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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=73196

Excerpt from "East of Eden"
by John Steinbeck (1902-2002)

Penguin Books

ISBN 0-14-200423-5

Chapter 19, pg. 216

A new country seems to follow a pattern. First come the openers,
strong and brave and rather childlike. They can take care of themselves
in a wilderness, but they are naive and helpless against men, and perhaps
that is why they went out in the first place. When the rough edges are
worn off the new land, businessmen and lawyers come in to help with the
development - to solve problems of ownership, usually by removing the
temptations to themselves. And finally comes culture, which is entertainment,
relaxation, transport out of the pain of living. And culture can be on any
level, and is.

The church and the wh0rehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously.
And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of
the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the
same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a
man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels. The
sectarian churches came in swinging, cocky and loud and confident.
Ignoring the laws of debt and repayment, they built churches which couldn't
be paid for in a hundred years. The sects fought evil, true enough, but
they also fought each other with a fine lustiness. They fought at the
turn of a doctrine. Each happily believed all the others were bound for
hell in a basket. And each for all its bumptiousness brought with it the
same thing: the Scripture on which our ethics, our art and poetry and our
relationships are built. It took a smart man to know where the difference
lay between the sects, but anyone could see what they had in common. And
they brought music - maybe not the best, but the form and sense of it.
And they brought conscience, or, rather, nudged the dozing conscience.
They were not pure, but they had a potential of purity, like a soiled
white shirt. And any man could make something pretty fine of it within
himself. True enough, the Reverend Billing, when they caught up with
him, turned out to be a thief, an adulterer, a libertine, and a zoophilist,
but that didn't change the fact that he had communicated some good things
to a great number of receptive people. Billing went to jail, but
no one ever arrested the good things he had released. And it
doesn't matter much that his motive was impure.
He used good material and some of it stuck. I use Billing
only as an outrageous example. The honest preachers had energy and go.
They fought the devil, no holds barred, boots and eye-gouging permitted.
You might get the idea that they howled truth and beauty the way a seal
bites out the National Anthem on a row of circus horns. But some of the
truth and beauty remained, and the anthem was recognizable. The sects
did more than this, though. They built the structure of social life in
the Salinas Valley. The church supper is the grandfather of the country
club, just as the Thursday poetry reading in the basement under the
vestry sired the little theatre.

While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in
prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister
evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in silently and grayly,
with its head bowed and its face covered.

You may have seen the spangled palaces of sin and fancy dancing in the false
West of the movies, and maybe some of them existed -- but not in the Salinas
Valley. The brothels were quiet, orderly, and circumspect. Indeed, if after
hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic conversation against the thumping
beat of the melodeon you had stood under the window of a wh0rehouse and
listened to the low decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse
the identities of the two ministries. The brothel was accepted while it was
not admitted.

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