Let
us try to understand what John Steinbeck said on Chapter
13 from the book ‘East of Eden’,
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.
It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing
or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is
a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of
the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn
breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great
stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole
world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all
his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark
and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have
trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the-glory-so that
a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth
rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a
tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent
of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s
importance in the world can be measured by the quality
and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it
relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness
and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There
are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces
shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these
forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but
because their tendency is to eliminate other things we
hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone
than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and
more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all
are born in the complication of mass production, mass
method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate
all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production
has entered our economics, our politics, and even our
religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea
collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger.
There is great tension in the world, tension toward a
breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask
myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must
I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only
one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit
of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are
no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry,
in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation
has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but
the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies
in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the
group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness,
the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions,
forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning,
the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted,
drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems
to have taken.
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind
of the individual human is the most valuable thing in
the world.”
“And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind
to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”
“And this I must fight against: any idea, religion,
or government, which limits or destroys the individual.”
This is what I am and what I am about. I can’t understand
why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the
free mind, for that is one thing, which can by inspection
destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and
I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the
one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts.
If the glory can be killed, we are lost.”
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Vision & Mission Statements
1) Understanding
Respect
2) Respect Human Rights
3) Respect The Free
Mind
4) Respect The Children
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