[00:00.00] Saul Bellow descrilbes his impressions of the seemingly endless cornfields of Illinois.
[00:07.13]ILLINGOIS JOURNEY by Saul Bellow
[00:11.28]The features of Illinois are not striking;they do not leap to the eye but lie flat and at first appear monotonous.
[00:20.90]The roads are wide, hard, perfect,
[00:25.16]sometimes of a shallow depth in the distance but so nearly level as to make you feel that the earth really is flat
[00:36.02]From east and west,travelers dart across these prairies into the huge horizons and through cornfields that go on forever
[00:46.08]giant skies,giant clouds,an evernal nearly featureless sameness.You find it hard to travel slowly.
[00:56.56]The endless miles pressed flat by the ancient glacier seduce you into speeding.
[01:03.97]As the car eats into the distances you begin gradually to feel that you are riding upon the floor of the continent,
[01:12.88]the very bottom of it,low and an impatient spirit of movement,of overtaking and urgency passes into your heart.
[01:24.64]Miles and miles of prairie,slowly rising and falling,sometimes give you a sense that something is in the process of becoming
[01:35.09]or that the liberation of a great force is imminent somepower,likeMichelangelo's slave only halfreleased fromthe block of stone
[01:46.84]Conceivably the mound-building Indians believed their resurrection would coincide with some such liberation,
[01:55.93]and built their graves in imitation of the low moraines deposited by the departing glaciers.
[02:03.72]But they have not yet been released and remain drowned in their waves of earth.They have left their bones,
[02:12.70]their flints and pots,their place names and tribal names and little besides except a stain,seldom vivid,
[02:23.57]on the consciouness of their white successors.
[02:28.48]The soil of the Illinois prairies is fat,rich and thick.
[02:34.44]After spring plowing it looks oil-blackened or colored by the soft coal which occurs in great veins throughout the state
[02:44.60]In the fields you frequently see a small tipple,or a crazy-looking device
[02:51.70]that pumps oil and nods like the neck of a horse at a quick walk…(2)Along the roads,
[03:00.64]with intervals between them as neat and even as buttons on the cuff,sit steel storage bins,in form like the tents of Mongolia
[03:11.74]They are filled with grain.And the elevators and tanks,trucks and machines that crawl over the fields
[03:20.36]and blunder over the highways-whatever you see is productive.It creates wealth,it stores wealth,it is wealth
[03:31.20]As you pass the fields,you see signs the farmers have posted telling in short code what sort of seed they have planted
[03:40.94]The farmhouses are seldom at the roadside,but far within the fields.The solitude and silence are deep and wide.
[03:51.26]Then,when you have gone ten or twenty miles through cornfields without having seen a living thing,no cow,no dog,
[04:01.92]scarcely even a bird under the hot sky,suddenly you come upon a noisy contrapion at the roadside,
[04:11.85]a system of contraptions,ratherforhusking the corn and stripping the grainIt burns and bangs awayand theconvey orbelts rattle
[04:23.21]When you leave,this noise and activity are cut off at one stroke:
[04:29.87]you are once more in the deaf,hot solitude of trembling air,alone in the cornfields.
[04:37.34]North,south,east and west,there is no end to them.
[04:42.75]They line roads and streams and hem in the woods and surround towns,
[04:48.18]and they crowd into back yards and edge up to gas stations
[04:53.80](3)An exotic stranger might assume he had come upon a race of corn worshipers who had created a corn ocean
[05:03.10]or that he was among a people who had fallen in love with infinite repetition of the same details,
[05:11.35]like the builders of skyscraters in New York andChicago who have raised up bricks and windows by the thousands,and all alike
[05:21.75]From corn you can derive notions of equality,or uniformity,massed democracy.You can,
[05:31.23]if you are given to that form of mental play,recall Joseph's brethren in the lean years,
[05:38.73]and think how famine has been conquered here and super-abundance itself become such a danger
[05:47.38]that the Government has to take measures against it.
[05:51.95]The power,the monotony,the oceanic extent of the cornfields do indeed shrink up and dwarf the past.
[06:02.34]How are you to think of the small bands of Illini,Ottawas,Cahokians,Shawnee,Miamis who camped in the turkey grass
[06:13.37]and the French Jesuits who descended the Mississippi and found them.(4)When you force your mind to summon them
[06:22.54]the Indians appear rather doll-like in the radiance of the present moment.They are covered in the corn,
[06:31.68]swamped in the oil,hidden in the coal of Franklin County,run over by the trains,turned phantom by the stockyards.
[00:07.13]ILLINGOIS JOURNEY by Saul Bellow
[00:11.28]The features of Illinois are not striking;they do not leap to the eye but lie flat and at first appear monotonous.
[00:20.90]The roads are wide, hard, perfect,
[00:25.16]sometimes of a shallow depth in the distance but so nearly level as to make you feel that the earth really is flat
[00:36.02]From east and west,travelers dart across these prairies into the huge horizons and through cornfields that go on forever
[00:46.08]giant skies,giant clouds,an evernal nearly featureless sameness.You find it hard to travel slowly.
[00:56.56]The endless miles pressed flat by the ancient glacier seduce you into speeding.
[01:03.97]As the car eats into the distances you begin gradually to feel that you are riding upon the floor of the continent,
[01:12.88]the very bottom of it,low and an impatient spirit of movement,of overtaking and urgency passes into your heart.
[01:24.64]Miles and miles of prairie,slowly rising and falling,sometimes give you a sense that something is in the process of becoming
[01:35.09]or that the liberation of a great force is imminent somepower,likeMichelangelo's slave only halfreleased fromthe block of stone
[01:46.84]Conceivably the mound-building Indians believed their resurrection would coincide with some such liberation,
[01:55.93]and built their graves in imitation of the low moraines deposited by the departing glaciers.
[02:03.72]But they have not yet been released and remain drowned in their waves of earth.They have left their bones,
[02:12.70]their flints and pots,their place names and tribal names and little besides except a stain,seldom vivid,
[02:23.57]on the consciouness of their white successors.
[02:28.48]The soil of the Illinois prairies is fat,rich and thick.
[02:34.44]After spring plowing it looks oil-blackened or colored by the soft coal which occurs in great veins throughout the state
[02:44.60]In the fields you frequently see a small tipple,or a crazy-looking device
[02:51.70]that pumps oil and nods like the neck of a horse at a quick walk…(2)Along the roads,
[03:00.64]with intervals between them as neat and even as buttons on the cuff,sit steel storage bins,in form like the tents of Mongolia
[03:11.74]They are filled with grain.And the elevators and tanks,trucks and machines that crawl over the fields
[03:20.36]and blunder over the highways-whatever you see is productive.It creates wealth,it stores wealth,it is wealth
[03:31.20]As you pass the fields,you see signs the farmers have posted telling in short code what sort of seed they have planted
[03:40.94]The farmhouses are seldom at the roadside,but far within the fields.The solitude and silence are deep and wide.
[03:51.26]Then,when you have gone ten or twenty miles through cornfields without having seen a living thing,no cow,no dog,
[04:01.92]scarcely even a bird under the hot sky,suddenly you come upon a noisy contrapion at the roadside,
[04:11.85]a system of contraptions,ratherforhusking the corn and stripping the grainIt burns and bangs awayand theconvey orbelts rattle
[04:23.21]When you leave,this noise and activity are cut off at one stroke:
[04:29.87]you are once more in the deaf,hot solitude of trembling air,alone in the cornfields.
[04:37.34]North,south,east and west,there is no end to them.
[04:42.75]They line roads and streams and hem in the woods and surround towns,
[04:48.18]and they crowd into back yards and edge up to gas stations
[04:53.80](3)An exotic stranger might assume he had come upon a race of corn worshipers who had created a corn ocean
[05:03.10]or that he was among a people who had fallen in love with infinite repetition of the same details,
[05:11.35]like the builders of skyscraters in New York andChicago who have raised up bricks and windows by the thousands,and all alike
[05:21.75]From corn you can derive notions of equality,or uniformity,massed democracy.You can,
[05:31.23]if you are given to that form of mental play,recall Joseph's brethren in the lean years,
[05:38.73]and think how famine has been conquered here and super-abundance itself become such a danger
[05:47.38]that the Government has to take measures against it.
[05:51.95]The power,the monotony,the oceanic extent of the cornfields do indeed shrink up and dwarf the past.
[06:02.34]How are you to think of the small bands of Illini,Ottawas,Cahokians,Shawnee,Miamis who camped in the turkey grass
[06:13.37]and the French Jesuits who descended the Mississippi and found them.(4)When you force your mind to summon them
[06:22.54]the Indians appear rather doll-like in the radiance of the present moment.They are covered in the corn,
[06:31.68]swamped in the oil,hidden in the coal of Franklin County,run over by the trains,turned phantom by the stockyards.
