Learning from steinbeck

As I passed through or near the great hives of production—Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron, Toledo, Pontiac, Flint, and later South Bend and Gary—my eyes and mind were battered by the fantastic hugeness and energy of production, a complication that resembles chaos and cannot be. So might one look down on an ant hill and see no method or direction or purpose in the darting hurrying inhabitants. What was so wonderful was that I could come again to a quiet country road, tree-bordered, with fenced fields and cows, could pull up Rocinante beside a lake of clear, clean water and see high overhead the arrows of southing ducks and geese. There Charley could with his delicate exploring nose read his own particular literature on bushes and tree trunks and leave his message there, perhaps as important in endless time as these pen scratches I put down on perishable paper. There in the quiet, with the wind flicking tree branches and distorting the water’s mirror, I cooked improbable dinners in my disposable aluminum pans, made coffee so rich and sturdy it would float a nail, and, sitting on my own back doorsteps, could finally come to think about what I had seen and try to arrange some pattern of thought to accommodate the teeming crowds of my seeing and hearing.
I’ll tell you what it was like. Go to the Ufizzi on Florence, the Louvre in Paris, and you are so crushed with numbers, once the might of greatness, that you go away distressed, with a feeling like constipation. And then when you are alone and remembering, the canvases sort themselves out; some are eliminated by your taste or your limitations, but others stand up clear and clean. Then you can go back to look at one thing untroubled by the shouts of the multitude. After confusion I can go into the Prado in Madrid and pass unseeing the thousand pictures shouting for my attention and I can visit a friend—a not large Greco, San Pablo con un Libro. St. Paul has just closed the book. His finger marks the last page read and on his face are the wonder and will to understand after the book is closed. Maybe understanding is possible only after.

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (pp.108-9)

If we are not careful, I think the conversations and experiences of our lives —even the meekest—crowd together in meaningless traffic. When we do not take ourselves into solitude, these things become like boxes of unsorted family photographs, present in one sense but forgotten in the dusty attic space of the mind.

Entering the quietness of a sanctuary inspires thought about the holy artifacts that fill it.
So with ourselves, entering into solitude consecrates the words and images that live there.
In turn, these small conversations and experiences teach us, and build within us an ever-deeper desire to learn from the grace of the humdrum and the ordinary.

In the madness of the modern world, we need solitude, because pictures do not frame themselves.