More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In his enforced moments of rest, he kept lifting his eyes to the sky. He could not look at the sky without his thoughts climbing very high, and sometimes that morning they almost skirted the foot of the throne. He realized that he would have given anything in this world if he could have gone home and knelt at the knees of his mother, laid his head on her lap, and tried the one thing that he had not yet tried—just the plain, old-fashioned thing of asking God for the help he had not been able to secure from man.
And then, with all the suddenness of an unexpected blow, clear on his ears came his own name, in that cold, impersonal tone of business men transacting an affair of business with an eye single to the welfare of the greatest good to the greatest number. He did not recall ever having heard his name spoken in precisely such tones before. It made him feel as if he were not a man, but merely an object.
Then he realized that quite likely death was the Great Adventure he was seeking; that in taking his fate in his own hands and walking out of the hospital and away from the provisions that were made for him by his government, he had known that he would exhaust himself speedily to such a point that his troubles would be ended in the quickest way.
Precisely why all his being had begun clamoring for the sea the minute he had gotten to his feet and made his start, Jamie did not know. He had not taken time to analyze himself or to try to find out why he wanted water, worlds of water, clean, jade-green and sky-blue and indigo-blue water, salty water, and foam, great swaths of snowy foam. He wanted to see waves, big waves, piling up high on a beach, and then he was obsessed with the ridiculous feeling, probably because he missed his morning bath, that he wanted to get in that water. Then he wanted to lie on the sand and bake in the sun and
...more
again. But he was thankful for the offer and dimly he was beginning to formulate in his mind the feeling that the world is made up of good people and bad people, of selfish people and thoughtful people, of cruel people and kind people, and it was merely a case of luck as to which kind you met when you went on a great adventure.
We know now that there are several kinds of being dead. There’s the kind where you’ve had a bad heart and you haven’t told true and you’ve taken things that didn’t belong to you, and you haven’t played the game square with God, and you haven’t had any respect for your government, and, of course, you ain’t going to look very well whether you’re dead or alive if you’ve got things like that inside you. And then, added to that, there’s accidents that might happen to anybody—lying in the water a long time and turtles is one thing, or being burned in a fire or blown up in a factory. That’s your hard
...more
He was thinking about almost anything, except himself, and that was one of the best things that had happened to him in two long years.
He did not know that he was matching forces. He did not realize that for two years the storm that wracks the soul and body of a man even to destruction had been raging in his battered breast, in his heart, in his brain. He did not know that he had dimly realized the strength, the terror, the futility of it. He did not know why he wanted to see the sky reach down and the sea rise up and do their utmost. He did not know that he wanted to compare the storm that may sweep the heart of a man with the kind of storm that may sweep the world.
One of the reasons I’d like to live is that I might go on further in what I am trying to teach that particular youngster about the keeping of bees and, incidentally, about the keeping of a soul that I happen to believe is immortal.
In fact, I have a feeling that the damaging things of this world are going to go past a mind that is fully occupied with something legitimate and constructive.
“One time I asked the Bee Master if I couldn’t see God and if I couldn’t touch Him, how I was going to know that He was here. And he said, ‘Because of the hair on a bee. ’ So that’s one of the ways you can know.
He doesn’t see any use in trying to dodge God and side-step Him and call Him ‘the Spirit of the Hive’ and Instinct and Nature and things like that. He says a great scientist, one of the best, almost went crazy trying to do that very thing. His name was Charles Darwin, and the Bee Master says C. D. would have been a heap better off if he’d been willing to put God in where He belongs. He says when God does anything ‘with such care, and puts so much thought in it, and deals out such splendid justice’ as there is in a beehive, that a wise man will just take off his hat and lift his eyes to the sky
...more
What they should have called it was the red-hot poker of scorn, the iron that can be thrust against the breast of a woman and that all her days can sear her soul and be set scorching anew at any unforeseen moment, and all because for a minute she probably loved a man so infinitely better than she loved herself that she risked her soul and lost it, so far as the world is concerned. It is a blessed thing that she did not lose it with God, for there was the Magdalene whom He forgave,
The pair of deft hands, glittering with sparkling rings, slipped under the baby and lifted it, and the mother who had it in her heart to be a mother to any baby, to all babies that needed her, sat down in the Bee Master’s chair, its first occupant since his going, and lifted the baby and held it against her breast and to her face and laughed to it and said sweet little words of utter nonsense and praised it and curved around it and cuddled it up and then paused and looked at Jamie.
“Drop flat on the ground!” shouted the Scout Master. Get on your belly and crawl! Crawl like the worm you are! I won’t turn the hose on our bees. Get down, Nebuchadnezzar, get on your belly and eat grass! Eat dirt, for all I care! Then you can start inching! You can start inching along like a poor inch worm!
