Overheard On A Saltmarsh

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  Nymph, nymph, what are your beads? Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them? Give them me. No. Give them me. Give them me. No. Then I will howl all night in the reeds, Lie in the mud and howl for them. Goblin, why do you love them so? They are better than stars or water, Better than voices of winds that sing, Better than any man's fair daughter, Your green glass beads on a silver ring. Hush, I stole them out of the moon. Give me your beads, I want them. No. I will howl in the deep lagoon For your green glass beads, I love them so. Give them me. Give them. No. - Harold Monro (1879 - 1932)

No Surrender

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"During the previous winter I had become ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whisper of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think doctors have memorized the litany. It happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, 'slow down. You're not as young as you once were.' And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-individualism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap . . .

. . . I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock of missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for small gain in yardage."

(Steinbeck, "Travels With Charley," pp. 19-20)

Travels with Charley: In Search of America

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