Callow Resistance

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?

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Words

Then it occurred to me
that the delicate shades
of feeling, of reaction,
are the result of communication,

and without such communication
they tend to disappear.

A man with nothing to say has no words.

Can its reverse be true—a man
who has no one to say anything to
has no words
as he has no need
for words?

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Survival

And 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 the desert, so
it changed itself.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Intermeshed

I discovered
long ago
in collecting and classifying marine animals

that what I found was
closely intermeshed with
how I felt at the moment.

External reality has a way of being
not so external
after all.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Shared Presence

Having a companion fixes you
in time and that of the present, but
when the quality of alone-ness settles down,
past, present, and future
all flow together.

A memory,
a present event, and a forecast
all equally present.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Mothballed

When I went away
I had died, and so became
fixed and unchangeable.

My return caused only
confusion
and uneasiness.

Although they could not say it,
my old friends wanted me gone
so that I could take my proper place
in the pattern of remembrance—and

I wanted to go for the same reason.

Tom Wolfe was right.
You can’t go home again
because home has ceased to exist except in
the mothballs of memory.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

A Deceptive Loss

And there are
true secrets in the desert.

In the war of sun
and dryness against living things,

life has its secrets of survival. Life,
no matter on what level,
must be moist or it will
disappear.

I find most interesting the conspiracy
of life in the desert
to circumvent the death rays of the all-conquering sun.

The beaten earth appears defeated
and dead, but it only appears so.

A vast and inventive organization of living matter
survives by
seeming to have lost.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

The Journey's End

My own journey started
long before I left, and was over
before I returned.

I know exactly where
and when it was over.

Near Abingdon, in
the dog-leg of Virginia, at
four o’clock of a windy afternoon,

without warning or good-by
or kiss my foot, my journey went away and
left me stranded far from home.

I tried to call it back, to catch it up—
a foolish and hopeless matter,
because it was definitely
and permanently over and finished.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)