Famous Road Trips

 

    I am again behind in my blogging and am not really ready to begin this post. It is important, however, to share this information with you and I will try to think of an introduction as I type. The subject is "Road Trips" (or should that be 'are'?) A famous one was taken by Ken Kesey and the 'Merry Pranksters' in the Magic Bus pictured above.  The search for a suitable picture for this post allowed me a little more time to figure out a way to introduce it. The picture does not really have anything to do with what follows, but it is about a road trip

   Let me begin this way. In the last two weeks I read two articles that both begin with sentences about road trips. Just as there are contests and arguments over such things as the "Best First Lines in Novels", there should be some for the "Best Opening Sentences About Car Trips in Articles." Here are my two nominations. The first one is about a very short trip, the second is  much longer, but length shouldn't matter.  If anyone can come up with any that are better, they will be given a year's subscription to Mulcahy's Miscellany.

In 1947, Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, and Oskar Morgenstern drove from Princeton to Trenton in Morgenstern’s car. The three men, who’d fled Nazi Europe and become close friends at the Institute for Advanced Study, were on their way to a courthouse where Gödel, an Austrian exile, was scheduled to take the U.S.-citizenship exam, something his two friends had done already. Morgenstern had founded game theory, Einstein had founded the theory of relativity, and Gödel, the greatest logician since Aristotle, had revolutionized mathematics and philosophy with his incompleteness theorems. Morgenstern drove. Gödel sat in the back. Einstein, up front with Morgenstern, turned around and said, teasing, “Now, Gödel, are you really well prepared for this examination?” Gödel looked stricken.

That is from the March 22, 2021 issue of The New Yorker and the article is by Jill Lepore, ("When Constitutions Took Over the World.") While Gödel may have been nervous, his compatriots were worried that Gödel might choose to argue about the logical inconsistencies he had found in the Constitution. 

   One week later ( the March 29, 2021 issue of The New Yorker), Madeleine Schwartz begins this article, "Sybille Bedford and the Unruly Art of the Origin Story," with these sentences:

In the summer of 1940, when she was twenty-nine years old, Sybille Bedford took on an unusual assignment: driving Thomas Mann’s poodle across the United States. Bedford had known Mann, nearly forty years her senior, since her adolescence, which she spent living among German expatriates in the South of France. An aspiring but so far unprolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, she had come of age under his shadow. Now both she and Mann were refugees in another country. Mann and his family, moving from Princeton to Pacific Palisades, took the train; the country was experiencing a heat wave, and the compartments were air-conditioned. Bedford drove the writer’s car with her girlfriend and Nico, the poodle, stopping every once in a while for a bottle of Coke, which she spiked with rum.

Well, unfortunately I still haven't figured out what to say about what I have just posted, but you will have undoubtedly have enjoyed these sentences and a year's free subscription will be given to anyone else who thinks they were worth calling to your attention.

The Bonus:

I could probably find something bonus-like if I bothered to look up Jill Lepore, the author of the first article. But, without doing so I know that she writes such pieces almost weekly, teaches at Harvard and publishes books regularly. She probably also has a blog. 

Careful readers will have noticed that both trips began in Princeton in the 1940s. If you want to read about a road trip in the 1920s that has Princeton on the itinerary see this account by F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.  They left from Connecticut to visit her parents in Alabama and to search for "biscuits and peaches." Unfortunately, her parents had just left to go and visit them in Connecticut. 
The Cruise of the Rolling Junk, F. Scott Fitzgerald, intro. by Paul Theroux, Hesperus Press, 2011.