Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this entertainment. They will certainly be over two hundred dollars, and maybe three hundred; and three hundred dollars is more than the year’s income of many a person in this room. There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch water on the floor—men who for six or seven months of the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till next Sunday morning …

It is  very  imprudent, it is tragic—but, ah, so beautiful! Bit by bit these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls—they cannot give up the vaselija! … The vasilija has come down to them from far-off time, and the meaning of it was that one might dwell within the cave and gaze upon shadows, provided only that once in  his lifetime  he could break his chains, and  feel his wings, and behold the sun; provided that once in his lifetime might  testify to the fact that life, with all its cares and its  terrors, is no such great thing after all,  but merely a bubble upon the surface of a river, a thing that one may toss about and play  with as a juggler tosses his golden balls, a thing that one may quaff, like a goblet of  rare red wine. Thus having known himself for the master of things, a man could go back to his toil and live upon the memory all his life.

From “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair

The novel describes the wage-slavery that European immigrants  were subjected in Chicago’s stockyards at the end of the nineteen century and the beginning of the twentieth century.  Sinclair describes a Lithuanian wedding celebration –the vasilija—in the midst of the chaos of these people’s lives. He went on to point out  how men can endure terrible conditions if at least once in their lifetime, life smiles at them so that they break their chains and feel their wings.   Man also lives by memory.