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he thought that consumerism and selfishness had begun to run rampant, destroying the community values he regarded as vital to the nation’s moral health.
a hero—whoever he might be—abandons his safe haven and pushes forward into the wilderness (or depths) in order to test himself against the odds; in the course of this testing, he either discovers his own rich resources or comes into contact with higher powers that assist him. The story inevitably involves a returning, which completes the cycle: the point being that, upon returning, the hero has been immeasurably strengthened by the knowledge gained in the course of his difficult journey.
He considered the wastefulness he saw everywhere around him and lack of caring for the environment as part of a greater malaise that seemed to have overwhelmed America.
In the Midwest, strangers seemed to talk to each other freely, without the reserve he had noticed in the Northeast.
The loss of colorful idioms, local conversational rhythms, and idiosyncratic figures of speech offended him deeply. He hated the notion of “a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.”
He wanted to know what America was thinking, although he soon enough came to believe that very little was on the mind of the average U.S. citizen.
“You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”
macrocosm of microcosm me.”
Over and over I thought we lack the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great.
the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here.
armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder.
do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in sea.
one of the very few contented people I met in my whole journey.
For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?
A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.
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.
nine people gathered in complete silence and the nine parts making a whole as surely as my arms and legs are part of me, separate and inseparable. Rocinante took on a glow it never quite lost.
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.
Joe and I flew home to America on the same plane, and on the way he told me about Prague, and his Prague had no relation to the city I had seen and heard. It just wasn’t the same place, and yet each of us was honest, neither one a liar, both pretty good observers by any standard, and we brought home two cities, two truths.
If my home town wants me in horse-blanket pins, nothing I can do is likely to change it, particularly the truth.
But to find where you are going, you must know where you are, and I didn’t.
It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There’s nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists. I highly approve of vaccination, feel it should be compulsory; rabies is a dreadful thing. And yet I found myself hating the rule and all governments that made rules. It was not the shots but the certificate that was important.
“Who’s got permanence? Factory closes down, you move on. Good times and things opening up, you move on where it’s better. You got roots you sit and starve. You take the pioneers in the history books. They were movers. Take up land, sell it, move on. I read in a book how Lincoln’s family came to Illinois on a raft. They had some barrels of whisky for a bank account. How many kids in America stay in the place where they were born, if they can get out?”
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 steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who were not content to stay at home. Wouldn’t it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency? And the fact is that we have. But that’s the short view. What are roots and how long have we had them?
It seemed to me that regional speech is in the
The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.
He wanted his pretty little wife and he wanted something else and he couldn’t have both.
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.
As the time went on I found that my reactions thickened. Ordinarily I am a whistler. I stopped whistling. I stopped conversing with my dogs, and I believe that subtleties of feeling began to disappear until finally I was on a pleasure-pain basis. Then it occurred to me that the delicate shades of feeling,
reaction, are the result of communication, and without such communication they tend to disappear. A man with nothing to say has no words.
But in the eating places along the roads the food has been clean, tasteless, colorless, and of a complete sameness. It is almost as though the customers had no interest in what they ate as long as it had no character to embarrass them.
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?
And I thought how every safe generality I gathered in my travels was canceled by another. In the night the Bad Lands had become Good Lands. I can’t explain it. That’s how it was.
Again my attitude may be informed by love, but it seemed to me that the towns were places to live in rather than nervous hives. People had time to pause in their occupations to undertake the passing art of neighborliness.
Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.
an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid.
I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
Everything was convenient, centrally located, and lonesome. I lived in the utmost luxury.
We value virtue but do not discuss it.
For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far back in geologic time as the upper Jurassic period. Fossils of these ancients have been found dating from the Cretaceous era while in the Eocene and Miocene they were spread over England and Europe and America.
Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?
To the sequoias everyone is a stranger, a barbarian.
In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me.
You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.
I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.
It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander.
Each hill looked like the one just passed. I have felt this way in the Prado in Madrid after looking at a hundred paintings—the stuffed and helpless inability to see more.
