Travels With Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult.

So it was that I determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the larger truth.

knew that ten or twelve thousand miles driving a truck, alone and unattended, over every kind of road, would be hard work, but to me it represented the antidote for the poison of the professional sick man. And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity.

And now submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.

And could be he’s right and I’m wrong. It’s his world, not mine any more. There’s no anger in his delphinium eyes and no fear and no hatred either, so maybe it’s all right. It’s just a job with good pay and a future. I must not put my memories and my fear on him.

The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn’t want to be somewhere else—one of the very few contented people I met in my whole journey.

And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

began to formulate a new law describing the relationship of protection to despondency. A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

If he had put out fifty of them it would have been a fortune, but Lee was a humble man who didn’t care for mass production.

Knowing they were not there made me defenseless against them and perhaps more afraid.

It occurs to me that, just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.

Where the rich lead, the poor will follow, or try to.

It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren’t really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control.

was not the shots but the certificate that was important. And it is usually so with governments—not a fact but a small slip of paper.

The father, a good-looking, fair-skinned man with dark eyes, answered me. “How many people today have what you are talking about? What roots are there in an apartment twelve floors up? What roots are in a housing development of hundreds and thousands of small dwellings almost exactly alike?

Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The

Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days.

There seemed to be no cure for loneliness save only being alone.

And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of alone-ness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.

Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling, of reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear.

Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.

Can I then say that the America I saw has put cleanliness first, at the expense of taste?

If this people has so atrophied its taste buds as to find tasteless food not only acceptable but desirable, what of the emotional life of the nation? Do they find their emotional fare so bland that it must be spiced with sex and sadism through the medium of the paperback? And

There was a seedy grandeur about the man. In the time of chivalric myth this would be the beggar who turns out to be a king’s son.

Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.

One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

Everything was convenient, centrally located, and lonesome.

believe this was going on all over the country in private. It must have been only publicly that the nation was tongue-tied.

Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American.

Like most passionate nations Texas has its own private history based on, but not limited by, facts.

It is for the few to know that in the great old days of Virginia there were three punishments for high crimes—death, exile to Texas, and imprisonment, in that order. And some of the deportees must have descendants.

When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not welcome witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble.

Only yesterday a reporter had been beaten and his camera smashed, for even convinced voters are reluctant to have their moment of history recorded and preserved.

They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking.

don’t know where they were. Perhaps they felt as helpless as I did, but they left New Orleans misrepresented to the world. The crowd, no doubt, rushed home to see themselves on television, and what they saw went out all over the world, unchallenged by the other things I know are there.

“Bless you, no, sir. But to get to be people they must fight those who aren’t satisfied to be people.”

But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself.