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 Chapter
13
I am currently reading one of the most amazing
books of all time by John Steinbeck, East of Eden. I decided
to forego a traditional journal update and provide you with
a passage from my favorite number chapter 13.
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 hi 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.
I don't know how it will be in the years to
come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world,
forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of
these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but
because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold
good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than
one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better
than one man, and bread from a huge factory I cheaper and
more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are
born in the complication of mass production, mass method is
bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other
thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered
our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that
some nations have substituted the idea collective for the
idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension
in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are
unhappy and confused.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself
these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for
and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and
it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and
spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There
are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry,
in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation
has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the
group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the
lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept
of the group have declared a war of extermination on that
preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation,
by repressions, forced direction and the stunning hammerblows
of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped,
blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species
seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring
mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in
the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the
mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this
I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which
limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what
I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern
must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which
can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand
this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve
the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts.
If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
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