memories.

Excerpt from __The Grapes of Wrath__
//John Steinbeck//

"Ma set her lantern on the floor. She reached behind one of the boxes that had served as a chairs and brought out a stationery box, old and soiled and cracked at the corners. She sat down and opened the box. Inside were letters, clippings, photographs, a pair of earrings, a little gold signet ring, and a watch chain braided of hair and tipped with gold swivels. She touched the letters with her fingers, touched them lightly, and she smoothed a newspaper clipping on which there was an account of Tom's trial. For a long time she held the box, looking over it, and her fingers disturbed the letters and then lined them up again. She bit her lower lip, thinking, remembering."



 //"In a way, I guess, she's right: I should forget it. But the

thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take

your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the

intersection of past and present. The memory traffic feeds

into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a

while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic

merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets."// __ --The Things They Carried __

__ back to tragedy.

to the memory connection.

forward to hope. __ 