldwin’s, to Charlotte Bronte’s to Dickens’s, to George Eliot’s to Fitzgerald’s, to Greene’s, to Hemingway’s, fictionalizing of events by authors, albeit on autofiction mode, have had their own charm and their sway on the readers.

Samuel Butler’s autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh is a case in point! A well-known English writer and a notorious iconoclast of the first quarters, from the Victorian age, Samuel Butler vehemently attacked the hypocrisy of the Victorian age, and gave a scathing portrayal of family life in Victorian England. For this and for other political considerations, this explosive autobiographical novel, though written as early as 1873, was published only in 1903. Upon its publication, praise and fame came to him from all quarters. George Orwell was especially profuse in his praise of The Way of All Flesh! He called Butler a courageous and truly independent observer! He added to say that, ‘Butler would say things that other people knew but didn't dare to say. And finally there was his clear, simple, straightforward way of writing, never using a long word where a short one will do.’ What’s more! George Bernard Shaw hailed it as ‘one of the summits of human achievement’! Such is the power, such the charm of this endearing read for us all!

Sample this, from Butler –

Butler speaks! Please go ahead and listen to him below –

I will give no more of the details of my hero’s earlier years. Enough that he struggled through them, and at twelve years old knew every page of his Latin and Greek Grammars by heart. He had read the greater part of Virgil, Horace and Livy, and I do not know how many Greek plays: he was proficient in arithmetic, knew the first four books of Euclid thoroughly, and had a fair knowledge of French. It was now time he went to school, and to school he was accordingly to go, under the famous Dr. Skinner of Roughborough.

The walls were covered with book shelves from floor to ceiling, and on every shelf the books stood in double rows.

That’s for a sample from Samuel Butler!

And next we come to the Teddy-Bear-fame Teddy Roosevelt aka Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography titled, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography.

Even while he was still a student at the famed Harvard, Roosevelt felt his flair for writing deep within him, and surrendered to this delightful call! The result is a whopping 35 wonderful reads from off his pen! He went on to become the 26^th President of the United States. Apart from being a writer, he also commanded great respect from all his subjects for his gift of the gab! He was also a naturalist and an explorer of the Amazon basin.

Teddy is known especially for his famed hunting expeditions. It’s no great wonder then that one of his bear hunting trips in 1902, under the invitation of the Mississippi Governor, fetched him the honorific Teddy that would be etched in people’s hearts even more than a century later, today!

His Autobiography published in the year 1913, also contains exciting, thrilling and fascinating descriptions of his hunting skills, whose beauty lies in the dexterous way in which he connects them with life-values and life-skills for everyday life.

Just excerpts for y’all, from one of his shooting adventures, from off his Autobiography, and the life-skills he imparts to the reader, through them all. Every word and every line of Teddy’s in his Autobiography, is so amazing and enthralling. Please please go through these lines to breathe into your very being the essence of good, descriptive writing. Teddy speaks of his hunting skills, the books that he so loves to read, the books-birds combo, acquiring fearlessness amongst a range of absorbing topics! Read on…

Teddy Roosevelt speaks –

Buck fever means a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity. It may affect a man the first time he has to speak to a large audience just as it affects him the first time he sees a buck or goes into battle. What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must, by custom and repeated exercise of self- mastery, get his nerves thoroughly under control. This is largely a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will power. If the man has the right stuff in him, his will grows stronger and stronger with each exercise of it--and if he has not the right stuff in him he had better keep clear of dangerous game hunting, or indeed of any other form of sport or work in which there is bodily peril.

After he has achieved the ability to exercise wariness and judgment and the control over his nerves /which will make him shoot as well at the game as at a target/, he can begin his essays at dangerous game hunting, and he will then find that it does not demand such abnormal prowess as the outsider is apt to imagine. A man who can hit a soda- water bottle at the distance of a few yards can brain a lion or a bear or an elephant at that distance, and if he cannot brain it when it charges he can at least bring it to a standstill. All he has to do is to shoot as accurately as he would at a soda-water bottle; and to do this requires nerve, at least as much as it does physical address. Having reached this point, the hunter must not imagine that he is warranted in taking desperate chances. There are degrees in proficiency; and what is a warrantable and legitimate risk for a man to take when he has reached a certain grade of efficiency may be a foolish risk for him to take before he has reached that grade.

A man who has reached the degree of proficiency indicated above is quite warranted in walking in at a lion at bay, in an open plain, to, say, within a hundred yards. If the lion has not charged, the man ought at that distance to knock him over and prevent his charging; and if the lion is already charging, the man ought at that distance to be able to stop him. But the amount of prowess which warrants a man in relying on his ability to perform this feat does not by any means justify him in thinking that, for instance, he can crawl after a wounded lion into thick cover.

I have known men of indifferent prowess to perform this latter feat successfully, but at least as often they have been unsuccessful, and in these cases the result has been unpleasant. The man who habitually follows wounded lions into thick cover must be a hunter of the highest skill, or he can count with certainty on an ultimate mauling.

I need hardly say that all the successes I have ever won have been of the second type. I never won anything without hard labor and the exercise of my best judgment and careful planning and working long in advance. Having been a rather sickly and awkward boy, I was as a young man at first both nervous and distrustful of my own prowess. I had to train myself painfully and laboriously not merely as regards my body but as regards my soul and spirit.

When a boy I read a passage in one of Marryat's books which always impressed me. In this passage the captain of some small British man- of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it. (I am using my own language, not Marryat's.) This was the theory upon which I went.

There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to "mean" horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid. Most men can have the same experience if they choose. They will first learn to bear themselves well in trials which they anticipate and which they school themselves in advance to meet. After a while the habit will grow on them, and they will behave well in sudden and unexpected emergencies which come upon them unawares.

It is of course much pleasanter if one is naturally fearless, and I envy and respect the men who are naturally fearless. But it is a good thing to remember that the man who does not enjoy this advantage can nevertheless stand beside the man who does, and can do his duty with the like efficiency, if he chooses to. Of course he must not let his desire take the form merely of a day-dream. Let him dream about being a fearless man, and the more he dreams the better he will be, always provided he does his best to realize the dream in practice. He can do his part honorably and well provided only he sets fearlessness before himself as an ideal, schools himself to think of danger merely as something to be faced and overcome, and regards life itself as he should regard it, not as something to be thrown away, but as a pawn to be promptly hazarded whenever the hazard is warranted by the larger interests of the great game in which we are all engaged.

I wish that people would read books like the novels and stories, at once strong and charming, of Henry Bordeaux, books like Kathleen Norris's "Mother," and Cornelia Comer's "Preliminaries," and would use these, and other such books, as tracts, now and then!

There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other men who love books but to whom the great book of nature is a sealed volume, and the lines written therein blurred and illegible. Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand. It is an affectation for the man who is praising outdoors to sneer at books.

Usually the keenest appreciation of what is seen in nature is to be found in those who have also profited by the hoarded and recorded wisdom of their fellow-men. Love of outdoor life, love of simple and hardy pastimes, can be gratified by men and women who do not possess large means, and who work hard; and so can love of good books--not of good bindings and of first editions, excellent enough in their way but sheer luxuries--I mean love of reading books, owning them if possible of course, but, if that is not possible, getting them from a circulating library.

Like most Americans interested in birds and books, I know a good deal about English birds as they appear in books. I know the lark of Shakespeare and Shelley and the Ettrick Shepherd; I know the nightingale of Milton and Keats; I know Wordsworth's cuckoo; I know mavis and merle singing in the merry green wood of the old ballads; I know Jenny Wren and Cock Robin of the nursery books. Therefore I had always much desired to hear the birds in real life; and the opportunity offered in June, 1910, when I spent two or three weeks in England. As I could snatch but a few hours from a very exciting round of pleasures and duties, it was necessary for me to be with some companion who could identify both song and singer. In Sir Edward Grey, a keen lover of outdoor life in all its phases, and a delightful companion, who knows the songs and ways of English birds as very few do know them, I found the best possible guide.

We left London on the morning of June 9, twenty-four hours before I sailed from Southampton. Getting off the train at Basingstoke, we drove to the pretty, smiling valley of the Itchen. Here we tramped for three or four hours, then again drove, this time to the edge of the New Forest, where we first took tea at an inn, and then tramped through the forest to an inn on its other side, at Brockenhurst. At the conclusion of our walk my companion made a list of the birds we had seen, putting an asterisk (*) opposite those which we had heard sing. There were forty-one of the former and twenty-three of the latter, as follows:

*Thrush, *blackbird, *lark, *yellowhammer, *robin, *wren, *golden-crested wren, *goldfinch, *chaffinch, *greenfinch, pied wagtail, sparrow, *dunnock (hedge, accentor), missel thrush, starling, rook, jackdaw, *blackcap, *garden warbler, *willow warbler, *chiffchaff, *wood warbler, tree-creeper, *reed bunting, *sedge warbler, coot, water hen, little grebe (dabchick), tufted duck, wood pigeon, stock dove, *turtle dove, peewit, tit (coal-tit), *cuckoo, *nightjar, *swallow, martin, swift, pheasant, partridge.

To be contd…

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