I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.—David Lynch, Catching The Big Fish

What is a vacation and why do we go on one?

Last week I was sitting by myself in an IHOP in Cambridge, MA, eating a $5 breakfast special. Here I was, on vacation in a great big city, on a beautiful college campus, with tons of exotic sights to see…and all I wanted to do was sit in this mundane little restaurant and drink coffee and think and doodle in my sketchbook.

Idling without guilt.

It was delicious.

In the early 1890s, GK Chesterton wrote that there were 3 types of leisure:

The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.

This weekend, I encourage you to not feel pressured to fill your holiday with activities. Go someplace mundane where the coffee flows and let your mind wander. Savor it.

“When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, when I was 10, 11 years old, the books that I loved…came with maps and glossaries and timelines—books like Lord Of The Rings, Dune, The Chronicles Of Narnia. I imagined that’s what being a writer was: You invented a world, and you did it in a very detailed way, and you told stories that were set in that world.”—Michael Chabon, Interview with the AV Club

My undergrad thesis argued that world-building wasn’t just for fantasy and sci-fi writers—every tale has a setting, every tale creates a world in the reader’s mind—and it explored ways that drawing that world (visual thinking!) can lead to better fiction.

Some of my favorite “lit’ry” books are accompanied by maps.

A recent read, Donald Ray Pollock‘s short-story collection, Knockemstiff, is set in the “real” town of Knockemstiff, right outside of Chillicothe, Ohio (30 miles from where I grew up—if you keep heading north on 23 you’ll get to Circleville). The book includes a nice hand-pencilled map by artist David Cain:

Lynda Barry’s Cruddy contains four maps. Here’s two of them:

And while it was a TV show and not a book, one of my favorite fictional worlds, Twin Peaks, was drawn by David Lynch for the pitch meeting:

Some writers use previously-made maps to help create their fiction: Melville used whaling charts, Joyce used Ordnance surveys of Dublin, and Pynchon used aerial maps.

Poking around the ‘net I found maps for Faulkner’s books, Treasure Island, and of course, Tolkien.

What other favorite books of yours include maps? Let’s get a big ol’ list going in the comments!

From Nigel Holmes’ out-of-print Pictorial Maps:

Before showing the pilot script of his revolutionary show Twin Peaks to executives at ABC television, director David Lynch drew a map to give them an idea of where the action would unfold. The peaks of the title, and the town they name, are clearly visible as white-topped mountains rising out of the modeled landscape. By creating a sense of place, Lynch made the town all the more believable. A straightforward map would have been dull by comparison and might have suggested that there was something intrinsically interesting avout the geography of the place. What was much more important to convey was the mood of the story, and it’s nicely captured in Lynch’s quirky drawing. Not many maps in this book attempt to convey both a mood and data, but it can be done, and Lynch’s map shows that information can be imbued with emotion and retain its factual authority.

And more from Lynch:

We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.

From an article in Arthur Magazine:

Transcendental Meditation is the way of the householder in that it allows you to stay in the world. Some people like the recluse way and want to go into the cave, and there are mantras that will take you right out of the activity and put you into that cave. But Transcendental Meditation is a way of integrating these two worlds….In the West people think, yeah like I’m really gonna give up my dental practice and go to the cave, but you don’t have to quit dentistry. Meditate before you go to work and you’ll start liking the people that come in and you’ll start getting ideas about dentistry. Maybe you’ll invent something and get into the finer points of a cavity and honing that bad boy.

Lynch talks more about TM and The David Lynch Foundation, his attempt to bring Transcendental Meditation and Conciousness-Based Education to the children of the world, in this Newsweek interview.

Dale Cooper would approve.