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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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II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; - and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find, in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought: - Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little: - But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; by camp-fires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honour and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: - everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness: - ah! if I could show you this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the implacable hunter.

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus: and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered politics and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like us - like us are tempted to grow weary of the struggle - to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will. Are they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Even while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, and the generation of a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our weakness is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity.

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