People I Met Hitchhiking on USA Highways: an uncanny book reviewed
Imagine you walked past a poster on the wall, on which stood the vague image of a bearded man, and the words around it reading "Y
OU’RE LIKE ME IN THIS RESPECT – WHAT YOU DO HAS ITS EFFECT", or perhaps "HELP ONE ANOTHER SUCCEED" or "SEEK TRUTH – DEVELOP CAPACITIES" or even "DESPITE INJUSTICE & NORMAL MADNESS, CHANGE YOUR SITUATION & OUR WORLD FOREVER FOR BETTER" © E. Chaet … would it make you stop and think?If so, then Eric Chaet has successfully reached out to you - then you are the kind of person his message is aimed at and you'd certainly enjoy his writing. If not perhaps the sign's too short and a dip into some of his writing, prose or poetry would do the trick. In any case, he's set himself the single handed mission of making you stop and think - about life, about why, about how … So much so that for years he's been posting these signs around America. They've even reached Europe it seems.
I groaned inwardly. Explaining what I had been doing--I had already attempted it with so many strangers--seemed overwhelming. I gave him the briefest synopsis possible: I had silk-screened posters on cloth--I took a couple from the pack & showed him--& I intended to staple them to utility poles in San Francisco & Los Angeles.
…
Dr. Hrindayanath twirled one of his mustaches. "You cannot change the world all by yourself," he said solemnly but kindly.
Someone's got to start, I thought.
…
"I think that what you are doing is courageous & noble, sir," he said, "but do you think you have any chance at all of success?"
"I think that, before I began," I said, "I had no chance of success, but that, now that I've begun, I'm changing the odds."
When I picked up his book People I Met Hitch-hiking on USA Highways, I was excited, by yet another book on hitch-hiking to hit our shelves and with such an unambiguous easily identified title. I must admit though, that I struggled at first, with Eric's stylistic idiosyncrasies - from his use of "thru", "tho", "&" in place of "and", and double hyphens where en or em dashes belong, to the rather prosaic introduction to his travel accounts and his choice of large serif-less type …
What unfolded however, in all its glorious eccentricity, was a self confessed challenge to the established order of things and the title suddenly seemed far less unambiguous than at first. Not at all a book about hitch-hiking! It is fundamentally a book intended to provoke some active thinking into the fundamental issues that face us all - what we're doing, why we're doing it. To be sure it is written by a hitch-hiker (though he admits: … I only do [hitch-hike] when I can't think how else to get something going …) and in some way around people he met while hitch-hiking (though for some of the tales the only clue to that is the loose claim the title lays to it!) but is in the end, a collection of semi-biographic narratives (with no immediate relation to one another) and a handful of poems that provide the vehicle for a deeper message.
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