How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
And I drove as quietly as I could, for on this day I intended to drive a little west and then take the long road south down the long reach of Maine. There are times that one treasures for all one's life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. I felt very fortunate that morning. (2.3.47)
Steinbeck starts out being kind of worried about his memory. After all, this project is all about updating his fuzzy (and outdated) recall of his native land. However, apparently some things are impossible for him to forget, such as the vistas he got to gaze upon as he drove through Maine.
Quote #2
I can report this because I have a map before me, but what I remember has no reference to the numbers and colored lines and squiggles. (2.3.49)
Now Steinbeck is back to questioning his memory, suggesting that his memories bear no relationship to the orderly numbers, lines, and squiggles of the map.
Quote #3
One of my purposes was to listen, to hear speech, accent, speech rhythms, overtones, and emphasis. For speech is so much more than words and sentences. I did listen everywhere. It seemed to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. (2.5.80)
Steinbeck focuses a lot on how technology appears to be changing America, and one of the big things that disturbs him is how dialects are disappearing because of radio and television. He claims that he doesn't get to hear real regional speech pretty much until he gets into Montana.
Quote #4
It is a rare house or building that is not rigged with spiky combers of the air. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. (2.5.80)
Again, Steinbeck is worried about how a nation of rich dialects and accents will get homogenized through the influences coming into our homes through the "spiky combers of the air" (antennae). He needn't have worried about English becoming "better English than we have ever used," though. That doesn't seem to have happened.
Quote #5
Of course the Deep South holds on by main strength to its regional expressions, just as it holds and treasures some other anachronisms, but no region can hold out for long against the highway, the high-tension line, and the national television. What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless. (2.5.81)
Oh, right, and the highways—those are the other big villains in Steinbeck's universe, in terms of changes for the worse. Steinbeck seems to loathe highways, since they are crowded and not very scenic. He does admit that some of his resistance to change and nostalgia for the old days might not have a solid basis, but he still laments a lot of the changes that mass communication and highways have brought to America.
Quote #6
It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain. (2.5.53)
Steinbeck seems to be trying hard not to be a curmudgeon about change—or, at least, to be self-aware about being a curmudgeon—but he still stands by his assertion that we've replaced certain ills or problems with new ones, like "corpulence for starvation." But he does admit that, really, at the end of the day, he doesn't really know anything about what the world will or should look like. By being humble like that, he kind of redeems himself from straight-up curmudgeon status.
Quote #7
And I made some notes on a sheet of yellow paper on the nature and quality of being alone. These notes would in the normal course of events have been lost as notes are always lost, but these particular notes turned up long afterward wrapped around a bottle of ketchup and secured with a rubber band. The first note says: "Relationship of Time to Aloneness." And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present. (3.3.12)
Apparently, solitude made the past, present, and future all equally available to Steinbeck; without someone to anchor you down into the present, you can just go all over the place. We suppose this is another way of saying that too much alone time can make you crazy and delusional.
Quote #8
After Spokane, the danger of early snows had passed, for the air was changed and mulsed by the strong breath of the Pacific. The actual time on the way from Chicago was short, but the overwhelming size and variety of the land, the many incidents and people along the way, had stretched time out of all bearing. For it is not true that an uneventful time in the past is remembered as fast. On the contrary, it takes the time-stones of events to give a memory past dimension. Eventlessness collapses time. (3.7.13)
Steinbeck thinks a lot about memory and how it works, and here he suggests that the more eventful a past event was, the longer that remembered time will appear to be (in the mind of the person remembering).
Quote #9
This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and reaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction. (3.7.117)
Steinbeck defends himself against the possible charge that he just doesn't like change, claiming that he just plain doesn't like what Seattle's become—and not because he remembers the way it used to be. He claims he'd have had no idea he was in Seattle if someone had set him down there randomly, and he would have hated it just as much. So, we guess he would be okay with progress and change—if it just didn't look so much like "destruction" or general awfulness.
Quote #10
Quite naturally, as we moved down the beautiful coast my method of travel was changed. Each evening I found a pleasant auto court to rest in, beautiful new places that have spring up in recent years. Now I began to experience a tendency in the West that perhaps I am too old to accept. It is the principle of do it yourself. At breakfast a toaster is on your table. You make your own toast. (3.7.120)
Steinbeck does not like the "do it yourself" attitude that has cropped up in hotels lately, because it basically means that you don't have to interact with anyone—you can just make or get everything you need yourself. It sounds like he's finding that parts of the country have grown more impersonal, or at least, hotels in certain parts of the country have.