Dreaming is a sequel to his classic 1973 volume and chronicles Simon’s motorcycling adventures along much of the same route he traveled in his first international tour. His talk in the HSU Library Fishbowl at 3:00 p.m. will recount the delights and discontents of motorcycling across five continents and how much the planet was debased in the 30 years separating his epic sojourns.
Simon comments pithily on the lethal impacts he witnessed of overpopulation, unplanned urban growth and the arid homogenizing of world culture and architecture—whole vistas traduced by meretricious theme parks and soul-numbing, trackless block houses.
Traversing the Maghreb and the historic World War II battleground at El Alamein, he observed “miles of spectacular scenery reduced to packaged banality” in the form of look-alike holiday condos. Consigned to desert oblivion was Nazi Germany’s farthest advance in July, 1942 in a sweeping strategic maneuver to seize Alexandria, Cairo and the Suez Canal and control of North Africa, led by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Wustenfuchs” (“Desert Fox”). Simon finds that the greatest events of history are swallowed whole by man’s rapaciousness and fickle memory.
Of today’s hideous, globe-girdling slums—including the squalid favelas that swarm atop Rio de Janeiro—Simon declares, “Overpopulation must lead the human race to disaster.”
In another chapter of Dreaming, he comments on the barrenness of modernity: “Contempt for space and time characterizes the age we live in,” he sighs.
Simon, a former Fleet Street journalist and lifelong votary of London pubs, captured the attention of Northern California’s environmentalist movement with his 1994 volume The River Stops Here. It was well-received by reviewers as a compelling account of the protracted struggle to save the Eel River and head off a government move at the end of the 1960s to flood Round Valley in Mendocino County.
Despite his revulsion at what he sees as man’s murderous impact on nature and high culture, Simon closes Dreaming of Jupiter with a paean to manmade beauty. Taking a bus to Agra, he gratefully discovers the Taj Mahal has retained its entrancing loveliness. “Seeing this marbled vision of perfection floating apparently unchanged above the pools and terraces helped to shore up some of my crumbling faith in humanity.”
The general public is welcome to Simon’s April 26 appearance at Humboldt State Library.