ePlaya

I came across "Waiting For The Morning Train - An American Boyhood", by Bruce Catton who is acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of American history, this weekend in the very act of pondering the American Dream theme. For the second time in my life, this book seemed to find me. If you haven't read this utterly relevant book, I recommend it and if you have, I'd love to hear what you thought. I posted excerpts in another thread, but, here's the one that strikes me the most:

"It is fairly easy for man to assert his mastery over his earthly environment, but once he has asserted that mastery he has to go on exercising it no matter where the exercise takes him. Invent a simple device like the automobile, to get you from here to there more quickly than you could go without it; before long you are in bondage to it, so that you build your cities and shape your countryside and reorder your entire life in the light of what will be good for the machine instead of what will be good for you."

-c

I am an avid reader but have never heard of this author. Not shocking since I normally stick to satire. What is the book about?

It's basically his memoir about being an American. He was born in 1899 and talks about the development and destruction of the natural resources of Michigan in the 19th century. He's not preachy, political, hyperbolic or angry, which is perhaps his strength because you immediately trust him. Just like his Civil War stuff, you get a sense that he's playing fair.

Catton described history, civilization and urban centers such as Detroit as that which happens in the chronological trough--the low tide--between ice ages:

"First there was the ice; two miles high, hundreds of miles wide and many centuries deep. It came down from the darkness of the world, and it hung over the eaves, and our Michigan country lay along the line of the overhang. To be sure, all of the ice was gone. It had melted, they said, ten thousand years ago; but they also pointed out that ten thousand years amounted to no more than a flick of the second hand on the geologic time clock..."

When I was a boy my grandfather told me that Mt. Hood would eventually erupt again, so I eyed the mountain with suspicion and spent a few nights dreaming of running from molten lava. (Rodan, dinosaurs, the usual.) Similarly, Catton described being a boy and checking out his bedroom window looking for the glaciers coming back down to gobble him up.

"There was a hint, at times, when the dead winter wind blew at midnight, that the age of ice might some day return, sliding down the country like a felt eraser over a grade school blackboard, rubbing out all of the sums and sentences that had been so carefully written down; leaving, barely legible, a mocking quod erat demonstrandum."

Also, he wrote this:

"To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it -- this is a hard lesson."

-Chris

Alright I am convinced I will purhcase the book right now since I have been looking for some reading material.

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My baby takes the morning train he works from 9 to 5 and then he takes another home again....




soorrrryyyy every time I read the title of this tread I think of that Song

ohhhh I'm showing my Age....

It's an evocative phrase.
So are you.

Which makes me ask, will the Book Mobile camp be returning this year.They are always one of my favorites. Last year I brought a box of donation books and will do so again if I know they'll be there.