Without Lifting A Finger

  Happy Friday! from the bird that looks and behaves a bit like a mouse: Northern House Wren @ Huntington Central Park. Big weekend ahead & Happy Mothers Day to all Moms.;)💗 #rlswihart13  #huntingtoncentralpark  #northernhousewren #thebirdlikeamouse #happymothersday2026💗

When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the Erlichs. Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor's degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year. Ralph would never have a profession or a trade, would never do or make anything the world needed. Nor did Claude find his own outlook much better. He was twenty-one years old, and he had no skill, no training,--no ability that would ever take him among the kind of people he admired. He was a clumsy, awkward farmer boy, and even Mrs. Erlich seemed to think the farm the best place for him. Probably it was; but all the same he didn't find this kind of life worth the trouble of getting up every morning. He could not see the use of working for money, when money brought nothing one wanted. Mrs. Erlich said it brought security. Sometimes he thought this security was what was the matter with everybody; that only perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in people and develop the mean ones.

I haven't gotten to the WWI part yet, the part of the novel that some notable critics had a problem with (e.g., Hemingway). We'll see. War of the Words: Cather vs. Hemingway, 1923 - The American Writers Museum https://share.google/yGmVNWIhAan83WAFr

 

He was thinking about what Dan had said while they were hitching up. There was a great deal of truth in it, certainly. Yet, as for him, he often felt that he would rather go out into the world and earn his bread among strangers than sweat under this half-responsibility for acres and crops that were not his own. He knew that his father was sometimes called a "land hog" by the country people, and he himself had begun to feel that it was not right they should have so much land,--to farm, or to rent, or to leave idle, as they chose. It was strange that in all the centuries the world had been going, the question of property had not been better adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people who didn't have it were slaves to them.

His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and card-playing dangerous pastimes--only rough people did such things when she was a girl in Vermont--and "worldliness" only another word for wickedness. According to her conception of education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one, was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before. The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept of history.