I oftentimes move so quickly from book to book that I don’t take the time to process/remember the amazing things that a given author says. “So,” I thought last night at one thirty in the morning, “Why don’t you go through Travels with Charlie and reread all the things that Steinbeck said that impressed you the first go around (i.e. the things you underlined like a good English major should).” So I did. And I loved it. And I’ve decided that’s what I’m going to do at the end of each book I read. Some people write book reviews, etc. Because I know that the people that I read are WAY smarter and more successful than I am, I’m going to refrain from commenting on their work and rather just reproduce it (and, in so doing, re-enjoy it). So here goes…
Travels with Charlie: In Search of America, by John Steinbeck copyright 1961. A Penguin Book.
(for a cursory understanding of the book and the context from which it comes, see the Wikipedia article on it)
Reason for reading it: I was in indulging in a 10-day-long trip with my wife and friends through Thailand (Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, and Bangkok) in order to understand the work of The SOLD Project and to a) understand my wife and her work better, b) see the beautiful country of Thailand and its people, and c) come face to face with the exploitation of men, women, and children in the Thai sex industry – and I thought a travel book by one of my favorite authors would be fun to read during the trip.
Quotes
1) “Once a bum always a bum” (3)
2) “A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike” (4)
3) “We do not take a trip; a trip takes us” (4)
4) “A journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it” (4)
5) “A projected journey spawns advisers in schools” (7)
6) “I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost” (9)
7) “I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation – a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unachored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every state I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move” (10)
8 ) “I also knew from thirty years in my profession that I cannot write hot in the event. It has to ferment. I must do what a friend call “mule it over” for a time before it goes down” (11)
9) “For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness” (20)
10) “Submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder”
11) “When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense or failure falls on me and I know I can never do it. This happens every time. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate and I eliminate the possibility of ever finishing” (24)
12) “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” (26)
13) “Man has to have feelings and then words before he can come close to thought and, in the past at least, that has taken a long time” (33)
14) “I’ve lived in good climate, and it bored the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate [...] For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?” (35-36)
15) “I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy” (38)
16) “I can never get used to the thousands of antique shops along the roads, all bulging with authentic and attested trash from an earlier time” (43)
17) (Speaking of Maine lobsters) “There are no lobsters like these – simply boiled, with no fancy sauces, only melted butter and lemon, they have no equals anywhere” (53)
18) “And the forest wept” (59)
19) “Everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it” (63)
20) “We Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat” (64)
21) “In establishing contact with strange people, Charley [Steinbeck's dog] is my ambassador. I release him, and he drifts toward the objective, or rather to whatever the objective may be preparing for dinner. I retrieve him so that he will no be a nuisance to my neighbors – et viola! A child can do the same thing, but a dog is better” (65)
22) “Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process [...] Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech [...] What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless” (106-107)
23) “It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us [...] The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain” (107-108)
24) “You know how you see a place and it’s just right, and you’re just tired enough. I guess you can’t help stopping” (111)
25) “There seemed to be no cure for loneliness save only being alone” (123)
26) “If manners maketh man, then manner and grooming maketh poodle” (124)
27) “The only good writer is a dead writer. Then he couldn’t surprise anyone any more, couldn’t hurt anyone any more” (134)
28) “After the comfort and the company of Chicago I had to learn to be alone again. It takes a little time” (136)
29) “Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present” (137)
30) “Only through imitation do we develop toward originality” (138)
31) “And I thought how every safe generality I gathered in my travels was canceled by another” (157)
32) “It’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it” (158)
33) “The [Montana] mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put in my agenda” (158)
34) “It seemed to me that the frantic bustle of America was not in Montana” (158)
35) “It seemed to me that the towns [of Montana] were places to live rather than nervous hives. People had time to pause in their occupations to undertake the passing art of neighborliness” (159)
36) “”But I see that, as usual, love is inarticulate. Of all the states [Montana] is my favorite and my love” (159)
37) “For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and of our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland” (161)
38) “I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple” (165)
39) “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction” (181)
40) “They [the redwood trees] are ambassadors from another time [...] For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far back in geologic time as the upper Jurassic period” (189-193)
41) “I find it difficult to write about my native place, northern California [...] I find it not one thing but many – one printed over another until the whole thing blurs” (194)
42) “Sometimes the view of change is distorted by a change in oneself. The room which seemed so large is shrunk, the mountain has become a hill” (195)
43) (With regard to population growth) “Even those people who joy in numbers and are impressed with bigness are beginning to worry, gradually becoming aware that there must be a saturation point and the progress may be a progression toward strangulation” (196)
44) “We have overcome all enemies but ourselves” (197)
45) (Talking about San Francisco) “But this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed” (198)
46) “[San Francisco] had been kind to me in the days of my poverty and it did not resent my temporary solvency” (198)
47) “Civil war is supposed to be the bitterest of wars, and surely family politics are the most vehement of venomous” (198)
48) “Carmel, begun by starveling writers and unwanted painters, is now a community of the well-to-do and the retired. If Carmel’s founders should return, they could not afford to live there, but it wouldn’t go that far. They would be instantly picked up as suspicious characters and deported over the city line” (205)
49) “The place of my origin had changed, and having gone away I had not changed with it” (205)
50) “You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory” (206)
51) “External reality has a way of not being so external at after all. This monster of a land [America], this mightiest of nations, the spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me [...] If other Americans reading this account should feel [Travels with Charlie] true, that agreement would only mean that we are alike in our Americanness” (209)
52) “In the delicate world of relationships, we are tied together for all time” (214)
53) “The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert” (214)
54) “In the desert, the dry and sun-lashed desert, is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of techniques of survival under pitiless opposition. Life could not change the sun or water or desert, so it changed itself” (217)
55) “It has been my experience that when paradox crops up too often for comfort, it means that certain factors are missing in the equation” (244)
56) (Speaking on the racial problems on the South in the early 60s) “I knew, as everyone knows, that true but incomplete statement of the problem – that an original sin of the fathers was being revisited on the children of succeeding generations” (245)
57) (Speaking on his experience outside a high school during desegregation) “Even setting this down on paper has raised a weary, hopeless nausea in me again” (260)
58) “‘The ancients placed love and war in the hands of closely related gods. That was no accident. That, sir, was a profound knowledge of man’” (264)
59) “‘If by force you make a creature live and work like a beast, you must think of him as a beast, else empathy would drive you mad. Once you have classified him in your mind, your feelings are safe’” (265)
60) (After a quality conversation) “When he went away I felt a sweetness like music, if music could pleasure the skin with a little chill” (266)
61) (Speaking of his experiences in the South in the early 60s) “So here – a little episode, a few people, but the breath of fear was everywhere” (268)
62) [Charley, his dog] doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at 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” (269)
(end)
