Exposition, Chapter 9 (p. 161-166)

"Aren't you going to try and talk me into staying?" D. asked Huck.

Huck's lower lip and eyebrows pushed upward into identical arches, and he shook his head. "Yer mind's made up, ain't it?"

"Yes."

"Then what'd be the pint?"

The silence returned softly to their walk. From her vantage point, D. could see mountains in every direction. The sun's position, still very nearly overhead, distributed an even shadelessness upon the land. Not, as is so at extremes of the day, enlightening one range and darkening another, but laying smoothly over them all, at least from D.'s perspective. In the morning, she thought, the sun-tipped western mountains might come to symbolize a hope for the day, whereas the evening ascended like a flood up the eastern mountains. It was also true, however, that the day sprang from the east and departed to the west. Perhaps the lazy effect of midday came from the lack of these uncomfortable distinctions.

The time of year was such that the semiplush foliage on the trees seemed to be the full stock, and therefore meager. For some, the effect that this has is one of longing for the past, when the springs were greener. D. understood, however, that the next week or two would bring a storm, and the next after that a wave of heat to urge the trees to produce their own shade. To justify her conclusion, D. had to cast her mind back to her pre-city days. Days when she was young and not yet working. The working world rarely noticed but short glimpses of change, making it seem rapid and untraceable. This was especially true for those working in the city, where the collection of natural things affected by a change of season was far smaller.

But even though the leaves and the flowers and, hence, the pollen were not yet ample enough to compare to a memory of the previous spring, D. recognized a smell on the air that she had forgotten through the winter, though she did recall intending to remember it. She wondered what else she might recall of the spring and of the country were she to stay away from the city for just a bit longer. That wouldn't mean that I had to stay here, she thought. Necessarily.

A bird chirped from a nearby bush as if calling out a warning to the next bird on the watch line. D. looked toward a sound and came to a cautious stop to watch a bunny that was nibbling on something and watching the passing humans with some anxiety. Huck took a few more steps before he noticed that D. had stopped. When he followed her eyes to the bunny, he smiled as a country boy may be wont to smile at the amazement of city folk at something as commonplace as a rabbit. Much as a farmer must find it strange that a couple of cows could cause spectator traffic.

At some inaudible signal, the bunny bounded off into the underbrush, creating a slight stir in the remnant leaves of fall and some low hanging twigs, all of which rustled and seemed to pass their rustling up into the larger branches of the trees, which swayed and increased the general murmur. The movement and sound of nature grew into a wind which spread the hum and began to whistle gently. As the wind gusted, the whistle changed its pitch slightly, until it sounded as if the mountains themselves were preparing to break out in song. And when the wind subsided, D. could hear a continued whistle, as of an Irish jig, that was too precise to be natural. Huck smiled when D. looked to him for explanation.

Soon a young man, about thirty and moderate of proportion and height, emerged around a bend in the path that Huck and D. had been approaching.

"Huck! How are you?" the young man hailed.

"Not bad. Yerself?" The two men shook hands and then hugged as friends are apt to do after long periods of separation. After a few congenialities, Huck told the young man that he was just helping D. find her car and would meet him at the house in a bit.

It occurred to D. that she would not be hearing this newcomer's story, whatever it might be. He had the scraggly beginnings of an unseasonable beard, which matched his hair — mostly light blond, but suggesting a red tinge. His nearly teal eyes twinkled, and D. thought that they alone might be full of tales.

"Oh," said the young man, showing no inclination to sway the plans of anyone involved, "I'll walk with you if you don't mind." Smiling at D., he explained, "Lord knows who I'll get stuck talking to if I go to the house now."

Huck interjected, "Well, the young lady's had some frights, so it'd have ta be up ta her."

"I don't mind," D. mumbled as if her mind were elsewhere.

The newcomer smiled and stuck out his hand. "I'm glad to be able to meet you, even if you are on your way away. I'm John." Noticing a slightly curious look pass over D.'s face, John added, "But everybody calls me Steinbeck so as not to confuse me with the old guy."

D. shook his hand and asked, "John Steinbeck? Isn't that against the rules?"

Laughing, Steinbeck said, "Well you might say that I've found a loophole. It was the name that I wanted for myself, and it was not a little pleasing to see how much Nathaniel enjoyed figuring out why it wasn't against the rules and then considering all the implications. Unfortunately, he decided that one of those implications is that I'm not allowed to speak directly of myself often, and that is one of the few pleasures that I've always tried to reserve. On the other hand, it has made me a tremendous conversationalist because, as my namesake wrote, 'if a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen.' Huck, didn't you say something along those lines?"

Huck smiled at the game, "Maybe sump'n like that."

Feeling that she had missed something, D. let her mind return to the seasons. "What is the date?" she asked Steinbeck.

"Early May is the most exact that I know."

D.'s thought escaped as incredulous words, "That means that I've been here for almost two months." Funny, but D. almost felt as if somebody should have come looking for her after so much time. She knew that, even had somebody searched, she would have been exceedingly difficult to find, but she also knew that there was something important about the fact that she didn't believe there to be anybody who would look for her.

"What's your thinking on that?" Steinbeck asked her.

D. stepped out of her thought, "Excuse me?"

"I gather that your disbelief at the span of time that you've been here means that you didn't think it had been that long. So was it eventfulness or eventlessness that made it seem so short?"

D. thought about it. "It's been a little of both. Now that I think about it, though, it seems like I've been here longer, but that it's gone by quickly."

"That sounds about right," Steinbeck responded. "When you're busy, time flies by on wings of occupation, but when it's past, a length of time seems as long as the number of events that happened within it. The real John Steinbeck called them posts on which to drape our conception of time."

D. looked around. The season had changed enough that she did not recognize the path that they followed, but somehow she felt that it was the very same one down which John, the elder, had led her in the opposite direction. It seemed only a short time ago, yet she felt as if something had changed within her, as it had around her, that left only the distance across a thin crevice between her arrival and this moment, her departure.

Steinbeck broke the silence. "That's how it was my first and second years. There were some days that felt as if they would never end and others that I prayed without hope to extend, either because I was enjoying them or because there was something that left the day crooked, without its being done before a new day. Looking back, it seems that there were so many more of those that were too short and that they weren't quite as short as they had seemed. But the days that seemed long seem now, in the memory, hardly to have existed. To tell the truth, the way those summers went, particularly the second, I could have done with more of the interminable dull days that I can't seem to remember."

D. smiled a little.

"I'm sorry," Steinbeck apologized. "You're on your way out, and I'm beginning my lectures."

D. hesitated and then said, "No, that's alright. It'll pass the time while we walk."

She was going to hear another story after all. And she wasn't sure how she felt about it.

"I came fairly late in the season. I don't think there's anything remarkable about that, or about my reasons for heading out into the wild or the choices and ways that led me here, but I mention it because I've always felt as if I came into the middle of something, and I've never quite felt right about that summer. I've seen movies and missed the beginning, and even later, when I'd managed to see the whole thing through, there was always an uneven feel to the film for me.

"So I came late, like a belated child, to this family in the woods. And it is like a family, with each person's differences. We're all kinds of people. Those who are running from something, and those who are running from nothing. Some are well read, and some aren't. I like to think that we each bring something or other to the group, like one might bring wine and another pretzels to a gathering. But the individuality, that's what's kept me returning these past several years: the beauty of variety. I've heard it said that even the most brilliant colors need another color, or only white or black, to offset them, and I believe it to be true of people, too.

"Somehow, though, I remember remarking the unique fact that everybody here was kind in their own way of being kind. I suppose it is a self-screening crowd. We're all lonesome for something, and lonesome people, because they feel for themselves, feel for others to at least a small degree.

"Of course, the loneliest, and the kindest, was Nathaniel. Some people, as I understand, think he's crazy or full of bull or full of himself, but I think anyone who believes that is missing something. I think he's desperately brilliant and brilliantly clear of thought, and therefore, since he is human and has his own secret pains, his are more pronounced to the degree of his own capacity for understanding others and himself. Nathaniel has a view of humanity that is probably reserved for those great men who rise up once or twice a century and share a little of their own understanding with the rest of us in the hopes of changing the world. More often than not, I believe, such understanding is too disturbing for the common man, and we turn away from it after only brief periods of trial. We do keep a piece of it within, but I think that we tend to keep something nonessential like a name or a saying. We keep the face but not the style, and we go back to our lives vaguely feeling that the world doesn't have to be this way.

"Knowing this, and feeling it to be true, is why it must be an awfully lonely thing being great. And Nathaniel is perhaps the loneliest man that I've ever known.

"This is not to say that he is cold or aloof. He's just like a child who has discovered that his parents are not perfect, because he knows more than they. When I first met him here, I think that he was still in a sort of panic to discover if it was he or the world who was the blunderer. I got out of him, once, that one or both of his parents had recently and suddenly died when he first came to the Pequod. I would have liked to have known his parents, or whoever the two were who must have formed him. (And there must have been two: one bright and warm like a California sunset and the other all midnights and lines.) You could almost see them struggling within him. And that might be why he came out here in the first place. Maybe he was trying to get away from the demands of the world, the money, the sex, the dealings with other and strange people.

"If all emotions and interactions between people come down to love in some way or other, then I think in his way Nathaniel was running away from love. But, as it always seems to go, love — well sex, anyway — found him. Even out here."