Words

 First of all apologies that my asterisked footnote appeared in sickly green and heavy type.  I had no idea that had happened - it wasn't intentional so I must have pressed the wrong button somehow.

The trouble with reading a really good writer like Steinbeck (who I wrote about yesterday whilst reading 'Travels with Charley',) is that it makes one realise just how pathetic one is at stringing words together.

Driving through 'Redwood country'  Steinbeck marvels at the beauty of the remaining giant Redwood trees - so few now remaining where there used to be thousands.

He speculates that so many have been chopped down and what a crime it was to do that.   He suggests that perhaps we don't like to be reminded that we are 'very young and callow in a world which was old when we came into it'.   And maybe a good reason for using their timber and chopping down so many of them is because there is perhaps a 'strong resistance  to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way' long after we have ceased to inhabit it.'

A genius like Steinback can say in one or two sentences exactly what the likes of me, struggling along to say what I am trying to say every time I put a post on, can take fifty times as many words and still not hit the nail squarely on the head.

Yet again I have been transported through  America with Steinbeck and Charley enjoying every minute of the ride  as though I was travelling with two good old friends.   But that is I am sure the intention of all writers of his calibre. 

Must try harder.   See you tomorrow.

** And thank you to readers who corrected me to say that the writer of   'Ann of Green Gables' lived on Prince Edward Island which is, of course, in Canada not the U.S.