Steinbeck, channeling my beliefs about humanity:
In uncertainty I am certain that under their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
If you remember my first post back from a long break, time is a concept I have been turning over in my mind with great frequency lately. Mr. Steinbeck recently helped me with an observation. From East of Eden:
Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy--that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all. (54)
At first I wasn't on board here, as much as I love the verb "crevassed." Eventless time does seem interminable. Ask anyone unfortunate enough to work a job they do not enjoy. We even talk about time "dragging on" during these moments. But that is not what Steinbeck is after here. During these moments time does seem interminable, but looking back in our memories we can't ground ourselves in a single event or memory worth conjuring. In that sense, then, eventless time is nothing in our memory. We can all attest to this on a basic level: there are whole months of my life I barely remember; there are days or hours or minutes that I remember with startling clarity and detail and vibrancy. Good and bad. Beautiful and ugly. Those moments that are splashed and wounded and crevassed are interminable for us because in a sense we never leave them. They have so imprinted their mark on our consciousness that we can relive them, go back into that moment, and we are free to carry it forward through our lives.
This is a value neutral judgment, I think. Sometimes we carry things forward and go back to dwell in moments best left alone. But everything dangerous comes with a reverse side of stunning beauty and possibility. It is the risk we run, both being human and inhabiting time. For my part it is worth the risk.
