★★★★☆ | Travel and Nature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Steinbeck was 58 when he took his trip in his new “RV” with his dog around the country in search of an answer to this question: “what is America today?”
He doesn’t find a satisfactory answer, but I enjoyed his musings and evocative travel writing, especially since we plan to do something similar in our little RV.
Highlights
In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico City but not at random. We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it. (Page 46)
It is very strange that when you set a goal for yourself, it is hard not to hold toward it even if it is inconvenient and not even desirable. (Page 54)
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. (Page 79)
Maybe understanding is possible only after. (Page 80)
She knew exactly what she wanted and he didn’t, but his want would ache in him all his life. After he drove away in his jeep I lived his life for him and it put a mist of despair on me. He wanted his pretty little wife and he wanted something else and he couldn’t have both.
people rarely take action on advice of others unless they were going to do it anyway …
It takes the time-stones of events to give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time.
Could that be why the sequoias make folks nervous? Those natives were grown trees when a political execution took place on Golgotha. They were well toward middle age when Caesar destroyed the Roman republic in the process of saving it. To the sequoias everyone is a stranger, a barbarian.