Mal12345
Permabanned
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2011
- Messages
- 14,532
- MBTI Type
- IxTP
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
From "East of Eden" (John Steinbeck) -
"You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be—more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world—the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless.
Old men who didn’t know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the century looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost—good manners, ease and beauty?
Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word. There was a time when people kept their fly buttons fastened. And man’s freedom was boiling off. And even childhood was no good any more—not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity? A man’s mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them. An elder man might truly recall through water the delicate doctor-testing of little girls, but such a man forgets, and wants to, the acid emotion eating at the spleen so that a boy had to put his face flat down in the young wild oats and drum his fists against the ground and sob “Christ! Christ!†Such a man might say, and did, “What’s that damned kid lying out there in the grass for? He’ll catch a cold.â€
Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!"
"You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddied by the way folks wanted it to be—more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world—the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless.
Old men who didn’t know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the century looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost—good manners, ease and beauty?
Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word. There was a time when people kept their fly buttons fastened. And man’s freedom was boiling off. And even childhood was no good any more—not the way it was. No worry then but how to find a good stone, not round exactly but flattened and water-shaped, to use in a sling pouch cut from a discarded shoe. Where did all the good stones go, and all simplicity? A man’s mind vagued up a little, for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them. An elder man might truly recall through water the delicate doctor-testing of little girls, but such a man forgets, and wants to, the acid emotion eating at the spleen so that a boy had to put his face flat down in the young wild oats and drum his fists against the ground and sob “Christ! Christ!†Such a man might say, and did, “What’s that damned kid lying out there in the grass for? He’ll catch a cold.â€
Oh, strawberries don’t taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!"
