To a God Unknown

Key Takeaways

Highlights imported 2026-09-13 from Kyle’s hand-exported notes (94 highlights, 11 notes). Key takeaways and synthesis to come.

John Steinbeck’s 1933 novel of Joseph Wayne and his homestead in the Salinas Valley. Listed on Kyle’s Roam “Books Read” page without a year; confirmed finished in 2026.

Connections

No cross-book interconnections identified yet.

Highlights

• Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969)

  Kyle: Look it up

• More than that, however, throughout Steinbeck’s life, writing was all things to him-a purely enjoyable activity, a sustaining addiction, a way of establishing and maintaining personal and economic identity, and perhaps most of all, a habit of being, a necessary condition of existence: “As long as [I] can eat and write more books, that’s all I require,” he stated in November 1933.
• Steinbeck’s parents were proper, civic-minded citizens in Salinas, a predominantly conservative agricultural community toward which Steinbeck exhibited antipathy for most of his adult life. Writing was his ticket out of town, though once gone he remained in close contact with his family. (Like Joseph Wayne, Steinbeck always chafed between the desire to be “at home” and the need to be independent and court adventure; metaphorically speaking, writing fulfilled both urges.
• Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West

  Kyle: Look it up

• Despite frequent lapses of self-confidence, on his way to becoming a full-fledged novelist Steinbeck relied upon little more than enormous dedication and commitment, unflagging endurance and independence, strong convictions, sincere intentions, an honest desire to improve, and a blistering capacity for selfcriticism. To these aspects of his talent, he was fortunate to add the support of his family and the generosity and goodwill of several trustworthy friends.
• More importantly, Edith Ronald Mirrielees, Steinbeck’s creative-writing professor in English 136, instilled in him an extraordinaryand lifelong-awareness that there was no “magic formula,” no “secret ingredient,” for writing “effective” fiction except experience, the desire to communicate, reverence for precise language, a terse, lean style, and plenty of discipline and humility.
• Steinbeck considered Cup of Gold “an immature experiment” necessary to purge a beginning novelist’s enthusiasms and to sweep “all the Cabellyo-Byrneish preciousness out for good.”
• From 1929 through 1934, when Steinbeck was struggling to establish confidence and credibility, and trying to perfect a tighter style, he wrote constantly, but with mixed success; more often than not he wrote only for himself, but at other times he labored with an eye on the marketplace, such as it was in the early stages of the Depression.
• “Fine artistic things seem always to be done in the face of difficulties, and the rocky soil, which seems to give the finest flower, is contempt. Don’t fool yourself,” he informed fellow novelist George Albee in 1931, “appreciation doesn’t make artists. It ruins them. A man’s best work is done when he is fighting to make himself heard, not when swooning audiences wait for his paragraphs.”
• Even The Grapes of Wrath, his most important fictional achievement, and arguably one of the world’s great novels, owes as much to the mythopoeic legacy of nineteenth-century American romanticism and to the experimental techniques of modernist cinema as it does to the rigorous process of conducting field research among California’s Dust Bowl migrants, upon which Steinbeck built his convincing vision.
• The “profound and dark and strong” libidinous “streams” of the unconscious in every human being had become the locus of his interest, he admitted to Wilhelmson in August 1933; in The Pastures of Heaven and To a God Unknown, Steinbeck defined reality to include seen and unseen, physical and metaphysical, quotidian and psychological, elements. His characters follow “a trail of innumerable meanings” toward what Joseph Wayne tells his wife is the undistorted real,” the alluring reality behind reality. This novel, then, inscribes a related web in which the conscious life is affected by the unconscious, and the literal, denotative properties of language are interpenetrated by symbolic, connotative values. Steinbeck’s goal, writes his biographer, Jackson Benson, was to make people “see the whole as it really is.”
• From an early stage of his career, Steinbeck exhibited a special affinity with and-like Joseph Wayne-an enormous hunger toward this unique part of his native state. In 1933 Steinbeck told Albee, “I think I would like to write the story of this whole valley, of all the little towns and all the farms and the ranches in the wilder hills. I can see how I would like to do it so that it( would be the valley of the world.” Steinbeck’s gaze covered an area from Santa Cruz and Watsonville on the north, to King City and Jolon on the south; westward, Steinbeck’s country was bounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Lucia Mountains, and to the east by the Gabilan Mountains. That slice of northern California is now popularly known as “Steinbeck Country.”
• Philosopher John Elof Boodin’s axiom that “the laws of thought must be the laws of things”-one of Steinbeck’s favorite quotations-has special resonance here and underscores the novelist’s view of the human body as text, the text as body, on which are written the defining struggles of desire, as well as the intricate difficulties of representation.
• “You haven’t any place you know until you make one,” Steinbeck informed George Albee in 1932. “And if you make one, it will be a new one. Forget about genius and write books. Whatever you write will be you.”
• You see I write with a pen for five days of the week and on saturday and sunday I type and revise the pages I have written.
• “The land is being taken,” Joseph said doggedly. “The century is three years gone. If I wait, the good land might all be taken. I’ve a hunger for the land, sir,” and his eyes had grown feverish with the hunger.

  Kyle: Urgency of youth

• The winter came soon, with deep snow, and the air was frozen to needles. For a month Joseph wandered about the house, reluctant to leave his youth and all the strong material memories of his youth, but the blessing had cut him off. He was a stranger in the house and he felt that his brothers would be glad when he was gone. He went away before the spring had come, and the grass was green on the hills in California when he arrived.
• As he rode, Joseph became timid and yet eager, as a young man is who slips out to a rendezvous with a wise and beautiful woman. He was half-drugged and overwhelmed by the forest of Our Lady. There was a curious femaleness about the interlacing boughs and twigs, about the long green cavern cut by the river through the trees and the brilliant underbrush. The endless green halls and aisles and alcoves seemed to have meanings as obscure and promising as the symbols of an ancient religion.
• The past, his home and all the events of his childhood were being lost, and he knew he owed them the duty of memall of him if he were not careful.
• Two miles away he could see, beside a gigantic lonely oak, the white speck of his tent pitched and left while he went to record his homestead. A long time he sat there. As he looked into the valley, Joseph felt his body flushing with a hot fluid of love. “This is mine,” he said simply, and his eyes sparkled with tears and his brain was filled with wonder that this should be his. There was pity in him for the grass and the flowers; he felt that the trees were his children and the land his child. For a moment he seemed to float high in the air and to look down upon it. “It’s mine,” he said again, “and I must take care of it.”
• The hunger in his eyes became rapaciousness as he looked down the long green valley. His possessiveness became a passion. “It’s mine,” he chanted. “Down deep it’s mine, right to the center of the world.” He stamped his feet into the soft earth.
• Juanito glared and touched his fingers to a long knife in his belt, but Romas only laughed and turned to Joseph. “Juanito tells himself, Some time I’ll kill somebody with this knife.’ That’s the way he keeps feeling proud. But he knows he won’t, and that keeps him from being too proud.
• “It’s a lie, Mr. Wayne. One lie is like another. If you lie, he’ll tell another lie. In a week he’d be the cousin of the Queen of Spain. Juanito, here, is a teamster, a damn good one. I can’t let him be a prince.”
• “Romas,” he said, “the grass is good here, the soil is rich and free. It needs only lifting with a plow. Why was it left, Romas? Why didn’t anyone take it before this?” Romas spat his cigarette stump at the fire. “I don’t know. People are coming slowly to this country. It’s off the main road. This would have been taken, I guess, but for the dry years. They set the country back a long time.” “Dry years? When were the dry years?” “Oh, between eighty and ninety. Why, all the land dried up and the wells went dry and the cattle died.” He chuckled. “It was dry enough, I tell Half the people who lived here then had to move you. Those who could, drove the cattle inland to the San Joaquin, where there was grass along the river. The cows died along the road, too. I was younger then, but I remember the dead cows with swelled-up guts. We shot at them and they went down like punctured balloons, and the stink would knock you down.” “But the rain came again,” Joseph said quickly. “The ground is full of water now.”o” isto banisiqu came after ten years. Floods of it came. Then “Oh, yes, the rain the grass came up again and the trees were green. We were glad then, I still remember it. The people down in Nuestra Señora had a fiesta in the rain, only a little roof over the guitar players to keep the strings dry. And the people were drunk and dancing in the mud.
• Joseph took the letter and walked slowly away. He knew what it was. He had been expecting it for some time. And the land seemed to know what it was, too, for a hush had fallen over the grass flats, the meadowlarks had gone away, and even the linnets in the oak tree had stopped their twittering. Joseph sat down on a lumber pile under the oak and slowly tore open the envelope. It was from Burton. “Thomas and Benjy have asked me to write to you,” it said. “The thing we knew must happen has happened. Death shocks us even when we know it must come. Father passed to the Kingdom three days ago. We were all with him at the last, all except you. You should have waited.
• Joseph dropped the letter on the ground and put his forehead down in his hands. His mind was inert and numb, but there was no sadness in him. He wondered why he was not sad. Burton would reproach him if he knew that a feeling of joy and of welcome was growing up in him. He heard the sounds come back to the land. The meadowlarks built little crystal towers of melody, a ground squirrel chattered shrilly, sitting upright in the doorway of his hole, the wind whispered a moment in the grass and then grew strong and steady, bringing the sharp odors of the grass and of the damp earth, and the great tree stirred to life under the wind. Joseph raised his head and looked at its old, wrinkled limbs. His eyes lighted with recognition and welcome, for his father’s strong and simple being, which had dwelt in his youth like a cloud of peace, had entered the tree.
• That night he wrote a letter to his brothers: “There’s land untaken next to mine. Each of you can have a hundred and sixty acres, and then we’ll have six hundred and forty acres all in one piece. The grass is deep and rich, and the soil wants only turning. No rocks, Thomas, to make your plough turn somersaults, no ledges sticking out. We’ll make a new community here if you’ll come.”
• Thomas understood animals, but humans he neither understood nor trusted very much. He had little to say to men; he was puzzled and frightened by such things as trade and parties, religious forms and politics. When it was necessary to be present at a gathering of Thomas understood animals, but humans he neither understood nor trusted very much. He had little to say to men; he was puzzled and frightened by such things as trade and parties, religious forms and politics. When it was necessary to be present at a gathering of people he effaced himself, said nothing and waited with anxiety for release. Joseph was the only person with whom Thomas felt relationship; he could talk to Joseph without fear.
• She automatically took charge of all children who came near her. Burton’s two children recognized her authority as far more legally constituted than the changeable rules their own soft mother made, for the laws of Rama never changed, bad was bad and bad was punished, and good was eternally, delightfully good. It was delicious to be good in Rama’s house.
• Perhaps because he had received the blessing, Joseph was the unquestioned lord of the clan. On the old farm in Vermont his father had merged with the land until he became the living symbol of the unit, land and its inhabitants. That authority passed to Joseph. He spoke with the sanction of the grass, the soil, the beasts wild and domesticated; he was the father of the farm. As he watched the community of cabins spring up on the land, as he looked down into the cradle of the firstborn-Thomas’ new child-as he notched the ears of the first young calves, he felt the joy that Abraham must have felt when the huge promise bore fruit, when his tribesmen and his goats began to increase. Joseph’s passion for fertility grew strong.
• I’ve always had a curious feeling about father. He was so completely calm. He wasn’t much like other fathers, but he was a kind of a last resort, a thing you could tie to, that would never change. Did you feel like that?”
• I just do the things I do, I don’t know why except that it makes me happy to do them. After all,” he said lamely, “a man has to have something to tie to, something he can trust to be there in the morning.”
• In Monterey there lived and worked a harness-maker and saddler named McGreggor, a furious philosopher, a Marxian for the sake of argument. Age had not softened his ferocious opinions, and he had left the gentle Utopia of Marx far behind. McGreggor had long deep wrinkles on his cheeks from constantly setting his jaw and pinching his mouth against the world. His eyes drooped with sullenness. He sued his neighbors for an infringement of his rights, and he was constantly discovering how inadequate was the law’s cognizance of his rights. He tried to browbeat his daughter Elizabeth and failed as miserably as he had with her mother, for Elizabeth set her mouth and held her opinions out of reach of his arguments by never stating them. It infuriated the old man to think that he could not blast her prejudices with his own because he did not know what they were.
• The profession of school teaching was something more than childinstructing to a girl of spirit. When she turned seventeen she could decent means it was a adventuring; take county examinations and of leaving her home, and her town where people knew her too well; a means of preserving the alert and shatterable dignity of a young girl. To the community where she was sent she was unknown and mysterious and desirable. She knew fractions and poetry; she could read a little French and throw a word of it into conversation.

  Kyle: That’s not why Helen Laney taught; she never tried to leave home.

• “I know I’m doing it all wrong,” he said. “I don’t know other way. You see, Miss McGreggor, I’m afraid I might get confused and embarrassed. I want you to be my wife, and you must know it. My brothers and I own six hundred and forty acres of land. Our blood is clean. I think I should be good to you if I could know what you want.” He had dropped his eyes while he talked. Now he looked up and saw that she was flushing and looking very miserable. Joseph jumped to his feet. “I suppose I’ve done it wrong. Now I’m confused, but I got it out first. And now I’ll go, Miss McGreggor. I’ll come back after we’ve stopped being embarrassed.” He hurried out without saying good-bye, leaped on his horse and galloped away into the night.
• They started off over the rough wheel-tracks, and their spirits were a little damped by Benjy’s presence. Joseph leaned back over the seat. “You mustn’t drink anything, Benjy. You’ve been sick.” “Oh no, I’m going in to get a new clock.’ “Remember what I say, Benjy. I don’t want you to drink.” “I wouldn’t swallow a drop, Joe, not even if it was in my mouth.” Joseph gave him up. He knew that Benjy would be drunk within an hour of his arrival, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
• McGreggor, the saddler, was wistful when they kissed Elizabeth clumsily on the forehead. “Don’t forget your father,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be an unusual thing if you did. It’s almost a custom in these days.” 100 bas atnew sdz lie “You’ll come to the ranch to see us, won’t you, father?” “I visit no one,” he replied angrily. “A man takes only weakness and a little pleasure from an obligation.’ “We’ll be glad to see you if you come,” said Joseph. “Well, you’ll wait a long time, you and your thousand ranches. I’d see you both in Hell before I’d visit you.’
• “Joseph,” she said. “It’s a bitter thing to be a woman. I’m afraid to be. Everything I’ve been or thought of will stay outside the pass. I’ll be a grown woman on the other side. I thought it might come gradually. This is too quick.” And she remembered how her mother said, ‘When you’re big, Elizabeth, you’ll know hurt, but it won’t be the kind of hurt you think. It’ll be a hurt that can’t be reached with a curing kiss.’
• “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll go back and bring the horses through.” But when he was gone, Elizabeth cried sadly, for she had a vision of a child in short starched skirts and with pigtails down her back, who stood outside the pass and looked anxiously in, stood on one foot and then on the other, hopped nervously and kicked a stone into the stream. For a moment the vision waited as Elizabeth remembered waiting on a street corner for her father, and then the child turned miserably away and walked slowly toward Monterey. Elizabeth was sorry for her, “For it’s a bitter thing to be a child,” she thought. “There are so many clean new surfaces to scratch.”
• Rama continued: “I do not know whether there are men born outside humanity, or whether some men are so human as to make others seem unreal. Perhaps a godling lives on earth now and then. Joseph has strength beyond vision of shattering, he has the calm of mountains, and his emotion is as wild and fierce and sharp as the lightning and just as reasonless as far as I can see or know. When you are away from him, try thinking of him and you’ll see what I mean. His figure will grow huge, until it tops the mountains, and his force will be like the irresistible plunging of the wind. Benjy is dead. You cannot think of Joseph dying. He is eternal. His father died, and it was not a death.” Her mouth moved helplessly, searching for words. She cried as though in pain, “I tell you this man is not a man, unless he is all men. The strength, the resistance, the long and stumbling thinking of all men, and all the joy and suffering, too, cancelling each other out and yet remaining in the contents. He is all these, a repository for a little piece of each man’s soul, and more than that, a symbol of the earth’s soul.”
• “Make up a story,” Joseph said. “Say he slipped and fell on a knife. Try to get through with it without having a coroner out. We’ll bury Benjy tomorrow if we can.’ He smiled wearily. “The first grave. Now we’re getting someplace. Houses and children and graves, that’s home, Tom. Those are the things to hold a man down.”
• She was a teacher, Rama, and a tactful woman, for she could show Elizabeth methods of doing things about the house without seeming to criticize Elizabeth’s method.
• “Draw a cross on the ground first,” Alice explained. “And when the head is off, lay the chicken gently on the cross, and it will never flop, because the sign is holy.” Rama tried it later and found it true and ever after that she had more tolerance for Catholics than she had before.
• In the center of the triangle the good children sat. (The bad ones were at home doing nothing, for Rama knew how idleness is a punishment to a child.)
• These were good times, and Elizabeth was very happy. Joseph didn’t talk much, but she never passed him that his hand wasn’t outstretched to caress her, and she never looked at him and failed to receive a slow calm smile that made her warm and happy. He seemed never to sleep completely, for no matter what time she awakened in the night and stretched an exploring hand toward him, he took her immediately in his arms.
• But still he stood in the rain, and only when the streaks of water were running down the oak trunk did he go in. “It will be a good ” he said. “The canyon streams will be flowing before Thanksgiving.” Elizabeth sat in the big leather chair; she had put a stew to simmering on the airtight stove. She laughed when he came in, there was such a feeling of joy in the air. “Why, you’re dripping the floor, all over the clean floor.” “I know,” he said. And he felt such a love for the land and for Elizabeth that he strode across the room and rested his wet hand on her hair in a kind of benediction. “Joseph, you’re dripping water down my neck!” “I know,” he said.
• The rain continued for a week, sometimes thinning to a mist and then pouring again. The drops bent down the old dead grass, and in a few days the tiny new spears came out. The river rumbled out of the western hills and rose over its banks, combing the willows down into the water and growling among the boulders. Every little canyon and crease in the hills sent out a freshet to join the river. The watercuts deepened and spread in all the gullies.”

  Kyle: Long for water

• Joseph, with glowing eyes, stood apart. His feet moved slightly with the throbbing, and he felt tied to the dancing body, but he did not join it. He thought exultantly: “We have found something here, all of us. In some way we’ve come closer to the earth for a moment.” He was strong with a pleasure as deep as the pounding bass strings, and he began to feel a strange faith arising in him. “Something will come of this. It’s a kind of powerful prayer.” When he looked at the western hills and saw a black cloud-head, high and ominous, coming over from the sea, he knew what was to come. “Of course,” he said, “It will bring the rain. Something must happen when such a charge of prayer is let loose.” He watched with confidence while the towgrew over the mountains and stalked upward toward cloud ering the sun.
• He sat with her all evening, and went to bed with her, but when her breathing was even he crept out and slipped on his clothes. She heard him going and lay still, pretending to be asleep. “He has some business with the night,” she thought, and her mind reverted to what Rama had said. ‘If he dreams you’ll never know his dreams.’ She went cold with loneliness, and shivered, and began to cry softly.
• Elizabeth came out to wave him off, and she was glowing with health again. After her little spell of illness, she had grown beautiful and well. Her cheeks were red with coursing blood and her eyes shone with a mysterious happiness. Often Joseph, watching her, wondered what she knew or what she thought to make her seem always on the verge of laughter. “She knows something,” he said to himself. “Women in this condition have a strong warmth of God in them. They must know things no one else knows. And they must feel a joy beyond any other joy. In some way they take up the nerveends of the earth in their hands.” Joseph regarded her narrowly, and stroked his beard as slowly as an old man would.
• With her coming time, Elizabeth grew increasingly possessive of her husband. She wanted him to sit with her all day and all evening, and she complained a little when he told her of the work to be done. “I’m idle here,” she said. “Idleness loves company.” And he replied, “No, you’re working.” He could see in his mind how she was doing it. Her helpless hands lay crossed in her lap, but her bones were casting bones and her blood was distilling blood and her flesh was moulding flesh. He laughed shortly at the thought that she was idle.
• One day when they were sitting on the porch she asked abruptly, “Why do you love the tree so much, Joseph? Remember how you made me sit in it the first time I ever came out here?” She looked up to the high crotch where she had sat. to sobie sd to wo “Why, it’s a fine big tree,” he explained slowly. “I like it because it’s a perfect tree, I guess. She caught him up, then. “Joseph, there’s more than that. One night I heard you speak to it as though it were a person. You called it ‘sir’, I heard you.” He looked fixedly at the tree before he answered, and then after a while he told her how his father had died wanting to come West, and he told her about the morning when the letter came. “It’s a kind of a game, you see,” he said. “It gives me a feeling that I have my father yet.”
• “Was it a hard birth?” Thomas asked. “I came out here to keep from going in to help.’”Yes, it was hard, and Rama said it was easy. God, how the little things fight against life!”’
• Joseph’s face softened. “If it bothers you so much, I won’t do it,” he said. “And will you swear never to do it?” “No, I won’t swear. I won’t give up my thing to your thing. Why should I?”
• “No,” Joseph replied. “I won’t swear to anything that limits me, that cuts down my activity. Surely I won’t swear.”
• Joseph strolled in and leaned against the wall, under the lantern. “I’m sorry you’re going, Burton,” he said.ol of lord ado Burton arrested his curry-comb on the horse’s broad rump. “There are a good many reasons for going. Harriet will be happier in a little town where she can have friends to drop in on. We were too cut off out here. Harriet has been lonely.” “I know,” Joseph said gently, “but we’ll miss you, Burton. It will cut the strength of the family.” Burton dropped his eyes uneasily and went back to currying. “I’ve never wanted to be a farmer,” he said lamely. “Even at home I thought of opening a little store in town.” His hands stopped working. He said passionately. “I’ve tried to lead an acceptable life. What I have done I have done because it seemed to me to be right. There is only one law. I have tried to live in that law. What I have done seems right to me, Joseph. Remember that. I want you to remember that.”
• When it was gone a listlessness came over the families. They stood silently, wondering what they should do now. They were conscious that a period was over, that a phase was past. At length the children moved slowly away.
• “Something in the air made me afraid.” And as he stroked the bark, suddenly he felt cold and lonely. “This tree is dead,” his mind cried. “There’s no life in my tree.” The sense of loss staggered him, and all the sorrow he should have felt when his father died rolled in on him. The black mountains surrounded him, and the cold grey sky and the unfriendly stars shut him down, and the land stretched out from the center where he stood. It was all hostile, not ready to attack but aloof and silent and cold. Joseph sat at the foot of the tree, and not even the hard bark held any comfort for him. It was as hostile as the rest of the earth, as frigid and contemptuous as the corpse of a friend.
• Sometimes she tried to argue him out of his fear. “Don’t worry about the rain. It will come. Even if there isn’t much water this year, there will be in another year. I know this country, dear.” “But it would take so much rain. There won’t be time if it doesn’t start pretty soon. The rain will get behind in the year.”
• Joseph stepped down from the porch. He moved close to the oak tree before he realized that it was dead. “If only it were alive,” he thought, “I would know what to do. I have no counsel any more.” He walked on into the barn, expecting to find Thomas there, but the barn was dark and the horses snorted at him as he walked behind them. “There’s plenty of hay for the stock this year,” he thought. The knowledge comforted him.
• “We’ll tie the horses here and walk in,” he said. When they were afoot, he hurried ahead to the little stream. “It isn’t dry,” he called. “It isn’t down a bit.” Elizabeth walked over and stood beside him. “Does that make you feel better, Joseph?” He glanced quickly at her, feeling a little mockery in her words, but he could see none in her face. “It’s the first running water I’ve seen for a long time,” he said. “It’s as though the country were not dead while this stream is running. This is like a vein still pumping blood.”
• “This is the storm,” he thought. “This is the beginning of the thing I knew. There is some cycle here, steady and quick and unchangeable as a fly-wheel.” And the tired thought came to him that if he gazed into the pool and cleaned his mind of every cluttering picture he might come to know the cycle.
• He went to his own dark house and lighted the lamps and set fire in the stove. The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over itLife cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, “It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.”
• A mountain range extended in a long curve and on its end were five little ranges, stretching out with narrow valleys between them. If one looked carefully, there seemed to be towns in the valleys. The long curved range was clad in black sage, and the valleys ended on a flat of dark tillable earth, miles in length, which dropped off at last to an abyss. Good fields were there, and the houses and the people were so small they could be seen only a little. High up on a tremendous peak, towering over the ranges and the valleys, the brain of the world was set, and the eyes that looked down on the earth’s body. The brain could not understand the life on its body. It lay inert, knowing vaguely that it could shake off the life, the towns, the little houses of the fields with earthquake fury. But the brain was drowsed and the mountains lay still, and the fields were peaceful on their rounded cliff that went down to the abyss. And thus it stood a million years, unchanging and quiet, and the world-brain in its peak lay close to sleep. The world-brain sorrowed a little, for it knew that some time it would have to move, and then the life would be shaken and destroyed and the long work of tillage would be gone, and the houses in the valleys would crumble. The brain was sorry, but it could change nothing. It thought, “I will endure even a little discomfort to preserve this order which has come to exist by accident. It will be a shame to destroy this order.” But the towering earth was tired of sitting in one position. It moved, suddenly, and the houses million years was lost.
• Rama moved close and sat down beside him. “You loved Elizabeth.” “Yes,” he said, “I did.” “But you didn’t know her as a person. You never have known a person. You aren’t aware of persons, Joseph; only people. You can’t see units, Joseph, only the whole.”

  Kyle: Pluribus

• Since he had entered the house his senses had been boxed up in his thoughts, but now, as his body stretched and relaxed, sounds of the night became available to his ears, so that he heard the murmuring of the wind and the harsh whisper of the dry leaves in the dead oak tree. And he heard the far-off moaning of a cow. Life flowed back into the land, and the movement that had been deadened by thought started up again. He considered turning off the lamp, but his reluctant body refused the task.
• “These are the dry years?” Joseph asked sullenly. “It looks that way, Mr. Wayne.’ “Then these are the years you talked about.” “This is one of the worst I ever saw, Mr. Wayne. Another like this and there will be trouble in the family.” minni sem o megad Joseph was scowling. “I have one stack of hay left. When that is gone, what do I feed the cattle?” He took off his hat and wiped the sweat out with a handkerchief.
• “I remember when you came,” Romas said quietly. “I remember when I hauled the lumber to your place. You said the drought would never come again. All of us who live here and were born here know it will come again.”
• He rode slowly home along the banks of the dead river. The dusty trees, ragged from the sun’s flaying, cast very little shade on the ground. Joseph remembered how he had ridden out in a dark night and flung his hat and quirt away to save a good moment out of a tide of moments. And he remembered how thick and the brush had been under the trees, and how the grass of the hills bowed under its weight of seed; how the hills were heavy-coated as a fox’s back. The hills were gaunt now; here was a colony from the southern desert come to try out the land for a future spreading of the desert’s empire.

  Kyle: To be married, in life or death, to the land is a vulnerability few men, today, could stand.

• Joseph pulled his hat down and bent his head so that he might not see the picked carcass of the land.
• Joseph looked away from him in shame. “I’m failing to protect the land,” he thought sadly. “The duty of keeping life in my land is beyond my power.”

  Kyle: My God, what a raw and heartbreaking realization.

• “Christ, let’s get moving, then!” Thomas cried. “Let’s get out of this bastard valley, this double-crossing son-of-a-bitch. I don’t want to come back to it! I can’t trust it any more!”

  Kyle: Land that you loved, that bonded your family together, will also break it apart without the slightest provocation.

• “It makes me sad,” Joseph said. “I wish I could be less sad about it.”
• Joseph had been staring at the up-ended sea. “I wonder where the moisture comes from.” He pointed to the long barren sweeps that dropped to the ocean far below. “No grass is there, but here in the creases it’s as green as a jungle.” And he said, “I’ve seen the fog heads looking over into our valley. Every night the cool grey fog must lie in these creases in the mountains and leave some of its moisture. And in the daytime it goes back to the sea, and at night it comes again, so that this forest is never kept waiting, never. Our land is dry, and there’s no help for it. But here—I resent this place, Thomas.”

  Kyle: To not wonder, but to reach out and control. Reminds me of cloud seeding.

• The old man jerked his head around. “Why?” he asked excitedly. And then he grew more calm. “No, you aren’t trying to trap me. Your brother thinks I’m crazy. I know. That’s why he went to walk. But you don’t think that. You’re too wise to think that.” He looked out on the darkening sea again. “You really want to know why I watch the sun-why I kill some little creature as it disappears.” He paused and ran his lean fingers through his hair. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I have made up reasons, but they aren’t true. I have said to myself, ‘The sun is life. I give life to life’-‘I make a symbol of the sun’s death.’ When I made these reasons I knew they weren’t true.” He looked around for corroboration. stodds 20 Joseph broke in, “These were words to clothe a naked thing, and the thing is ridiculous in clothes.”adi “You see it. I gave up reasons. I do this because it makes me glad. I do it because I like to.”
• “It isn’t dead,” Joseph protested. “The rain will come next winter, and in the spring the grass will be up and the river will be flowing. You’ll see, Tom. There was some kind of accident that made this. Next spring the ground will be full of water again.’ Thomas jeered: “And you’ll get another wife, and there won’t ever be another drought.’ “It might be so,” Joseph said gently.
• Joseph saw lights of a ship passing far out on the ocean, and he watched the lights and held up his finger to see how fast they moved. “I can’t go away,” he said. “This is my land. I don’t know why it’s mine, what makes it mine, but I cannot leave it. In the spring when grass is up you’ll see. Don’t you remember how the grass was green all over the hills, even in the cracks of the rocks, and how the mustard was yellow? The redwing blackbirds built nests in the mustard stems.”

  Kyle: Stewardship

• “I’ll have to stay,” Joseph said. “If I went with you, I’d be wanting to start back every moment to see if the rain had fallen yet, or if there was any water in the river. I might as well not go away.”
• He smiled at her, and the calm he knew came upon him. He pointed to the dead and naked tree beside the porch. “Look, Rama! That was my tree. It was the center of the land, a kind of father of the land. And Burton killed it.” He stopped and stroked his beard and turned the ends under, as his father had done. His eyes drooped with pain and tightened with resistance to the pain. “Look on the ridge where the pines are, Rama,” he said. “There’s a circle in the grove, and a great rock in the circle. The rock killed Elizabeth. And on the hill over there are the graves of Benjy and Elizabeth.” She stared at him uncomprehendingly. “The land is struck,” he went on. “The land is not dead, but it is sinking under force too strong for it. And I am staying to protect the land.”
• Here it is safe,” he thought. “Here is the seed that will stay alive until the rain comes again. This is the heart of the land, and the heart is still beating.” He felt the dampness of the watered moss soaking through his shirt, and his thought went on, “I wonder why the land seems vindictive, now it is dead.” He thought of the hills, like blind snakes with frayed and peeling skins, lying in wait about this stronghold where the water still flowed. He remembered how the land sucked down his little stream before it had run a hundred yards. “The land is savage,” he thought, “like a dog far gone in hunger. And he smiled at the thought because he nearly believed it. “The land would come in and blot this stream and drink my blood if it could. It is crazy with thirst.” He looked down at the little stream stealing across the glade. “Here is the seed of the land’s life. We must guard against the land gone crazy. We must use the water to protect the heart, else the little taste of water may drive the land to attack us
• “Listen, Juanito, first there was the land, and then I came to watch over the land; and now the land is nearly dead. Only this rock and I remain. I am the land.” His eyes grew sad. “Elizabeth told me once of a man who ran away from the old Fates. He clung to an altar where he was safe.” Joseph smiled in recollection. “Elizabeth had stories for everything that happened, stories that ran alongside things that happened and pointed the way they’d end.”
• But Joseph’s head sank down. “I don’t want you here,” he said miserably. “That would make too much time to wait. Now there is only night and day and dark and light. If you should stay, there would be a thousand other intervals to stretch out the time, intervals between words, and the long time between striding steps.
• He saw the crucified Christ hanging on his cross, dead and stained with blood. There was no pain in his face, now he was dead, but only disappointment and perplexity, and over these, an infinite weariness. Jesus was dead and the Life was finished.
• Joseph and Juanito rode at last into the quiet street of Nuestra Señora. Half the people had gone away, had gone to visit relatives in luckier fields, leaving their houses and their burned yards and their empty chickenpens.
• “I thought you might come some time,” Father Angelo said. “Sit down. Did the tree fail you, finally?” Joseph was puzzled. “You spoke about the tree before. What did you know about the tree?”
• “Of course he did, but did the tree fail you at last?” “My brother killed the tree,” Joseph said sullenly. Father Angelo looked concerned. “That was bad. That was a stupid thing. It might have made the tree more strong.”
• Father Angelo lost some of his confidence, then. “I will help you to pray for your soul, my son. The rain will come. We have held mass. The rain will come. God brings the rain and withholds it of his knowledge.” “How do know the rain will come?” Joseph demanded. “I tell the land’s dying.” “The land does not die,” the priest said sharply. But Joseph looked angrily at him. “How do you know? The deserts were once alive. Because a man is sick often, and each time gets well, is that proof that he will never die?” Father Angelo got out of his chair and stood over Joseph. “You are ill, my son,” he said. “Your body is ill, and your soul is ill. Will you come to the church to make your soul well? Will you believe in Christ and pray help for your soul?” Joseph leaped up and stood furiously before him. “My soul? To Hell with my soul! I tell you the land is dying. Pray for the land!” The priest looked into his glaring eyes and felt the frantic fluid of his emotion. “The principal business of God has to do with men,” he said, “and their progress toward heaven, and their punishment in Hell.” Joseph’s anger left him suddenly. “I will go now, Father,” he said wearily. “I should have known. I’ll go back to the rock now, and wait.” He moved toward the door, and Father Angelo followed him. “I’ll pray for your soul, my son. There’s too much pain in you.” “Good-bye, Father, and thank you,” and Joseph strode away into the dark.
• “You’re better off than some. My brother-in-law lost every single head.” And he told how the ranches were deserted and the cattle all dead, and he told how the people had from the town of gone away Our Lady. “No business now,” he said. “I don’t sell a dozen drinks a day. Sometimes a man comes in for a bottle. People don’t like to drink together now,” he said. “They take a bottle home, and drink alone.”
• Joseph laughed harshly and climbed into the saddle. “There is a saying in this country, I learned it long ago: ‘In a dry year all signs fail.’ Good-night, Juanito.’”
• The light had come secretly in, and the sky and the trees and the rock were grey. Joseph walked slowly across the glade and knelt by the little stream. And the stream was gone. He sat quietly down and put his hand in the bed. The gravel was still damp, but no water moved out of the little cave any more. Joseph was very tired. The wind howling around the grove and the stealthy drought were too much to fight. He thought, “Now it is over. I think I knew it would be.”
• The sun lost its brilliance and sheathed itself in thin clouds. Joseph regarded the dying moss and the circle of trees. “This is gone now. I am all alone.” And then a panic fell upon him. “Why should I stay in this dead place?” He thought of the green canyon over the Puerto Suelo. Now that he was no longer supported by the rock and the stream, he was horribly afraid of the creeping drought. “I’ll go!” he cried suddenly.
• “I should have known,” he whispered. “I am the rain.” And yet he looked dully down the mountains of his body where the hills fell to an abyss. He felt the driving rain, and heard it whipping down, pattering on the ground. He saw his hills grow dark with moisture. Then a lancing pain shot through the heart of the world. “I am the land,” he said, “and I am the rain. The grass will grow out of me in a little while.’” And the storm thickened, and covered the world with darkness, and with the rush of waters.
• All the first night he stayed awake and listened happily to the commotion of the rain. And he was glad when he remembered how he had prayed for it.
• He went back to his chair and sat listening to the rush of the waters. He thought of Joseph Wayne, and he saw the pale eyes suffering because of the land’s want. “That man must be very happy now,” Father Angelo said to himself.