Tag Archives: Steinbeck

Excerpted: Travels with Charley

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From John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America

  •  “American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.”
  • “He said bitterly, ‘If anywhere in your travels, you come on a man with guts, mark the place. I want to go to see him. I haven’t seen anything but cowardice and expediency. This used to be a nation of giants. Where have they gone?…’  ‘Must be somewhere,’ I said… ‘There used to be a thing or commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone….Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln….’ I remember retorting, ‘Maybe the People are always those who used to live the generation before last.’”
  •  “Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?”
  • “But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself…I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”
  • “…all the polls and opinion posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other…”

Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley: In Search of America. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

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When the Frost is on the Punkin

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John Everett Millais, "Autumn Leaves,"1855-56. Manchester City Art Galleries.

“For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?” John Steinbeck

In honor of Autumn, October, and Halloween, I’ve been re-reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962). I usually do this because there’s something so perfectly fall-like about the first half of Part Two. “The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.” And so I wanted to share this, the Millais painting, and the short list of atmospherically perfect things to dip into on a crisp October day, or better, a brisk All Hallows’ Eve.

With a nod to Indiana, James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost is on the Punkin.”

For poison and pathos and the ability to stick in one’s head, “Where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son?” Anonymous child ballad, “Lord Randal (Randall).”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark.”

Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman.” For cadence, but mostly for this:

“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees / The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas…”

Happy Halloween. Happy Autumn.

Rocinante

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Bloom where you're planted.

Someone planted a horse on the south side of downtown Indianapolis, which pleases me. It’s right across from a Burger King, which may or may not please the horse. Smack in the middle of an area that has its share of decrepitude, where children in dirty diapers roam in front of squalid, blighted buildings while adults sit on porches not attending them; where cement crumbles and weeds are never pulled and the street in summer smells a bit like hopelessness, there is now a gift horse with no name.

So I’ve been calling her “Rocinante.” And how pleased was I, after naming her, to find out that the name means “high-sounding and meaningful name of what she has been, when she was nag, before what is now?” And pleased that this could be a symbol of attention, affection even, for areas of the city that could use some elevation; a symbol for the area itself and the hope that it, too, could eventually be lifted and need something to remind it of what it “has been…before what is now.”