Thomas Wolfe (1900 – 1938)
“In the course of George Webber’s life, many things of no great importance in themselves had become deeply imbedded in his memory, stuck there like burrs in a scottie’s tail; and always they were little things which, in an instant of clear perception, had riven his heart with some poignant flash of meaning.
“Thus he remembered, and would remember forever, the sight of Esther’s radiant, earnest face when, unexpectedly one night, he caught sight of it as it flamed and vanished in a crowd of grey, faceless faces in Times Square. So, too, he remembered two deaf mutes he had seen talking on their fingers in a subway train; and a ringing peal of children’s laughter in a desolate street at sunset; and the waitresses in their little rooms across the backyard, washing, ironing, and rewashing day after day the few adornments of their shabby finery, in endless preparations for a visitor who never came.
“And now, to his store of treasured trivia was added the memory of this man’s face – thick, white, expressionless, set in its stolid and sorrowful stare. Immutable, calm, impassive, it became for him the symbol of a kind of permanence in the rush and sweep of chaos in the city, where all things come and go and pass and are so soon forgotten. For, day after day, as he watched the man and tried to penetrate his mystery, at last it seemed to him that he had found the answer.
“And after that, in later years, whenever he remembered the man’ s face, the time was fixed at the end of a day in late summer. Without violence or heat, the last rays of the sun fell on the warm brick of the building and painted it with a sad, unearthly light. In the window the man sat, always looking out. He never wavered in his gaze, his eyes were calm and sorrowful, and on his face was legible the exile of an imprisoned spirit. That man’s face became for him the face of Darkness and of Time. It never spoke, and yet it had a voice – a voice that seemed to have the whole earth in it. It was the voice of evening and of night, and in it were the blended tongues of all those men who have passed through the heat and fury of the day, and who now lean quietly upon the sills of evening. In it was the whole vast hush and weariness that comes upon the city at the hour of dusk, when the chaos of another day is ended, and when everything – streets, buildings, and eight million people – breathe slowly, with a tired and sorrowful joy. And in that single tongueless voice was the knowledge of all their tongues.
“‘Child, child,”‘ it said, “‘have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them – but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way – but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us – we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass. We have outlived the shift and glitter of so many fashions, we have seen so many things that come and go, so many words forgotten, so many flames that flared and were destroyed; yet we know now that we are strangers whose footfalls have not left a print upon the endless streets of life. We shall not go into the dark again, nor suffer madness, nor admit despair: we have built a wall about us now. We shall not hear the clocks of time strike out on foreign air, nor wake at morning in some alien land to think of home: our wandering is over, and our hunger fed. O brother, son, and comrade, because we have lived so long and seen so much, we are content to make our own a few things now, letting millions pass.
“‘Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.
“‘The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’ s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air – these things will never change.
“‘The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and can never be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry – these things will always be the same.
“‘All things belonging to the earth will never change – the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth – all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth – these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.
“‘The tarantula, the adder and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again, like April.”‘
Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
Michael Lemon Portfolio 