The Wayfarer in Fiction

Wayfarism did not emerge from a vacuum. It has a literary tradition — British, humane, characterised by endurance held lightly — and a set of modern examples that arrived at the same territory independently, through story rather than argument. Both are useful. They show what the philosophy looks like when lived rather than theorised: imperfectly, under pressure, sometimes triumphantly, sometimes as a warning. Not all of it is fiction in the strict sense: Herriot is memoir lightly disguised, Tuesdays with Morrie is memoir outright, and Clarkson's Farm is a documentary. They are here because they are stories.