Earning the title of solo circumnavigator meant undertaking a sometimes overwhelming goal and not quitting for two-and-a-half-years of moments testing commitment on a huge stage. But, this resolve is a daily task in life on many different stages for everyone, not just physical or adventurous, part and parcel of the human experience. I always have, and continue to find inspiration in stories of perseverance.
Tania Aebi was an unambitious eighteen-year-old, a bicycle messenger in New York City by day, a Lower East Side barfly at night. In short, she was going nowhere—until her father offered her a challenge: Tania could choose either a college education or a twenty-six-foot sloop. The only catch was that if she chose the sailboat, she’d have to sail around the world—alone. She chose the boat, and for the next two and a half years and 27,000 miles, it was her home.
What Roosevelt and his party go through in this story of their expedition down an unexplored tributary of the Amazon is insane. Quitting isn’t an option, they have to go forward until they either make it, or don’t. And most of the original crew and all their expedition equipment don’t. Images of the vividly described characters arriving at yet another waterfall, or dangerous rapid, around which they have to portage increasingly fewer people and belongings, over near impenetrable and hostile jungle terrain, still gives me the willies. Pure distilled perseverance here—not a choice, but necessary for survival.
In 1912, shortly after losing his bid to spend a third term as American President to Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt with his son Kermit, a Brazilian guide and a band of camaradas set off deep into the Amazon jungle and a very uncertain fate. Although Roosevelt did eventually return from THE RIVER OF DOUBT, he and his companions faced treacherous cataracts as well as the dangerous indigenous population of the Amazon. He became severely ill on the journey, nearly dying in the jungle from a blood infection and malaria. A mere five years later Roosevelt did die of related issues.…
Read during a jag of dystopian fiction, this one stuck with me. First published in Austria in 1963, it only got translated into English in 1990, which suits the story’s timelessness. For some reason, the world ends and traps a woman behind a glass wall. Not important why the world as she knows it is gone. It just is, and she has to keep living, and part of that means writing about it. Success will not know recognition, her words will not be read. Stripped of all need to answer to any other human or societal expectation, the story stretches through the seasons and years of her learning how to stay alive entirely on her own, with whatever she can find on her side of the wall. The slow and deliberate pacing of days accumulate hauntingly into years of unconditional perseverance.
“I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead…” writes the heroine of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a quite ordinary, unnamed middle-aged woman who awakens to find she is the last living human being. Surmising her solitude is the result of a too successful military experiment, she begins the terrifying work of not only survival, but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple and moving talk — of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the…
Of course, I’ve read lots of sailing books. It’s a genre, it’s my world, I’m a reader. So, I’ve chosen the proto solo sail, lived and written before anyone else had lived such an experience and written about it. Slocum took off at the end of the nineteenth century, when engines were replacing sails, and before sailing morphed into sport, leisure, and nomadic lifestyle.
The first person to sail around the world single-handedly, he did it on The Spray, a leaky old wooden boat he salvaged from a beach and restored himself, a journey in and of itself. Without a Panama or Suez Canal, around Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, making landfalls where nobody had ever seen a solo sailor, incomplete and inaccurate charts, engineless, no self-steering. Plenty of reason and opportunity to quit, but no. Instead, he launches 120 years of people heading off to sea. What an adventure, what a story! A classic.
"The classic of its kind." —Travel World "One of the most readable books in the whole library of adventure." —Sports Illustrated "The finest single-handed adventure story yet written." —Seafarer Challenged by an expert who said it couldn't be done, Joshua Slocum, an indomitable New England sea captain, set out in April of 1895 to prove that a man could sail alone around the world. 46,000 miles and a little over 3 years later, the proof was complete: Captain Slocum had performed the epic "first" single-handedly in a trusty 34-foot sloop called the "Spray." This is Slocum's own account of his…
This book has sold gadzillion copies. I read it when it first came out, and as experienced by many, it resonated as a beautiful parable about having to live life, follow dreams, and not give up, to come home on another turn of the screw and truly understand who we are is the treasure that lies within.
Many years later, I underwent a big voyage with my children that took a lot of perseverance to pull off successfully. Throughout, as the adventure unfolded, I kept reminding myself of how, until we’ve pushed past the doubts and fears and taken off down a new and potentially problematic path, we can never know how much the universe will conspire to help us along. I thought living this for myself had inspired the revelation and I wrote about it.
Then, recently rereading The Alchemist, I found this very sentiment in its pages, almost verbatim, something I’d internalized and held onto as a guiding inspiration before leaping into new unknowns. “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Believing this is key to not quitting.
A global phenomenon, The Alchemist has been read and loved by over 62 million readers, topping bestseller lists in 74 countries worldwide. Now this magical fable is beautifully repackaged in an edition that lovers of Paulo Coelho will want to treasure forever.
Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book - a beautiful parable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all, follow your dreams.
Santiago, a young shepherd living in the hills of Andalucia, feels that there is…
This 19th century classic is the only book I’ve reread multiple times—other than children’s books with my boys. The first go was as a teenager, and about once a decade thereafter, always appreciated for its richness of detail and developed thought. The story is about principle, about Jane falling in love with Rochester, and finding out at the altar that he already has a wife, a madwoman living in the attic. She cannot be with a married man, regardless of the wife’s insanity, and Jane sacrifices love, security, comfort, and stumbles away from him, out into the world and the abyss of sorrow.
Her resolve is firm, and with time and hundreds of pages, she learns she has the strength to resurface. Her intellectual and physical horizons broaden and she gains a whole other life. Even though this is fiction, the core tenet for me is how Bronte’s Jane doesn’t quit or abandon integrity. When she is eventually returned to Rochester after he loses his wife, house and sight to a fire, the eponymous heroine’s moral compass remains intact.
Ultimately, the common thread that holds these five disparate books together is how they are each about people taking on and completing deliberate inner and outer journeys with conclusions that wouldn’t be possible without tenacity and perseverance. They all teach what it means to keep struggling, keep living, keep making mistakes, and keep learning from them by not quitting.
Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue, Canterbury Christ Church University College.
Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage.
She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester.
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket.
Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father. The Truth About Unringing Phones is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
When Lara was four years old, her father moved from Rochester, New York, to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of over 4,000 miles. She spent her childhood chasing after him, flying a quarter of the way around the world to tug at the hem of his jacket. Now that he is in his eighties, she contemplates her obligation to an absentee father.
The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning is an exploration of responsibility and culpability told in experimental and fragmented essays.
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