The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress by Gertrude Stein Page A

with his cane and begin talking and somebody near him would come to listen. It was just ordinary talking that he would be doing, about the weather or the country or the fruit and it did not seem to have any deep meaning but it was the power and completeness of the identification of this big man with all creation that forced people to think of him. This man was big as all the world in his beginning, it was nothing in him even if he did not always keep going, he had been as big as all the world once in his feeling and that he never could lose with him.
     And so he would stand talking and the unhappy uncomfortable child beside him would keep saying, when he was not afraid to break in on him, “Come on papa all those people are looking.” “What!” the father was not listening to him but would keep right on with his talking. The child as much as he dared would twitch or pull at him, “What!” but the father never really heard him and he would go on with the queer ways in him. Slowly his children learned endurance of him. Later in their life they were queer too like him.
     Often when he was walking with his children and passed a shop and saw some fruit or cakes or something that pleased him he took it and gave it to his children and they would be most uncomfortable then and say something about not wanting it to him. “What!” and he never listened to them. The children suffered so because they were not sure that the man inside knew that their father would pay him. The father of course always paid for them but there was something in the manner of him that gave one a kind of feeling that he was as big as all the world about him, one included the other in them, the world and him, the earth the sky the people around him the fruit the shops, it was all one and the same, all of it and him, and this kind of a feeling he always gave to them who saw him walking standing thinking talking, that the world was all him, there was no difference in it in him, and the fruit inside or outside him there were no separations of him or from him, and the whole world he lived in always lived inside him.
     It was all so simply to him as the world as all him, and it was this that gave him a big freedom and this big important feeling and the big way of beginning and so made a queer man of him, an eccentric from the others around him, and all that stopped it from making a god of him was his way of being impatient inside him and not being very good at keeping going but always making for himself a new beginning.
     This large way of him when it made him take up fruit from shops to eat and to give to his children made a very uncomfortable shamed child beside him, and it would be protesting to him, and its father would say, “What", but he never listened to him. The child never did learn that the fruit man would not be worried with him, that they all knew his father and the queer ways of him, and that the father always paid them. The fruit men all knew him and liked the abundant world embracing feeling of him and they liked to see him, but his children never could lose, until they grew up to be queer themselves each one inside him, the uncomfortable feeling that his queer ways gave them.
     To him, David Hersland, education was almost the whole of living. In it was always the making of a new beginning, the having ideas, and often changing. And then there were so many ways of considering the question.
     There were so many different ways of seeing the meaning of the various parts that made education. There was the health, the mind, the notion of right living, the learning cooking and all useful things that he knew they should know now to be doing, and then there was his system of hardening so that they would be ready to make each one their own beginning; and all these needs for them and the many ways to look at them led to many queer things that his children had to endure from him.

 
     Their education