Cynthia Egbert's Reviews > The Sojourner

I love this book so much. It is out of print and can be hard to find but I do have one that I will loan out. It is written by the same lady who wrote The Yearling and has much the same tone but addresses more of the marriage relationship in family dynamics. Very powerful!

Well, that review above was from many years ago and now I am going to give this novel the proper review it deserves! This is truly one of my favorite books of all time and certainly my favorite of all that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote, and she wrote some powerful stuff! It breaks my heart that it was not well received in her time. I am grateful that it is back in print and that more people are finding their way to Ase's story. This was my suggested reading for our book group for this year and, while not all enjoyed it, it did make for a great discussion. I was so grateful that I did finally get to discuss this book with people after many years of knowing only a handful of people who have read it. There are a lot of quotes to share from this one...

"Benjamin had had four years, while Asahel, after the simple schooling of the one-room schoolhouse two miles down the road, had been kept at home to work. Yet it was Benjamin who remembered nothing from his textbooks, scarcely read the weekly county paper, and Asahel who knew those books secretly by heart, and read, as laboriously as he did everything else, any scrap of paper with printing on it, poring hungrily over the magic of words. It seemed to him, who was all but inarticulate, that if he could read enough of them he would know the answers to the questions that tormented him. He had no way of knowing that wiser men had asked those questions, which never had been, perhaps never would be, answered."

"Yet it seemed to young Ase that the greater the injustice that came to one, the deeper would be the desire to give justice and warmth to one's children."

"Ase was stirred and touched by the generosity of his three friends, taking their affection as a gift past his deserving. He did not guess that they recognized in him imagination and spirit like their own, a bigness of mind, a rare understanding and tenderness that warmed them, too, made them feel valued, as they valued him. He knew only that he was a stranger and they took him in. They spoke to him and he was a little able to speak with them. He found his voice fully in his flute alone."

"She was almost as pretty as he thought her."

"There were still late apples to be picked that needed the touch of frost, the Northern spies and russets. These would be the tangiest of all, and would keep all winter long in the stone cellar. The easy summer apples had been sweet but insipid. He wondered, if strength and goodness needed a touch of hardship to come to true maturity. No, he decided, this was not necessarily so. His mother had been subjected to the frosts and they had only made her acid."

"As always, the majestic language moved him; the talk of shepherds, abiding in the field. It seemed to him that a man might meet God, if ever, in the fields, for so much of creation was there."

"He was always anxious for his crops, not so much for their money value, as because they were a part of him, something like his children. He had brought them into being, nursed and tended them, and it seemed to him a betrayal of them, of the land, when they did not thrive. Their failure was his failure. He thought of Nat. Somehow, he was failing with him, and he could not put his fingers on the reasons."

"She was a fragment of himself. Their edges were raw with recognition, so that they must constantly be fitted together, else in the separation there was pain."

"He stood off at a distance and saw his remotest ancestors side by side with his farthest descendants. He wondered if he had an unnatural point of view. Time for him was not marked off in jumps, as Nellie expressed it. It was not clearly marked and definite, it was all one, sometimes relative but forever whole. All life seemed to him contained in the beginning and the end, if there had ever been a beginning and if there ever would be an end. Time was, must be, timeless. As from a great enough height a landscape would show no detail, so from a far enough distance all time would be seen to exist simultaneously. He felt this in his inner mind and spirit."

"In any case, the truth had always seemed to him more vital than happiness."

"He could not speak the truth to this woman, his mother. Doll was as close to him as his own skin. She lay as deep as his very seed. With her, he felt himself complete, often actually articulate. He puzzled over this relationship of parent to child, of human to human, so that one spoke to another with understanding and in turn was understood. It seemed to have nothing to do with the blood relation, but only with some spark that flashed rarely, that said, 'You and I together share a bright secret flame. Perhaps, as one, we may find the answer to all that torments us and is hidden.' It seemed to him that no man could it for himself, alone."

"He heard and read much these days of giving the younger generation 'advantages' and 'opportunities'. Where this concerned a better education, he agreed, with the deep yearning of his own to know the things he had never known, to learn not only facts and wisdom, but the truth, and beyond that, the very nature of truth. Where it seemed to mean a blind leaving of the farms for the cities, a seeking of less arduous labor, the going into the businesses and industries that were making great fortunes, for the sole purpose of making a fortune, he could not see advantage, but loss."

"Children came into the world with characters infinitely more unpredictable than those of the creatures, from whose breeding and bloodlines much could be prophesied. Well, he thought, that was part of the glory of human beings, that each was only himself."

"Amelia's sly greed for food was indeed a puzzling thing. It was as though, feeling cheated by life, she would compensate herself in this fashion. Surprisingly, too, she remained lean, where Aunt Jess the midwife, who ate half as much, grew yearly vaster. The consuming flame in Amelia seemed to burn up the aliment as fast as she took it."

"His Shakespeare was of course beyond her, but he looked forward to the time when she would read aloud to him the rolling rhythms, where his own tongue could only stammer."

"It seemed to Ase that snow resembled human beings, after a fashion, with an equal capacity for good or evil. It was necessary for covering the winter wheat, tiw as needed for winter moisture, to supplement the spring and summer and autumn rains, for without water neither man nor stock nor vegetation could survive. Yet when it came, as now, it was malevolent. He recognized in the same instant that he was being injust in his conception of the snow, for it was a casual, an indifferent, force of nature, where mankind, surely, had a choice."

"It was asking too much of the physician, too, he thought, to pass judgment on a human soul. That was a function of God. Or was each soul supposed to judge itself, was that the ladder by which it climbed toward godhood? And if so, where and whose was the responsibility when a soul like Amelia's had lost, apparently, all power of judgment? Did it then lie in the opaque and timeless hands of time?"

"It came to him that the one strong family bond was Nellie's food...The breaking of bread together, the sharing of salt, the eating of meat, was a sacred thing, one small community against the outer darkness."

"He wanted to say, 'Life is a difficult matter, and the more a simple man may learn of what greater men have thought, and taught, have spoken and have written, the better can he cope with any sort of life.'"

"He did not know whether Mink's breath ceased to come or whether he ceased to draw it. There was an instant when he sensed an unheard thunder and an unseen lightning. Then the room was filled with a vast calm."

"Nothing could have satisfied Amelia but complete possession of her son, to all intents and purposes returning him to the dark slyness of her womb."

"Nellie had called the gypsies 'strangers'. They were less of strangers to him than his own."

"But the danger, Ase knew, had never been that Nat might now succeed, but that he would."

"Ase picked up eagerly each new volume that Willis brought home, but for all the warmth the Dickens gave him, he was still unsatisfied. Surely there must be other books that told of larger worlds, books more like his Shakespeare and his Bible, to carry a man's mind and spirit soaring, to stab him with questions, and having drawn blood, to staunch with answerings. It was the great thinkers for whose words he longed, unknowingly what he longed for."

"Something in Willis had been waylaid and destroyed. He had taken the easy road instead of the hard one, but it was the easy road that had proved dark and tortuous."

"It occurred to him that the increasing patience of age was as great a myth as the unalloyed joy of youth"

"The old cabin was more nearly his home than his own. It was here he found meat for the teeth of his spirit."

"He wondered if he could explain his sense of timelessness. He did not think of it as another life, nor yet quite an immortality of the same one. It was only, he felt that individual lives could no more be separated from life itself than drops of water from the mass of ocean. He was willing to give to life the name of 'God' since men knew no other large enough with which to speak of the ineffable, the Word made Life. He supposed men were not yet fit or ready to be entrusted, desperately as they needed it, with the secret of the Word. No, he could not explain."

"Some of the books that provided the richest fare were hidden under unrevealing names, like a rare soul behind a drab face."

"He had been a stubborn man, he thought, about the wrong things."

"There is good and there is evil, and every man has to throw his weight on one side or the other."

"In the last hours across the thousands of miles of the beautiful, the fabulous nation, he understood that he had been watching so eagerly in the hope that he might recognize his home. It was not here. Neither had he left it behind him."

"He, too, he recognized, had sought to find the unfindable. He had lost and sought a brother, and it was in the faces of all men he should have peered. He had been homeless, and knew that for such men as he there was no home; only an endless journey. He had sought to know the unknowable. He and his whole race, great, slow, groping, God-touched children, would have to wait a long time, he supposed, for all that, learning one lesson a millennium, sometimes forgetting it and having to begin all over. He himself, he thought humbly, had learned far too little. He had done much harm. He had known good from evil, and he had sat miserable and mute when the fight was called for. He had carried his standards into battle perhaps not quite too late. He could not know whether his good had been greater than his evil. No man could balance the delicate scales, for himself weighted one end and could not reach across to weight the other. An invisible hand would add or subtract. An unheard voice would speak the answer."