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Discovering America
Last time I was in town--we had to drop something at the G.E. plant--Appliance Park. We came at the enormous place from the wrong side and had to drive miles all around it. Surrounded by open fields with nothing whatever in them, not even thistles, marked "Property of General Electric. No Trespassing." The buildings were huge and go on forever and ever, out in the midst of their own wilderness. Stopped by guards, we signed in at the appropriate gate and promptly got lost in the maze of empty streets between the buildings. Finally came out right. What struck me most was the immense seriousness of the place--as if at last I had found what America takes seriously. Not churches, not libraries. Not even movies, but THIS! This is it. The manufacture of refrigerators, of washing machines, of tape recorders, of light fixtures. This is the real thing. This is America.
September 26, 1958, III.218-19
To Absorb, to Digest, to Remember
Heavy rain after a long dry spell. (I think perhaps I register all the rain in this book--my journal--solicitude for rain and freshness, as if dying in a desert.
Sorrow. Sorrow for sin. No more fooling about this sorrow in silence. Mourning. Grief.
Importance of being able to rethink thoughts that were fundamental to men of other ages, or fundamental to men in other countries. For me, especially: contemporary Latin America--Greek Patristic period--Mt. Athos--Confucian China--T'ang dynasty--Pre-Socratic Greece. Despair of ever beginning to know and understand, to communicate with these pasts and these distances, yet sense of obligation to do so, to live them and combine them in myself, to absorb, to digest, to "remember." Memoria. Have not yet begun. How will I ever begin to appreciate their problems, reformulate the questions they tried to answer? Is it even necessary? Is it sane? For me it is an expression of love for man and for God. An expression without which my contemplative life would be useless.
And to share this with my own contemporaries.
September 8 and 9, 1960, IV.42-43
