cricket song

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 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.  An then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens the 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 the number of his glories.  It is a lonely thing but it relates to us in the world.  It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

JOHN STEINBECK, EAST OF EDEN, 1952