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Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays — обложка книги
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Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays

Автор Роберт Льюис Стивенсон
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Дата написания1970-01-01
Язык книгиen
Возрастное ограничение12+
Жанры
литература 19 веказарубежная классиказарубежная старинная литература

Описание

Книга представляет собой сборник воспоминаний и размышлений автора о путешествии через Америку, столкновениях с культурными различиями, природе Тихого океана, жизни в художественных сообществах и личных поисках смысла, объединённых в единый поток наблюдений и философских рассуждений.

Главный конфликт / проблема

Книга исследует конфликт между культурными предрассудками и реальными человеческими качествами, а также внутреннюю борьбу автора за смысл и идентичность в новом мире.

Ключевые идеи

  • Хаос и трудности эмиграции в 19‑веке
  • Культурные различия между Европой и Америкой
  • Важность имён и ландшафта в восприятии страны
  • Проблемы коммуникации и ожиданий в американском обществе
  • Организация и социальные нормы в эмигрантском поезде.
  • Экономические схемы и взаимопомощь среди пассажиров.
  • Эмоциональное воздействие открытых пространств и изоляции.
  • Расистские предрассудки и их влияние на иммигрантов
  • Путешествие по пустыням и горам как метафора внутреннего поиска
  • Влияние океана и лесных пожаров на природу и климат Монтерей
  • Монтерей как символ перехода от мексиканского к американскому влиянию и последующего упадка.
  • Кредитная культура и «tick» как проявление экономической зависимости мексиканцев.

Вывод

Книга приводит к выводу, что опыт эмиграции, столкновения с предрассудками и открытие природы и искусства позволяют человеку обрести более глубокое понимание себя и мира, подчёркивая важность эмпатии, честности и внутреннего удовлетворения.

Кому полезна

  • Студенты истории и культурологии
  • Путешественники и любители эмиграционных историй
  • Творческие люди и художники
  • Люди, интересующиеся философией и моралью

Главные темы

  • Путешествие и эмиграция
  • Культурные столкновения и предрассудки
  • Природа и ландшафты Тихого океана
  • Жизнь в художественных сообществах
  • Личностный рост и внутренний поиск
  • Моральные и философские размышления

Персонажи

  • Нарратор — Опытный путешественник, наблюдающий за поездкой, критически относится к расистским предрассудкам, описывает поездку и природу Тихого океана, сохраняет воспоминания о жизни в Барбизоне, описывает встречи с солдатом и резаком, размышляет о бедности и пишет письмо
  • Аретуса — Лёгкий, но небрежно одетый, носит книги Карла Орлеанского и Мишеля, а также свои нераспечатанные рондо
  • Кислота — Путешествует вместе с Аретусой, часто размышляет, но в итоге попадает под подозрение, но избегает наказания
  • Эмигрантский агент — Бедный, бритый человек, который помогает зарегистрировать багаж и советует оставаться в покое
  • Портёр — Суетливый и раздражённый, пытается переместить пассажиров и багаж
  • Мать с ребёнком — Старается защитить ребёнка, но не обращает внимания на вмешательство нарратора
  • Голландская вдова — Практичная и скептическая, но открытая к общению
  • Чёрный официант — Обучает нарратора американским обычаям, объясняет, что чаевые не принято давать
  • Немецкий пассажир — Пьяный и громкий, пытается общаться, но из-за усталости не удаётся
  • Кондуктор — Строгий, выгоняет пьющего пассажира
  • Белый чиновник — Собирает имена и распределяет пассажиров по вагонам
  • Старый мужчина — Отказался от предложения, считая его неподходящим

Цитаты

  • "The sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe."
  • "Never. They considered themselves too highly to accept."
  • The train toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions it began to assume in our regard.
  • The newsboy with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us like dogs.
  • They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld them.
  • I have discovered a plan to make it broader, with which I here endow the public.
  • «The history of Monterey has yet to be written.»
  • «The Mexicans, although in the State are out of it. They still preserve a sort of international independence, and keep their affairs snug to themselves.»
  • "ET EGO IN ARCADIA VIXI"
  • "Il faut faire de la peinture nouvelle"

Сводка по автору из Wikidata

1850–1894. Robert Louis Stevenson. шотландский писатель и поэт (1850–1894)

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At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far from dry. For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood into the bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour to whom I lent the brush, appeared to take the least precaution. As they were, they composed themselves to sleep. I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow their example.

TUESDAY. - When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling to and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan by the wayside. We were near no station, nor even, as far as I could see, within reach of any signal. A green, open, undulating country stretched away upon all sides. Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest; but the contours of the land were soft and English. It was not quite England, neither was it quite France; yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes. And it was in the sky, and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change. Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe. There is more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple, brown, and smoky orange in those of the new. It may be from habit, but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day. I thought so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the continent. If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day. There was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods, rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the United States of America. All times, races, and languages have brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas; and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified New York. The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance farther on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waiting-room to seek a dinner for myself. I mention this meal, not only because it was the first of which I had partaken for about thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but of a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their parallel in England. A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity. But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid. I had come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.

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