'...the children listening with their souls...'

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck's epic novel, 'The Grapes of Wrath', follows one family's experience of the migration from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression of 1930s America. Many families were driven to join the migration due to drought, economic hardship and the lure of a better life in the west. The journey is long and fraught with many challenges. This short passage captures the moment, one evening, when a weary family, beset by hunger and the spectre of death, prepares a meagre meal by the roadside. Much of the journey still lies ahead and the men have been discussing their scant options:

'The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the sidemeat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand.'

What I love about this passage is how Steinbeck captures the way children absorb the adult world in which they find themselves. The words of the adults are, essentially, meaningless to the children. For them, listening is not an active tracking of words with a view to making meaning but rather a visceral, felt sense of the non-verbal cues that accompany them. In this way the children intuit the nature of their world.

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I wonder how many of us can recall a felt sense of our own childhood world. Did it feel safe? Chaotic? Frightening? Were we loved, and therefore know ourselves to be loveable? Or did we sense we were somehow a burden? To be tolerated rather than welcomed?

As infants we absorb the nuances of our environment and the people who populate it, making sense of our experiences as best we can. In this way we come to 'know' things about ourselves and form expectations about how the world will respond to us.

We often unwittingly carry these early, unconscious 'knowings' into our relationships and everyday transactions as adults.

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