Azeril对《The Grapes of Wrath》的笔记(1)

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Az.: 刻画了一个以大萧条时代为背景的家庭故事 主要篇幅都聚焦在这一段漫长的流浪之路 从无望 迟疑 希冀到清醒 一个家也随之陷入分崩离析的边缘。有人死去 有人受伤 有人挨饿 悲观 逃离 有人心怀希望 奋力抗争 或是在被压榨和侮辱中徒然地坚持 但终究是 继续着生活 在异域他乡 在美好的土地与绝望的境地之中。斯坦贝克的这部小说 在叙事上 以精炼 克制而冷淡的文字为主 即使是刻画死亡 背叛种种 也往往是近乎极致的那种轻描淡写。但那番冷淡之中 也分明看得到他内心对于那个时代陷入绝望生活的农民们的热忱 以及由此而起的不平与愤怒
>> Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.
>> “Sure—I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.”
>> The driver looked over at him, slitting his eyes, and he chewed as though thoughts and impressions were being sorted and arranged by his jaws before they were finally filed away in his brain.
>> “Been doing a job?” Again the secret investigating casualness. 
>> “guy that drives a truck does screwy things. He got to. He’d go nuts just settin’ here an’ the road sneakin’ under the wheels. Fella says once that truck skinners eats all the time—all the time in hamburger joints along the road.”
>> The driver said, “Well—that ain’t none of my business. I ain’t a nosy guy.”
“The hell you ain’t,” said Joad. “That big old nose of yours been stickin’ out eight miles ahead of your face. You had that big nose goin’ over me like a sheep in a vegetable patch.”
>> sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man’s trouser cuff or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.
>> I ain’t preachin’ no more much. The sperit ain’t in the people much no more; and worse’n that, the sperit ain’t in me no more. ’Course now an’ again the sperit gets movin’ an’ I rip out a meetin’, or when folks sets out food I give ’em a grace, but my heart ain’t in it. I on’y do it ’cause they expect it.”
>> “Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can’t keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go—off somewheres. 
>> Now they say layin’ up with a girl comes from the devil. But the more grace a girl got in her, the quicker she wants to go out in the grass.
>> ‘Why is it that when a fella ought to be just about mule-ass proof against sin, an’ all full up of Jesus, why is it that’s the time a fella gets fingerin’
>> ‘No, I don’t know nobody name’ Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people. An’ sometimes I love ’em fit to bust, an’ I want to make ’em happy, so I been preachin’ somepin I thought would make ’em happy.’
>> But Pa never did write no letters. He always says what he couldn’tell a fella with his mouth wasn’tworth leanin’on no pencil about.”
>> But—you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without sidemeat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.
>> The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.
>> The bank is something  else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.
>> No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. 
>> The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.
>> “Where the hell you s’pose he’s goin’?” said Joad. “I seen turtles all my life. They’re always goin’ someplace. They always seem to want to get there.” 
>> A large red drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east. The evening star flashed and glittered in the dusk. The gray cat sneaked away toward the open barn shed and passed inside like a shadow.
>> “Fella gets use’ to a place, it’s hard to go,” said Casy. “Fella gets use’ to a way a thinkin’, it’s hard to leave.
>> “You’re lonely—but you ain’t touched.”
>> And he was silent, his  thin lips still moving, his chest still panting. He sat and looked down at his hands in the firelight. “I—I ain’t talked to nobody for a long time,” he apologized softly. “I been sneakin’ aroun’ like a ol’ graveyard ghos’.”
>> Casy said quietly, “I gotta see them folks that’s gone out on the road. I got a feelin’ I got to see them. They gonna need help no preachin’ can give ’em. Hope of heaven when their lives ain’t lived? Holy Sperit when their own sperit is downcast an’ sad? They gonna need help. They got to live before they can afford to die.”
>> He says it’s a thing that started way to hell an’ gone back, an’ nobody seems to be  able to stop her, an’ nobody got sense enough to change her. He says for God’s sake don’t read about her because he says for one thing you’ll jus’ get messed up worse, an’ for another you won’t have no respect for the guys that work the gover’ments.
>> He stood over the fire. The hundred muscles of his neck stood out in high relief, and the firelight went deep into his eyes and  ignited red embers. He stood and looked at the fire, his face tense as though he were listening, and the hands that had been active to pick, to handle, to throw ideas, grew quiet, and in a moment crept into his pockets
>> When you’re huntin’ somepin you’re a hunter, an’ you’re strong. Can’t nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted—that’s different. Somepin happens to you. You ain’t strong; maybe you’re fierce, but you ain’t strong.
>> I could shut my eyes an’ walk right there. On’y way I can go wrong is think about her. Jus’ forget about her, an’ I’ll go right there.
>> She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they  looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty.
>> Granma and Grampa raced each other to get across the broad yard. They fought over everything, and loved and needed the fighting.
>> Noah could do all that was required of him, could read and write, could work and figure, but he didn’t seem to care; there was a listlessness in him toward things people wanted and needed. He lived in a strange silent house and looked out of it through calm eyes. He was a stranger to all the world, but he was not lonely.
>> And on the preacher’s face there was a look not of prayer, but of thought; and in his tone not supplication, but conjecture.
>> You’re not buying only junk, you’re buying junked lives. And more—you’ll see—you’re buying bitterness. 
>> To California or any place—every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. And  some day—the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And they’ll all walk together, and there’ll be a dead terror from it.
>> How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.
>> “I ain’t gonna baptize. I’m gonna work in the fiel’s, in the green fiel’s, an’ I’m gonna be near to folks. I ain’t gonna try to teach ’em nothin’. I’m gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear ’em talk, gonna hear ’em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin’ mush. Gonna hear husban’ an’ wife a-poundin’ the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with ’em an’ learn.” His eyes were wet and shining. “Gonna lay in the grass, open an’ honest with anybody that’ll have me. Gonna cuss an’ swear an’ hear the poetry of folks talkin’. All that’s holy, all that’s what I didn’ understan’. All them things is the good things.”
Ma said, “A-men.”
>> Preachin’s a kinda tone a voice, an’ preachin’s a way a lookin’ at things. Preachin’s bein’ good to folks when they wanna kill ya for it.
>> The earth contributed a light to the evening. The front of the gray, paintless house, facing the west, was luminous as the moon is. The gray dusty truck, in the yard before the door, stood out magically in this light, in the overdrawn perspective of a stereopticon.
>> The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be a part of an organization of the unconscious. They obeyed impulses which registered only faintly in their thinking minds. Their eyes were inward and quiet, and their eyes, too, were lucent in the evening, lucent in dusty faces.
>> It’s a free country.
Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it.
>> Fella in business got to lie an’ cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That’s what’s important. You go steal that tire an’ you’re a thief, but he tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.
>> The people in flight from the terror behind—strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.
>> “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done—on earth—as it is in Heaven.”
>> This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. 
>> And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.
>> If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”
>> And her eyes were on the highway, where life whizzed by.
>> Two days the families were in flight, but on the third the land was too huge for them and they settled into a new technique of living; the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression. Little by little they settled into the new life.
>> But along the highway the cars of the migrant people crawled out like bugs, and the narrow concrete miles stretched ahead.
>> “They’s a time of change, an’ when that comes, dyin’ is a piece of all dyin’, and bearin’ is a piece of all bearin’, an’ bearin’ an’ dyin’ is two pieces of the same thing. An’ then things ain’t lonely any more. An’ then a hurt don’t hurt so bad, ’cause it ain’t a lonely hurt no more, Rosasharn.
>> Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor. Pray God some day a kid can eat.
>> Casy turned his head on the stalk-like neck. “Listen all the time. That’s why I been thinkin’. Listen to people a-talkin’, an’ purty soon I hear the way folks are feelin’. Goin’ on all the time. I hear ’em an’ feel ’em; an’ they’re beating their wings like a bird in a attic. Gonna bust their wings on a dusty winda tryin’ ta get out.”
>> “I use ta think that’d cut ’er,” he said. “Use ta rip off a prayer an’ all the troubles’d stick to that prayer like flies on flypaper, an’ the prayer’d go a-sailin’ off, a-takin’ them troubles along. But it don’ work no more.”
>> Tom said, “Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.”
>> Tom said, “When a bunch a folks, nice quiet folks, don’t know nothin’ about nothin’—somepin’s goin’ on.”
>> He says a fella’s sinned if he thinks he’s sinned.
>> The dim lights felt along the broad black highway ahead.
>> The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.
>> Ma smiled. “Remember?” she said. “Remember what we’d always say at home? ‘Winter’s a-comin’ early,’ we said, when the ducks flew. Always said that, an’ winter come when it was ready to come. But we always said, ‘She’s a-comin’ early.’ I wonder what we meant.”
>> The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement. Sometimes amusement lay in speech, and they climbed up their lives with jokes.
>> And the stars down so close, and sadness and pleasure so close together, really the same thing. Like to stay drunk all the time. Who says it’s bad? Who dares to say it’s bad? Preachers—but they got their own kinda drunkenness. Thin, barren women, but  they’re too miserable to know. Reformers—but they don’t bite deep enough into living to know. No—the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything’s holy—everything, even me.
>> Wisht I knowed what all the sins was, so I could do ’em.
>> The spring is beautiful in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes, swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts. And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants.
>> “I’m learnin’ one thing good,” she said. “Learnin’ it all a time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”
>> ‘the on’y thing you got to look at is that ever’ time they’s a little step fo’ward, she may slip back a little, but she never slips clear back. You can prove that,’ 
>> Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ’cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ’less it was with the rest, an’ was whole. 
>> ‘Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif’ up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.’
>> Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. 
>> “Woman can change better’n a man,” Ma said soothingly. “Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head. Don’ you mind. Maybe—well, maybe nex’ year we can get a place.”
>> I noticed that. Man, he lives in jerks—baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk—gets a farm an’ loses his farm, an’ that’s a jerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on—changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.
>> “Hard to say,” she said. “Ever’thing we do—seems to me is aimed right at goin’ on. Seems that way to me. Even gettin’ hungry—even bein’ sick; some die, but the rest is tougher. Jus’ try to live the day, jus’ the day.”
>> And the women sighed with relief, for they knew  it was all right—the break had not come; and the break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.