Good afternoon, everyone. Hope all is well:)
To recap last week's class, the two stories read–"Breakfast," by John Steinbeck, and "The Portable Phonograph," by Walter Van Tilburg Clark– illustrate something of the existential condition of human life, its joys and satisfactions, high achievements, and ever-present dangers and anxieties, all, I dare say, born of the complexities of our physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life in connection with others and the earth itself. Strangers meet under the open sky and suspicion and wariness give way before open hospitality and generosity. Steinbeck's narrator says of the scene he encounters: "This thing fills me with pleasure. I don't know why, I can see it in the smallest detail." As dawn is breaking over the eastern mountains, he a solitary traveler, on foot, cold and hungry, comes upon a family whose campsite provides warmth and welcome, food, company, and a sustaining memory of the goodness we may find in honest, hard-working, humble people, the proverbial salt of the earth. He departs at the end, having declined their offer to "maybe get [him] on" picking cotton, but he takes with him "some element of great beauty" that refreshes him and serves as a theme of his story. Such encounters, however brief, may become in memory pillars of hope and wisdom, a wonderful page in the book of our lives.
Likewise, Clark's story is about a ragged group of cold, hungry, frail, and sick men who meet in a small earthen cave carved out of the bank of a stream to read from some leather-bound classics of literature and listen to classical recordings. The acme of human achievement is symbolized in these works, which have here been salvaged from the wholesale destruction of war. Amid the remains, the bomb craters, blasted trees, and weeds, life hangs on. The men gathered together are survivors brought together by the shared hardship of life, and their nostalgia for what was, which they can no longer take for granted. They listen to the music in a trance of exquisite memories and feelings. The protagonist, whose collection of art is sacrosanct in this setting, jealously guards it from the possibly predatory regard of his fellows. In the conclusion, he retires to his makeshift bed, watching the doorway of his hovel and clutching "the comfortable piece of lead pipe." Is he merely paranoid? Perhaps. Certainly, he will defend his possessions in hand-to-hand combat, if need be.
Essay 4 is due today, a little piece on the role of setting in a story of your choosing from the reading list.
Reading for next week: "The Black Cat," by Edgar Allen Poe, and "The Minister's Black Veil," by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Short response 5.
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