On John Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie-2

On page 116, Steinbeck wrote:

An animal resting or passing by leaves crushed grass, footprints and perhaps droppings, but a human occupying a room for the night prints his character, his biography, his recent history and sometimes his future plans and hopes. I further believe that personality seeps into walls and is slowly released. This might well be an explanation of ghosts and such manifestations. Although my conclusions may be wrong, I seem to be sensitive to the spoor of the human. Also I am not shy about admitting that I am an incorrigible Peeping Tom. I have never passed by an unshaded window without looking in, have never closed my ears to a conversation that was none of my business. I can justify or even dignify this by protesting that in my trade I must know about people, but I suspect that I am merely curious.

Having read that, I stopped for a while, stood up and surveyed my room. What would Steinbeck say about my cluttered books, the colored pencils on the table, the more than full waste basket, an unfinished drawing and some crumpled papers on the floor? What about the hanged towel that defied gravity? I have to smile at the thought that he would probably say: The recent occupant has problems and on top of those is that she is unfocused.

And then I continued reading...trying to focus : D

On John Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie

On page 154 of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie (Bantam Books), it's being mentioned that there's a place called Badlands which the author described with appropriate adjectives and he added: "They deserve this name." Two pages later, he wrote that after talking with a woman who lived there, he continued, saying: "Her voice rattled on as though she was terrified of the silence that would settle when I was gone. As she talked, it came to me that she was afraid of this place and, further, that so was I. I felt I wouldn't like to have the night catch me here." He wrote further that he was "in a state of flight and was ready to get away from the unearthly landscape." He continued, "And then the late afternoon changed everything. As the sun angled, the buttes and coules, the cliffs and the sculptured hills and ravines lost their burned and dreadful look and glowed with yellow and rich browns and a hundred variations of red and silver gray, all picked out by streaks of coal black. It was so beautiful that I stopped near a thicket of dwarfed and wind-warped cedars and junipers, and once stopped, I was caught, trapped in color and dazzled by the clarity of the light......... The strange landscape shouted with color! And the night, far from being frightful, was lovely beyond thought."

Wow!