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 down 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 of his life in the gray, and the land and the 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 other men.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
