A Transcendental Journey: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (Twenty-Fifth Anniversary)
"A road-tripping travel memoir that's graced with humor, adventure, and wisdom." -Foreword Clarion Reviews
A Transcendental Journey is the insightful and often humorous account of playwright and author Stephen Evans' journey across America, exploring America and American Transcendental Philosophy. Ralph Waldo Emerson's life, thought, and influence is explored through five of his most important essays. These famous works transform the journey, just as the journey transforms the author's experience of Emerson, a combination that made for a life-changing, truly Transcendental journey.
This edition, published to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journey, includes a new Afterword describing the author's visit to Emerson's home town of Concord, Massachusetts.
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"Author and playwright Stephen Evans's memoir, in a new edition, revisits his journey through natural landmarks of the mid and western U.S. and the philosophical rambles they inspired. "We live on the surface of the past," Evans begins, but it's his past, including a painful divorce, that he's driving away from when he leaves Washington, D.C. with no itinerary but with maps, books, and a toy moose named Bernard. A thoughtful diarist, Evans records meals, conversations, scenery observations, and random musings, many regarding spirituality and philosophy. The diary avoids becoming claustrophobic with cuts to outside history and knowledge, including reactions to what he's reading on the journey-Ralph Waldo Emerson essays-and information about the places he visits, like the geology of the Badlands or the origins of Devil's Tower...Although more anecdotal than transcendent, Evans's book, with its beautiful description, poignant moments, and interesting philosophy, will resonate with any reader who has set out for new places to find something "barely remembered, yet vaguely familiar: joy."
-BlueInk Review
"A Transcendental Journey is a road-tripping travel memoir that's graced with humor, adventure, and wisdom."
-Foreword Clarion Reviews
"For almost everyone there is a call to adventure and, if heeded, small opportunities in the course of our lives to wiggle out of the tightly constructed worlds and obligations we have created for ourselves. Few of us heed the call, and of those who do, even fewer write about it in such a delightful way. Evans' soulful and completely intuition-driven trip through a large swath of America is a great read."
-Amanda Larson, Author, Healing from a Grandmother's Heart
"Stephan Evans' A Transcendental Journey manages to be warm, wise. and humorous at the same time. Addictively readable."
-Izzy Ballard (Author of Fearless in Alaska)
