By Lance Hardie Everything you ever wanted to know about psychology or physics is contained in those words. Man, he lives in jerks baby born an' a man dies, an' that's a jerk gets a farm an' loses his farm, an' that's a jerk. Woman, it's all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river, it goes right on.
Woman looks at it like that.
That's Ma talking to Pa towards the end of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath . Well, it takes less than three lines of text for her to set him straight. Though she may put it in her own language, Ma knows all about life in terms of male-female polarities. And, when all is said and done, it is she who doesn't break. Of course male-female polarities have been around since let's go ahead and say it since the Big Bang.