the greater the urge …
the need, the will, the hunger
to be somewhere else
What are roots and how long have we had them?
If our species has existed for a couple of million years, what is its history?
Our remote ancestors followed the game, moved with the food supply, and fled from evil weather, from ice and the changing seasons.
Then after millennia beyond thinking they domesticated some animals so that they lived with their food supply.
Then of necessity they followed the grass that fed their flocks in endless wanderings.
Only when agriculture came into practice—and that’s not very long ago in terms of the whole history—did a place achieve meaning and value and permanence.
But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.
Thus it was that one man wanted ownership of land and at the same time wanted servitude because someone had to work it.
Roots were in ownership of land, in tangible and immovable possessions.
In this view we are a restless species with a very short history of roots, and those not widely distributed.
Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need.
Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.
From Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck (Bantam, New York, 1962).
But land is a tangible, and tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.
Tangibles have a way of getting into few hands.
Mr. Steinbeck ends his book with this thought.
With all the polls and opinion posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other, I want to be very clear about one thing.
… it is a troubled place and a people caught in a jam. And I know that the solution when it arrives will not be easy or simple. I feel that the end is not in question. It’s the means—the dreadful uncertainty of the means.
Watching, looking and waiting as each little bit of news dribbles out.
I sense the urge of need and I know that my will, my hunger is to be … somewhere else.
No Haiku For You 