" quiet pleasures, ...family employments and courtesies..."

12/31/2017

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from Yosemite Trails

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Chase worked as a tutor/facilitator to the underprivileged in his 

early days in California. He was fairly well acquainted with the

Mexican culture, first hand. In this passage Chase muses

on the Mexican people whom he observed living in, and 

around the foothills of the Sierra. His sensitive description

belies a simpatico relationship with their priorities and 

lifestyle, one that shows often throughout all of his

writing. It is a perceptive sketch and exhibits that longing

for the simple and the pastoral that Chase undoubtedly revered.

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" Scattered up and down the multitudinous canyons of the foothills

where the Sierra Nevada sweeps out in fringes of winter green or

summer ochre upon the great central valley of California, unsuspected

number of Mexicans have found congenial homes. As miners, shepherds,

bee-men, or nondescripts they live in these sequestered places, performing

at least as well as the rest of us the Symphony of the Quiet Life, which 

consists in such matters as ' living content with small means, talking gently,

acting frankly, bearing all cheerfully, doing all bravely, awaiting occasions,

hurrying never. '

Troops of children, often lovely as young arch-angels, whose dark eyes and

shinning tresses have often disquieted my tough bachelor heart with longing, 

play around these humble doors. Mandolins tinkle through long evenings

after easy days, and the smoke of everlasting cigarettes mingles with low-toned

laughter and murmured conversation in the most musical of languages. 

Standing outside the hurly-burly, these philosophical noncombatants find

leisure for the quiet pleasures and family employments and courtesies which we

deny ourselves, or think we are denied. They have not traveled so far from Eden

as we have. Can we be sure that we who have come farther have not fared worse? "

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 [Chase borrowed the quote ending the first paragraph from
' Symphony ' written by W.H. Channing in his memoir from
1886.]
( for more on Manning see tag below )

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Channing