Catching up on old Sierra magazines. From an unnamed Maasai man in the September/October 2016 issue:
These young Maasai children — they grow up now without ever hearing a lion roar at night. They don’t even know what a lion sounds like. Things are changing for us. Once, we Maasai were lions. Tomorrow, we might only be ants.
So much for the forces that help to jar men and boys loose, forces that have doubled in the last twenty years and are still increasing: New labor-saving machines, throwing more men out of work, new machines to make use of child labor, new machines to speed up the American pace and so turn out more cripples; rush and slack seasons, demanding more and more armies of surplus labor; the swift growth of industry, bringing to America millions of immigrants, over half of them young men who come alone; and most of all, the railroads, demanding increasing throngs of nomadic camp workers; the railroads, “the real hot circus,’’ tempting boys to the Road and giving to all kinds of hoboes easy and free means of travel. Lastly, the huge tenement hives, where year by year people are packed in tighter, where year by year life grows more nervous and tense and restless. And deep under all these conditions, responding to the chances they offer, the old human love of the Road that lies deep down in the souls of men — the “wanderlust” of humanity.
Poole, Ernest. “A Clearing-House for Tramps.” Everybody’s Magazine, vol. XVIII, no. 5, May 1908, p. 657.
Quotation from one of the strangest books I’ve read, German Winter Nights (1681) by Johann Beer. When the characters aren’t pulling off frat-level and sometimes sadistic, cruel pranks, they’re moralizing. Ludwig is one of the cruelest of the “brothers.” Here he moralizes.
What does it help us humans that we invade countries in war, lay waste to them, even bring them under our dominion? Many a person fights and defeats his outer enemy and nonetheless permits himself to be so cravenly conquered by his inner and invisible foe, who often can be driven back and away by a single pious thought. What did the miserable Veronia gain through her wantonness? Her desire was brief, her pleasure imperfect, her delight sinful, her marriage stained, her life shortened, and, what I don’t want to believe, her soul perhaps lost forever! Carnal depravity bears such fruits, and she did enjoy it because she never acknowledged the sin in which she was so frightfully lost.
Ludwig in German Winter Nights by Johann Beer
Mrs. Hale, the woman displaced by her husband’s conscientious concerns from the bucolic south of England to the industrial northern city of Milton (Manchester), has opinions about Milton and its residents. From the 2004 BBC series based on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South:
The people here don’t want learning. They don’t want books and culture. It’s all money and smoke. That’s what they eat and breathe.
Not just in 19th-century Milton.
The horse may not have thought him a “kind youth.”
I just realized (or remembered, now I think about it) Kindle has a visual quotation feature. This one refers to Tahiti, “paradise” to the early sailors who landed there and found a different and less restrictive society, not so much after a few visits.
During the annual Black Friday shopping event, Americans spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need and that don’t make them happy or happier, just poorer and unsatisfied. Then, like Charlie Brown, they wonder what happened to the spirit of Christmas.
Diane Schirf
I passed some time in Poets Corner, which occupies an end of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the abbey. The monuments are generally simple; for the lives of literary men afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have statues erected to their memories; but the greater part have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to the abbey remained longest about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes place of that cold curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze on the splendid monuments of the great and the heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure: but the intercourse between the author and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and immediate. He has lived for them more than for himself; he has sacrificed surrounding enjoyments, and shut himself up from the delights of social life, that he might the more intimately commune with distant minds and distant ages. Well may the world cherish his renown; for it has been purchased, not by deeds of violence and blood, but by the diligent dispensation of pleasure. Well may posterity be grateful to his memory; for he has left it an inheritance, not of empty names and sounding actions, but whole treasures of wisdom, bright gems of thought, and golden veins of language.
Washington Irving, “Westminster Abbey”
She’s living in a place where you take the Obama sticker off your car.
Two women discussing a friend
Desk attendant at the Flamingo:
Every now and then I used to get a resident come down and ask for a [phone] book, but not anymore.