For today’s Wordsmith Wednesday since I’ve about exhausted the poems I have here on my computer, and to be honest, haven’t been writing poetry any more, I’m going to share a journal entry from 1991, the year after I graduated from college and when I was living with my parents. I may do this from time to time and pretty much, I’ll present them as they appeared in my journal. In this journal entry, I provide excerpts from Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, which if you haven’t read, you should. It is one of those books that still remains in my mind, even after 17 years.
Journal Entry 07 02 91
Today after many wasteful nights of TV and radio, not writing a single poem, I have resigned myself to a book I have been trying to read for a little while “Travels with Charley,” by John Steinbeck. And finally here the next day the third of July 1991 I finish it. Now I want to record sections, paragraphs, and sentences I found particularly noteworthy. Why? Because I am bored and have nothing else to do this week.
from pp. 113-114:
There was a time not too long ago when a man put out to sea and ceased to exist for two or three years or forever. And when the covered wagons set out to cross the continent, friends and relations at home might never hear from the wanderers again. Life went on, problems were settled, decisions were taken. Even I can remember when a telegram meant just one thing — a death in the family. In one short lifetime, the telephone has changed all that. If in this wandering narrative I seem to have cut the cords of family joy, of junior’s current delinquency and junior Junior’s new tooth, of business triumph and agony, it is not so. Three times a week from some bar, supermarket or tire-and-tool cluttered service station, I put calls through to New York and reestablished my identity in time and space. For three or four minutes I had a name, and the duties and joys and frustrations a man carries with him like a comet’s tail. It was like dodging back and forth from one dimension to another, a silent explosion of breaking through a sound barrier, a curious experience, like a quick dip into a known but alien water.
from pp. 136-137:
…And I made some notes on a sheet of yellow paper on the nature and quality of being alone. These notes would in the normal course of events have been lost as notes are always lost, but these particular notes turned up long afterward wrapped around a bottle of ketchup and secured with a rubberband. The first notes says: “Relationship Time To Aloneness.” And I remember about that. 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.
from page 179:
After Spokane, the danger of early snows had passed, for the air was changed and mulsed by the strong breath of the Pacific. The actual time on the way from Chicago was short, but the overwhelming size and variety of the land, the many incidents and people along the way had stretched time out of all bearing. For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time, stone of events to give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.
from page 205:
You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.
from pp. 212-213:
At night in this waterless air the stars come down just out of reach of your fingers. In such a place lived the hermits of the early church piercing to infinity with unlittered minds. The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert. The quiet counting of the stars, and observation of their movements, came first from desert places. I have known desert men who chose their places with quiet and slow passion, rejecting the nervousness of a watered world. These men have not changed with the exploding times except to die and to be replaced by others like them.
And always there are mysteries in the desert, stories told and retold of secret places in the desert, mountains where surviving clans from an older clan waiting to re-emerge. Usually these groups guard hidden treasures from the waves of conquest, the golden artifacts of an archaic Montezuma, or a mine so rich that its discovery would change the world. If a stranger discovered their existence, he is killed or so absorbed that he is never seen again. These stories have an inevitable pattern untroubled by the question, if none return, how is it known what is there? Oh, it’s there all right, but if you find it, you will never be found.
The one thing that always stayed with me about that book was toward the end, where he explains that at a certain point a trip stops being an adventure and becomes simply ‘getting home’. I remember it because it was the first time I think I’d ever read something that articulated that sadness and anxious completion I experienced toward the end of just about all of my rambles in this big ol’ world. I always suspected the anxiousness comes from the uncertainty over how the experience informs the path we’re on, and whether it speaks to us about changes in direction we need to make.
First: THANK YOU for updating your RSS feed so it displays your whole post instead of a snippet.
Second: I read “Travels with Charley” about five or six years ago and liked it until the end, when it appears Johnnie there got bored with his trip and just decided to go home. Apparently he also got bored writing his book. Or else some editor was harassing him too much. I was disappointed with the lack of ending or completeness to the story.
Third: My sister recommended I read “Travels with Charley,” since that is the story that inspired her to move to New Zealand. And now she has a family there that I have never met.