Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.
(Here I would like to insert a little N.T.Wright thoughts on the separateness of transience and evil and how incredible it is that Steinbeck said this so well: "Evil does not consist in being transient, made to decay. There is nothing wrong with the tree dropping its leaves in the autumn. There is nothing wrong with the sunset fading away into darkness (which is the time of day I hate the most, me, not N.T.Wright) . Evil consists in none of those things; indeed, it is precisely the transience of the good creation that serves as a pointer to its larger purpose. Creation was good, but it always had a forward look. Transience acts as a God-given signpost pointing not from the material world to a nonmaterial world but from the world as it is to the world as it is meant one day to be. Without transience we might the more easily be led into idolatry (idolatry, being the evil)...There is no smooth evolutionary transition, in which creation moves up another gear into a higher mode of life. This is the traumatic, involving convulsions and contractions and the radical discontinuity in which mother and child are parted and become not one being but two." - Surprised By Hope Ch 6. And then I'd go on to say how He's got to make real men out of us. Read The Great Divorce. Men are compared to mere smudges on a window, not really a figure, not whole, not tangible, because they aren't really alive, but I think through transience we are grown into people. And then we could go into why would God do something like that to us....and that goes on...and I still don't know. This is word vomit. I'll clean it up soon, promise. Anyways - let us go on with East of Eden. Ahem.)
It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
(And I would like to insert here only that devils are always unmaking language. We are alone because we do not know how to share the glory, the beauty that is this life with one another, only sometimes. And so we are left alone with our enjoyment of our poem or song, etc. But I'm not as hopeless as Steinbeck. I think with language, and love, and prayer and God Himself....I think we're gonna be okay.)
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on the preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
(The Pharisees did this. Christians today do this. Boy. Validated by the existence of a massive standard. It's our sin nature. Our desire to be something to somebody.This is pure prose of my sin nature.)
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
THIS. This is the MOST amazing paragraph I have read in a long time. It's amazing. The Church is the only place where an individual can be fully themselves and fully a part of a system of Truth. I struggle with this because I recently have been asking a lot of questions. That will come on another day, but I just question what gives me the right to say "God did all of this to dazzle us. God forbid we ignore your glory.." Because it IS true. I believe it. Still. But in the face of another, I've got to allow them to be themselves. And I can't let myself ever believe that they are less because they don't believe it.
And I have all these theories about language learning stirring all around in my soul to the point that I can't sit still, unless, of course you decide to sit me down and ask me question after question. I'd sit for that. For now. All I'm gonna say here is, people deserve to be. To be who they are. It is very hard, but it's the most beautiful thing and they've just got to be themselves, I think. We need everyone to be who they are. God made us that way. Unique.
Yes. That's all for now.
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