'the split second'

Train schedules are a matter of pride and of apprehension to nearly everyone. When, far up the track, the block signal snapped from red to green and the long, stabbing probe of the headlight sheered the bend and blared on the station, men looked at their watches and said, "On time."

There was pride in it, and relief too. The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don't believe it, we'll say, "Oh, the hell with it. What's wrong with an hour?" But it isn't silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outwards in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

It's Not an Uncommon Disease

Adam said, "I've wondered why a man of your knowledge would work a desert hill place." 

"It's because I haven't courage," said Samuel. "I could never quite take the responsibility. When the Lord God did not call my name, I might have called His name--but I did not. There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It's not an uncommon disease. But it's nice for a mediocre man to know that greatness must be the loneliest state in the world." 

"I'd think there are degrees of greatness," Adam said. 

"I don't think so," said Samuel. "That would be like saying there is a little bigness. No. I believe when you come to that responsibility the hugeness and you are alone to make your choice. On one side you have warmth and companionship and sweet understanding, and on the other--cold, lonely greatness. There you make your choice. I'm glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other? None of my children will be great either, except perhaps Tom. He's suffering over the choosing right now. It's a painful thing to watch. And somewhere in me I want him to say yes. Isn't that strange/ A father to want his son condemned to greatness! What selfishness that must be."

--John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

'It's small mining—small mining.'

"I can't tell you how to live your life," Samuel said, "although I do be telling you how to live it. I know that it might be better for you to come out from under your might-have-beens, into the winds of the world. And while I tell you, I am myself sifting memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining—small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age."

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

Her faith is a mountain

“Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.

Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings, "I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you'd take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven't even got a shovel yet.”

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

'And then—the glory—'

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

We're leaning, but we're leaning on each other.

I once asked Paw why, given that he was feeling sick that day, he was planning to go to the funeral of an old woman he didn't know well.

"Respect," he said to me, slightly annoyed that he had to explain the obvious. "That family has lived around here for a long time."

It's hard to know these things, much less find the wherewithal to behave this way, if you haven't lived in a place for years and come to make its stories part of yourself. Absence has consequences.

"When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another," writes the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry. "How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another's stories? If they do not know one another's stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now."

Those of us who have moved away are not necessarily callow and ungrateful people. We live in a time and place in which we are conditioned to leave our hometowns. Our schools tell our young people to follow their professional bliss,wherever it takes them. Our economy rewards companies and people who have no loyalty to place. the stories that shape the moral imagination of our young, chiefly by film and television, are told by outsiders who were dissatisfied and lit out for elsewhere to find happiness and good fortune.

During the decade leading up to Ruthie's death, I had spent my professional life writing newspaper columns, blog posts, and even a book, lamenting the loss of community and traditions in American life. I had a reputation as a pop theoretician of cultural decline, but in truth I was long on words, short on deeds. I did not like the fact that I saw my Louisiana family only three times a year, for a week at a time, if we were lucky. But that was the way of the world, right? Almost everyone I knew was int eh same position. My friends and I talked a lot about the fragmentation of the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass media and the erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization of religion and the leviathan state and every other thing under the sun that undermines our sense of home and permanence.

The one thing none of us did was what Ruthie did: Stay.

Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you--and it will--you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want--no, you need--to be able to say, as Mike, "We're leaning, but we're leaning on each other."

--Rod Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013)

'another alternative than to obtain the superfluities'

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous incessant and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

Liza Hamilton

“I’m late, Mother,” Samuel said.

She did not look around at him. Her spatula moved like a striking snake and the hot cakes settled their white sides hissing on the soapstone. “What time was it you came home?” she asked.

“Oh, it was late—late. Must have been near eleven. I didn’t look, fearing to waken you.”

“I did not waken,” Liza said grimly. “And maybe you can find it healthy to rove all night, but the Lord God will do what He sees fit about that.” It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

Olive

Olive had great courage. Perhaps it takes courage to raise children. And I must tell you what she did about the First World War. Her thinking was not international. Her first boundary was the geography of her family, second her town, Salinas, and finally there was a dotted line, not clearly defined, which was the county line. Thus she did not quite believe in the war, not even when Troop C, our militia cavalry, was called out, loaded its horses on a train, and set out for the open world.

Martin Hopps lived around the corner from us. He was wide, short, red-haired. His mouth was wide, and he had red eyes. He was almost the shyest boy in Salinas. To say good morning to him was to make him itch with self-consciousness. He belonged to Troop C because the armory had a basketball court.

If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)

I Believe Everything Now

He could not convince himself then, he said, in those days and months after her death, that heaven was any more than a well-intentioned deception meant to ease our own sense of foolishness, to ease pain. Despite his own years of vigilant Catholicism, despite his own mother's deathbed conversion, despite the promises he and my mother had exchanged, he could no longer see death as anything other than the void that met a used-up body, a spent mind. Not a mere moment, over which you could sail, buoyed by love, by faith, but the abyss toward which you stumbled inevitably, part of the crowd. Put out a hand, if you like, to help someone along, surround yourself, if you like, to help someone along, surround yourself, if you like, with people who love you, who owe you, whose lives you've changed, but don't expect it to make a difference. It will make no difference; eventually one after the other, every one of you will fall. 

"And now?" I asked him, both of us standing, not sitting, aware that there had been enough talking today. "Do you still feel that way now?" Aware, too, that we were edging close to it, to that embarrassing profundity he and Dan had feared, to that point at which too much had been said, but amazed, I suppose much as my father had once been amazed when his mother told him to get Billy to go out there, he's avoided it for too long--amazed at this kind of conversation at this stage of the game. A conversation, it occurred to me, that Billy's life had spurred for us as much it had once spurred it for my father and his dying mother. 

My father's eyes were a deep brown. He smiled a little, shaking his head. "Oh no," he said. "Not now." 

How lonely they all seemed to me that night, my father's family and friends, lonely souls every one of them, despite husbands and children and cousins and friends, all their hopes, in the end, their pairings and procreation and their keeping in touch, keeping track, futile in the end, failing in the end of keep them from seeing that nothing they felt, in the end, has made any difference. 

"It was only a brief loss of faith," he said. "It happens. They say it's not uncommon." And then he turned to climb the stairs on the night of the day Billy Lynch was placed in his grave. "I believe everything now," he said, his back to me. "Again." 

Of course there was no way of telling if he lied.

--Alice McDermott, Charming Billy (1998)