Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" breaks down to one simple expression for me: "You can't trust anyone." While this sounds like a pessimistic opinion, it is, unfortunately, slightly true. I don't not trust people to a point that I don't rely on anyone's help, or that I don't make friends with anyone and tell them secrets. I'm just extremely careful about what I say to certain people. This seems like a natural defense mechanism for humans, but I believe mine is worse, because I have a really hard time telling people things.
As lengthy and seemingly jumbled-up as Jack Kerouac's stories are in "Big Sur," I found a lot of interest in reading them. I have a sort of mythical dream of vagabonding the world, and reading "Big Sur" sparked that dream just a little more. Of course, the practice of vagabonding and traveling was much more prevalent in the mid-twentieth century.
Anne Sexton evokes feelings of nostalgia by telling her "string bean" that she's growing up too fast. This is a sadness everyone deals with in some form or fashion, whether he or she misses being a child, or he or she is seeing his or her child grow up too fast. I personally am seeing my life fly by so quickly that I have almost no time to realize what decisions I'm making. It's difficult and scary to be moving through life so quickly, but I know that it's part of life and everyone deals with it. It's simply a matter of finding the best, most patient, and most efficient way of doing it.
In the fourth chapter of Song of Solomon, in the Bible, the man speaks of his new wife and her naked body, and describes her, to her, from her hair down to the unmentionable parts of her figure. He gives a very detailed description of each of her features, relating each of them to a piece of nature. In this same way, Gary Snyder reverses the role in what seems like a comparison of nature to the body of a woman in "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills. Your Body." I thought that that concept, of switching the traditional woman-nature comparison, was brilliant, and Snyder, being the outdoorsy mountain man that he was, executed the description well.
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