East of Eden

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then -the glory- so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. ”

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

According to Wikipedia, prose is a form or technique of language that exhibits a natural flow of speech and grammatical structure.

What that means -as far as I can tell- is that, assuming proper grammatical structure, the quality of one’s prose is necessarily relative to the person reading it.

With that said, I intend to periodically highlight examples of particularly enjoyable prose as I find them. Feel free to comment, and agree, disagree, explain, and ignore as you like.

The example above is taken from East of Eden by John Steinbeck at the beginning of chapter 13. The rest of the subchapter is worth a read beyond just the highlighted section, but at a certain point you’d be better off just reading the whole book.

Timshel.