"It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth"
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Steinbeck doesn’t flatter the species; he drags it into the light and then refuses to let it stay there. The opening inventory - weak, sick, ugly, quarrelsome - reads like a prosecutor’s charge sheet, a deliberate antidote to the self-mythology civilizations write about themselves. He starts with the body (weak, sick, ugly) and ends with society (quarrelsome), suggesting that human failure isn’t an occasional glitch but a full-spectrum condition: physical, psychological, political.
Then comes the pivot that makes the line hum. “But if that is all we ever were” is a trapdoor phrase, a hypothetical that exposes the insufficiency of cynicism. Steinbeck’s intent is to shame the fashionable pose of total disgust. If contempt were the whole story, the species would have been selected out long ago. Survival becomes evidence in an argument: not proof of nobility, but proof of extra capacity - cooperation, invention, tenderness, stubbornness, whatever allows a fragile animal to persist across “millenniums.”
The subtext is classic Steinbeck: a hard-eyed humanism that doesn’t require purity to justify compassion. This belongs to the postwar, Depression-hardened worldview where people are capable of cruelty and still worth writing about, still worth feeding, still worth organizing around. The sentence is built like a moral pressure test: can you hold two truths at once - that humans are often wretched, and that we contain something else strong enough to outlast our worst habits? Steinbeck’s wager is that the “something else” is not sentiment but endurance, and that endurance carries an obligation.
Then comes the pivot that makes the line hum. “But if that is all we ever were” is a trapdoor phrase, a hypothetical that exposes the insufficiency of cynicism. Steinbeck’s intent is to shame the fashionable pose of total disgust. If contempt were the whole story, the species would have been selected out long ago. Survival becomes evidence in an argument: not proof of nobility, but proof of extra capacity - cooperation, invention, tenderness, stubbornness, whatever allows a fragile animal to persist across “millenniums.”
The subtext is classic Steinbeck: a hard-eyed humanism that doesn’t require purity to justify compassion. This belongs to the postwar, Depression-hardened worldview where people are capable of cruelty and still worth writing about, still worth feeding, still worth organizing around. The sentence is built like a moral pressure test: can you hold two truths at once - that humans are often wretched, and that we contain something else strong enough to outlast our worst habits? Steinbeck’s wager is that the “something else” is not sentiment but endurance, and that endurance carries an obligation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Resilience |
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