THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (Family Saga). Gertrude Stein

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СКАЧАТЬ bad thing happened to them.

      She loved them and was very proud of all three of them. Often she wondered as she looked at them, how could they be so perfect and so wonderful and yet all three of them be so different from the others of them that there was hardly anything alike in the three of them.

      They were big children and each one of them in his own way was strong to do what they needed to find themselves free inside them. They were big children and she was only a very little mother to them. And they were not very loving children, they were too strong at finding their own way to feel free and important each one to himself inside him. They were to her very good children. She never had any trouble with them. And now she was a little ailing and they were good but then she never had been very important to them.

      Now we begin to learn more about the Hersland family and their way of living.

      As I was saying the father David Hersland was in some ways a very splendid kind of person but he had some very uncertain things inside him. He too was very proud of his children but it was not easy for them to be free of him. Sometimes he was very angry with them. Sometimes it came to his doing very hard pounding on the table at which they would be sitting and disputing, and ending with the angry word that he was the father, they were his children, they must obey him, he was master and he knew how to make them do as he would have them. Such scenes were very hard on the little gentle mother woman who was all lost in between the angry father and the three big resentful children who knew very well what they needed to have given to them so that they could be free inside them.

      This is the way the three Hersland children grew up to be strong each one to be free inside him. They were all big in themselves and in their way of winning. Soon you will learn slowly the history of each one of them, how each one was important to himself in him, and how they won a kind of freedom for themselves each one inside them.

      The little mother was not very important to them. They were good enough children in their daily living but they were never very loving to her inside them. They had it too strongly in them to win their own freedom.

      They turned to their father, altogether, in their thinking. It was against him inside, and strongly always around them, that they had to do the fighting for their freedom. Now the mother was a little ailing. She was all lost between the father and the three big struggling children.

      In their young days the father was proud of his children, proud that they were important each one to himself inside him, proud that they needed to win for themselves their own freedom. Always then he encouraged their disputing, he wanted then that they should fight and win out against him. As I was saying David Hersland the father of these big resentful children was in some ways a splendid kind of person. But now things were going less easily around him. Joy was a little dim inside now for all of them. Now he would often be angry and be given to pounding on the table and loudly declaring, he was the father, they were the children, they must obey else he would know how to make them. And the gentle little mother who every day was giving signs of weakening would sit scared, and afterwards she would be weeping, lost between the father and the three big resentful children.

      But this was all when they had become grown young men and women and joy was a little dim inside for all of them.

      Now listen to their lives as children, their early struggles each one to find for themselves freedom, the abundant father in them in those days full of joyous beginning, proud of himself and of his children, glad to feel that they were strong all of them to make for themselves their own beginning.

      Now I will tell you more of the Hersland ways of living in the old home with the wind and the sun and the rain beating, and the dogs and chickens and the open life, and the hay, and the men working, and the father's way of educating the three children so that they could be strong to make for themselves their own beginning, and the gentle little mother who was not very important to them, who had sometimes a fierce little temper that could be very stubborn but mostly she was only sad, not angry, when any bad thing happened to them, and the three children with the mixed up father and the little unimportant mother in them.

      As I was saying Mr. Hersland was big and abundant and always was very full of new ways of thinking. Always he was abundant and joyous and determined and always powerful in starting. Also sometimes he would be irritable and impatient and uncertain. Also he was in his way important inside to him, and all these things came out in his educating of his children.

      Truly he loved education. It was to him almost all there is of living. He did not do it with steadfast steady working, things always were a little uncertain with him. One never knew which way it would break out from him the things he was very good at starting and then other things would happen to him and to all the people around who were dependent on him.

      It was a very good kind of living the Hersland children had in their beginning, and their freedom in the ten acres where all kinds of things were growing, where they could have all anybody could want of joyous sweating, of rain and wind, of hunting, of cows and dogs and horses, of chopping wood, of making hay, of dreaming, of lying in a hollow all warm with the sun shining while the wind was howling, of knowing all queer poor kinds of people that lived in this part of Gossols where the Herslands were living and where no other rich people were living. And so they grew up with this kind of living, such kind of queer poor, for them, people around them, such uncertain ways of getting education that they had from the father's passion for all kinds of educating, from his strong love of starting and the uncertain things he had inside him.

      Altogether it was a good way of living for them who had a passion to be free inside them and this was true of all three of the Hersland children but mostly with Martha the eldest and the only daughter living, and the youngest David who was always searching to decide in him and no one could ever understand him, from day to day what life meant to him to make it worth his living. It was less in Alfred, this love of freedom, in Alfred who was soon now to be marrying Julia Dehning. He had some of it in him but not so strongly inside him as Martha and David and his father had it in them. Yes I say it again now to all of you, all you who have it a little in them to be free inside them. I say it again to you, we must leave them, we cannot stay where there are none to know it, none who can tell us from the lowest from them who are simply poor or bad because they have no other way to do it. No here there are none who can know it, we must leave ourselves to a poor thing like Alfred Hersland to show it, one who is a little different with it, not with real singularity to be free in it, but it is better with him than to have no one to do it, and so we leave it, and we leave the Alfred Herslands to do it, poor things to represent it, singularity to be free inside with it, poor things and hardly our own in it, but all we can leave behind to show a little how some can begin to do it.

      Yes real singularity we have not made enough of yet so that any other one can really know it. I say vital singularity is as yet an unknown product with us, we who in our habits, dress-suit cases, clothes and hats and ways of thinking, walking, making money, talking, having simple lines in decorating, in ways of reforming, all with a metallic clicking like the type-writing which is our only way of thinking, our way of educating, our way of learning, all always the same way of doing, all the way down as far as there is any way down inside to us. We all are the same all through us, we never have it to be free inside us. No brother singulars, it is sad here for us, there is no place in an adolescent world for anything eccentric like us, machine making does not turn out queer things like us, they can never make a world to let us be free each one inside us.

      And yet a little I have made it too strong against us in saying Alfred Hersland was the only one who could in this adolescent world represent us. The father David Hersland we cannot count for us, it was an old world that gave him the stamp to be different from the adolescent world around us. But there is still some hope for us in the younger David who is different from the people all around us, in him who always was seeking to be free inside him, to know it in him, and no one could ever understand him, what it was inside him that made it СКАЧАТЬ