Travels With Charley: In Search of America

by John Steinbeck

We can stand anything God and Nature throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”

Over and over I thought we lack the pressures that make men strong and the anguish that makes men great. The pressures are debts, the desires are for more material toys and the anguish is boredom. Through time, the nation has become a discontented land.

It is my experience that in some areas Charley is more intelligent than I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can’t read, can’t drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he was now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing of an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?

She wasn’t happy, but then she wasn’t unhappy. She wasn’t anything. But I don’t believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing.

St. Paul has just closed his book. His finger marks the last page read and on his face are the wonder and will to understand after the book is closed. Maybe understanding is possible only after. Years ago when I used to work in the woods it was said of lumber men that they did their logging in the whorehouse and their sex in the woods. So I have to find my way through the exploding production lines of the Middle West while sitting alone beside a lake in northern Michigan.

He whirled his plastic glass in his hand and regarded the rinse of whisky left in it, a gesture often designed to draw emptiness to the attention of a host. I uncorked the bottle. “No,” he said. “No more for me. I learned long ago that the most important and valuable of acting techniques is the exit.” “But I’d like to ask more questions.” “All the more reason for the exit.” He drained the last drop. “Keep them asking,” he said, “and exit clean and sharp. Thank you and good afternoon.”

Again it might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

And we sang the southern county anthem, “There wass a jung guy from Jolón— got seek from leeving halone. He wan to Keeng Ceety to gat sometheeng pretty—Puta chingada cabrón.”