The End

The story has several threads but one of the threads is that Doc needs a microscope to do his research on octopi. His friends on Cannery Row save up to buy him one in hopes that it will make him happier:

“And here they came down the chicken walk, balancing among them the tripod and long black tube. They crossed the track and the lot and they set the tripod down beside the car.

Mack cleared his throat. “Friends,” he said, “on behalf of I and the boys it gives me great pleasure to present Doc with this here.”

Doc looked at the gift – a telescope strong enough to bring the moon to his lap. His mouth fell open. Then he smothered the laughter that rose in him.

“Like it?” said Mack.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Biggest one in the whole goddam catalogue,” said Mack.Doc’s voice was choked. “Thanks,” he said. He paused, “After all, I guess it doesn’t matter whether you look down or up – as long as you look.”

A perfect ending to a tale of discontent as Doc's friends help him out of his rut. Friends are good. Friends are happiness incarnate.

Now it really is Sweet Thursday

I am not taking excerpts from the book that tell the complete story but they are chronologically correct and I think I just enjoy the descriptions and way with words and that is why I am sharing these. The last installment will be tomorrow.

“Looking backward in time, you can usually find the day it started, the day of Sarajevo, the day of Munich, the moment of Stalingrad or Valley Forge. You fix the day and hour by some incident that happened to yourself. You remember exactly what you were doing when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

There is no doubt that forces were in motion on that Thursday on Cannery Row. Some of the causes and directions have been in process for generations. There are always some people who claim they felt it coming. Those who remember it say it felt like earthquake weather.

It was a Thursday, and it was one of those days in Monterey when the air is washed and polished like a lens, so that you can see houses in Santa Cruz twenty miles across the bay and you can see the redwood trees on a mountain above Watsonville. The stone point of Fremont’s Peak, clear the other side of Salinas, stands up nobly against the east. The sunshine had a goldy look and red geraniums burned the air around them. The delphiniums were like little openings in the sky.

There aren’t many days like that anyplace. People treasure them. Little kids are likely to give off tin-whistle screams for no reason, and business men find it necessary to take a drive to look at a piece of property. Old people sit looking off into the distance and remember inaccurately that the days of their youth were all like that. Horses roll in the green pastures on such a day and hens make a terrible sunny racket.

Thursday was that kind of magic day.”

I wonder if everyday is like this for someone, somewhere? I would imagine so. To a sweet Thursday!

More on Doc

I love this book because of it captures moods with humor and accuracy. All too often I have been in this same situation as Doc:

“For days the flame burned in Doc, his phoenix thought. True, he didn’t have a proper microscope, but he had eyes, and he had, thank God, an analytic mind that could slough off sensations, emotions and pains. As he stared at the octopi his thesis took form.
…
Doc bought a package of yellow pads and two dozen pencils. He laid them out on his desk, the pencils sharpened to needle points and lined up like yellow soldiers. At the top of the page he printed: OBSERVATIONS AND SPECULATIONS. His pencil point broke. He took up another and drew lace around the O and B, made a block letter S and put fish-hooks on each end. His ankle itched. He rolled down his sock and scratched, and that made his ear itch. “Someone’s thinking about me,” he said and looked at the yellow pad. He wondered weather he had fed the cotton rats. It is easy to forget when you’re thinking.”

Feeling ambitious yet utterly stuck. I think a good deal of happiness comes from these ambitions or challenges we set for ourselves but it is so hard translating them into reality!

Sweet Thursday

I have just read Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday and I have wanted to share a few excerpts for the past two Thursdays. I can't upload the image I drew though and it is frustrating me so even though I like my posts to have an image at the top, this time, words alone will have to suffice.

There is too much to post at once so I will just have to post the joy I discovered in this book over a series of days. I forgot how much I enjoy Steinbeck. I am remembering how happy reading makes me…

From Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday:

“Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away - you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch - and you mind says "Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?" All of these, of course, are the foundation for man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. "What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?" And now we're coming to the wicked, poisoned dart: "What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?" And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay, no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.

Doc's greatest talent had been his sense of paying as he went. The finish line meant nothing to him except that he had wanted to crowd more living into the stretch. Each ended with its night; each thought with its conclusion; and every morning a new freedom arose over the eastern mountains and lighted the world. There had never been any reason to suppose it would be otherwise. People made pilgrimages to the laboratory to bask in Doc's designed and lovely purposelessness. For what can a man accomplish that has not been done a million times before? What can he say that he will not find in Lao-Tse or the Bhagavad-Gita or the Prophet Isaiah? It is better to sit in appreciative contemplation of a world in which beauty is eternally supported on a foundation of ugliness; cut out the support, and beauty will sink from sight. It was a good thing Doc had, and many people wished they had too.

But now the worm of discontent was gnawing at him.”

…