As a book review editor, I can confirm what any casual reader of books must know by now: that the book industry has given itself over almost entirely to the pursuit of the smoking gun, that is, to investigative journalism, exposés, editorials, and polemics. It is the age of Seymour Hersh, Ron Suskind, Frank Rich and Lawrence Wright, of acute analysts and, some would argue, agents of current affairs. Whether you agree with these authors’ theses or not, their interpretation of facts or not, these works are valuable correctives to cultural and political imbalances created since 9/11; they remind the reader how crucial it is to have access to more than one story or more than one version of a story. You see these authors appear as Jon Stewart’s guests – providing the material on which and with which satire (the other great corrective to troubling times) riffs and colludes. Our laughter is proportional to our disbelief or trauma (I mean, whether you’re on the right or the left, war is traumatizing or should be).  

But all this hard news is wearying – as it also should be: Who to believe? And once you’ve decided whose voice to champion, whose book to send to your friends and associates, what next? How to live with frightening revelations and move through the everyday with your portion of disgust or fear? How to sleep soundly?  

I found one answer in a manuscript sent to me by W.W. Norton & Co late this spring. It was Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books by Ted Bishop. By any publicist’s standards, it’s a small book, hard to categorize and harder to sell in this current climate. But its effect on me was enormous. Simply put, it reminded me of the restorative powers of pleasure and passion. In our studied observation of our own woes, our helplessness, both are easy to forget.

Bishop is a Canadian literary scholar who’s written extensively about James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, but for the purposes of his new book he’s a guy who loves motorcycles and rides one from Edmonton to the Ransom Research Center in Austin, Texas. He writes about the trip with all of him, with the sensual and the physical beautifully complemented by his range of expertise — that is, from the literary to the automotive. Reading his account, I came as close as I ever might to what it is to ride a Ducati Monster cross country (evidently these United States are still beautiful) and came that much closer to the lives and idiosyncrasies of some of my literary heroes (I never fully understood what a motorcycle fanatic Lawrence was). I’ve included a brief excerpt below to acquaint you with Bishop’s felicitous prose and, more, with his knowing, controlled rapture that helped renew my contact with living. His decision to take the trip and to write about it was a boy’s and a man’s, an adventurer’s and a professor’s. Surely he has not forgotten Abu Ghraib or why we couldn’t (until today) carry liquids on a plane, but he has not forgotten himself either. The book’s in stores now. Lord knows where they’ve shelved it, but it’s a sure bet, and perhaps a shame, that you won’t find in the current affairs section.  


“Even if you ride without a helmet, you ride in a cocoon of white noise.  You get the smells from the roadside, and you feel the coolness in the dips and the heat off a rock face, but you don’t get sound. On a bike you feel both exposed and insulated. Try putting in earplugs the world changes, you feel like a spacewalker. What I like best about motorcycle touring is that even if you have companions you can’t talk to them until the rest stop, when you’ll compare highlights of the ride. You may be right beside them, but you’re alone. It is an inward experience. Like reading. In the archive there might be ten other readers, each at a solitary table, yet if you intersect at all it is only at lunch breaks. You may spend two weeks or more together, in silence.

“The classical pianist Alfred Brendel once told a New Yorker interviewer, ‘I like the fact that “listen” is an anagram of “silent.” Silence is not something that is there before the music begins and after it stops. It is the essence of the music itself, the vital ingredient that makes it possible for the music to exist at all. It’s wonderful when the audience is part of the productive silence.’ He was speaking of classical piano concerts, but he could have been talking of the highway. Some of the best moments on a bike come when you are not moving: roadside moments. You stop, kill the engine, and take off your helmet, and all is still.”