Though I’ve never been much of a fan of poetry, one that frequently comes to mind is Ozymandias.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart.[d] Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Like most teen boys my age, I read every Heinlein book I could get my hands on.
Tunnel in the Sky (1955) … a group of students sent on a survival test to an uninhabited planet, who soon realise they are stranded there. The themes of the work include the difficulties of growing up and the nature of man as a social animal.
His juvenile books are rollicking adventures. No profanity.
But on another level, Heinlein was a provocative philosopher on matters of personal freedom, particularly sexual freedom, libertarianism, religion, politics, and government.
Heinlein wrote strong female characters decades before it was cool. 😀
My main takeaway from Tunnel is the truism that rule of law must come first.
Everything else, later.
If you don’t have enforceable laws, wannabe dictators will insist criminals are tourists.
Here’s Georgia GOP Andrew Clyde barricading the doors of the Senate. He later called those attacking him tourists.
Any objective person would want those breaking into their home or business arrested. To deny this fact is to deny rule of law.
As in Lord of the Flies, which had been published a year earlier, isolation reveals the true natures of the students as individuals. The Heinlein book is more optimistic, however.
The colony of young people in Tunnel do establish rule of law. Democracy.
In any case, it’s still worth reading Heinlein books today. They are thought provoking.
MrBeast is #1 in 2024. A College dropout whom nobody would ever have got to know, except for YouTube. His childhood friends are still collaborators.
Casey Neistat popularized vlogging. A high school dropout who headed to NYC with no money. And went on to inspire tens of thousands to start their own YouTube channel. His first upload was February 17, 2010.
I first learned about him from this edit for Nike. 😀
“Nike asked me to make a movie about what it means to #makeitcount. Instead of making their movie, I spent the entire budget traveling around the world with my friend Max. We’d keep going until the money ran out. It took 10 days.”
And my first 3 weeks in Norway were certainly unexpected. I arrived far north of the Arctic Circle with no bicycle. No luggage. Both were stuck at Heathrow airport where I checked in with SAS (Scandinavian Airlines).
I could give up. Or make do with my carry-on.
WHY not simply go to an all-inclusive beach resort and start drinking at noon?
Here’s a good answer from Jedidiah Jenkins who cycled Oregon to the southern tip of South America.
The riveting true story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers—and then disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This book “contains everything: adventure, mystery, travelogue, and unforgettable characters”
David Grann
The story of a unique American ➙ Dick Conant.
He’s most often compared with Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild ➙ Chris McCandless.
Personally, I don’t see the connection. I was much more reminded of ➙ Eustace Conway, The Last American Man.
Ben McGrath, a staff writer at The New Yorker, met Conant by chance just north of New York City as Conant paddled down the Hudson, headed for Florida. McGrath wrote a widely read article about their encounter, and when Conant’s canoe washed up a few months later, without any sign of his body, McGrath set out to find the people whose lives Conant had touched–to capture a remarkable life lived far outside the staid confines of modern existence. …
