Freedom
A short and dense book that is part travel narrative part anthropology part sociology and part meditation on what it means to be free.
The premise is simple. Four men and a dog spend months walking along railway lines in the eastern United States. They sleep under bridges and cook over fires and avoid the police and deliberately stay outside ordinary society. We are never really told why they are doing it.
I enjoyed Junger’s writing style. There is something distinctly Hemingway-esque about it. The prose flows almost uninterrupted and often relies on long chains of observations connected together and one thought leading naturally into the next. It is an easy book to read despite discussing surprisingly deep subjects.
Junger moves effortlessly between Apache raiders and hunter-gatherer societies and labour movements and military history and modern America. The central tension of the book is that humans seem to desire both freedom and community even though those two ideals frequently pull in opposite directions.
One thing I particularly appreciated is that Junger refuses to romanticize either side. Native American societies are presented neither as noble utopias nor as barbaric caricatures. Western civilisation is criticised without becoming the villain. The result feels balanced and curious and intellectually honest.
Perhaps the most powerful decision in the entire book is what Junger leaves out. Throughout almost the entire text he remains invisible as a person. His private life is completely absent.
Then in a short paragraph on the very last page he briefly reveals what was happening in his own life while these walks were taking place. Suddenly the entire journey acquires a different emotional weight.
