traven jungle series
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Cotton-Pickers, P. 100 "In some countries pickets are respectable, law-abiding citizens who believe in authority. They don't talk much, and when a policeman says 'Stand back! You're blocking traffic!' they move at once, as if the police paid them and not the other way around."
The Cotton-Pickers, P.
The Carreta, P. 129 - " ... His thoughts had no bias. He could attack anything whithout prejudice and without being hindered by what others before him had said or thought about it. He drew his conclusions from naked circumstance and from his own experience. He saw things and happenings not as someone else had described them, but as they were or seemed to him to be."
The Carreta, P. 130 - " ... He was an example of the wisdom of the Church in gathering its flock together while the child is still a child and takes everything literally, without the faculty of thinking for himself and separating the possible from the probable and the impossible from the symbolical. Whatever is put into a child's mind before he can think and judge remains implanted there and entwines itself as years go on with the romance of adolescence; and since the grown man does not like to vex his mother who taught him all these fairy tales, he gives his assent to them all; and growing up to become a useful member of society he looks on with all the satisfaction of sentimental reminiscence when his wife tells his own children the same stories and teaches the children to believe them. The Church thrives and prospers because, like Communism, it makes sure of the new generation in good time."
The Carreta, P. 198 - "The more poor and hunger-stricken people there are in the world the greater is the profit of all those who know how to exploit their poverty and grow rich on their labors. An empty belly and torn shirt produce the willing worker, who neither winces nor jibs, for his belly cries aloud and his body craves warmth and clothing. It is the Church that prospers, and with it all those whose rule is: Keep the people religious, for religion is our best safeguard."
The Carreta, P. 259 - "Fate is incontestable - and far more so for an Indian than for a European, who lives under the influence of many conflicting philosophies, from among which he selects the one which promises him the best return on the most harmonious existence. The Indian is not so happily situated. For him fate is the decision from which he cannot escape and against which he does not even fight."
The Carreta, P. 224 - "And when he thought all this over, he only took a stronger fancy to her. Never mind a girl's past when time presses and nothing better offers. After a while it is always found that it makes no real difference. Any woman may be the right one and any can be intolerable, whatever her past may have been. A woman is far less influenced by her past than a man by his. A man is too much inclined to be pedantic, moral, and respectable through and through, to be plagued by his conscience, and to sacrifice everything, including his wife, to his narrow-minded and strait-laced respectability. If you leave out the dessicated holy women and withering spinsters, a man is far more of an intolerable and stinking pharisee than a woman."
The Bridge In The Jungle - "Aside from the fact that philosophy actually pays if you know how to handle it right, experience has taught me that traveling educates only those who can be educated just as well by roaming around their own country. By walking thirty miles anywhere in one's own home state, the man who is open-minded will see more and learn more than a thousand others will by running round the world. A trip to a Central American jungle to watch how the Indians behave near a bridge won't make you see either the jungle or the bridge or the Indians if you believe that the civilization that you were born into is the only one that counts. Go and look around with the idea that everything you learned in school and college is wrong."
