Thomas Wolfe, page 156
Temporal experience divided into three qualitatively distinct intervals: the remembered past, the perceived specious present, and the anticipated future—By means of the tripartite division we are able to inject our present selves into the temporal stream of our own experience.
By arrangement of temporal orders of past with temporal orders of future—we can construct a temporal order of our specious presents and their contents.
Thus time has its roots in experience and yet appears to be a dimension in which experiences and their contents are to be arranged.
Thus the stuff from which time is made is of the nature of experienced data.
The Zenonian paradoxes: Achilles cannot catch up with the almost here save by occupying an infinity of positions.
A flying arrow canot remain where it is, nor be where it is not.
These things do not deal with space or time but with the properties of infinite assemblages and dense series (Americana).
Weber’s at midnight: The waiters in Weber’s standing in a group in their black coats and white boiled shirts——
All around the great mirrors reflecting them—for a moment a strange picture I thought of TIME!
The horrible monotony of the French—Weber’s at midnight some Frenchmen in evening dress—the heavy eyelids—the dangling legs—the look of weary vitality——
Then in come some “Parisiennes”—God! God! All sizes and shapes and all the same—Unfit for anything else in the world, and not good for what they are—The texture of enamelled tinted skin, the hard avaricious noses, the chic style of coats, hair, eyebrows, etc.
The great myth that the Latins are romantic people. The Latins have qualities and standards that we do not possess—Hence we overvalue them.
There are many places in the world where life attains a greater variety, interest or profundity than in Paris (viz., New York, London, Vienna, Munich). Yet a great many Americans make their homes in Paris because they are sure it is the centre of the world’s intellectual and cultural reputations.
It is easier for a writer to secure a reputation in France than in any other country. Many French writers have very respectable reputations who would be laughed at in other countries. For example, Henri Bordeaux—Some Americans who study French literature think he is a distinguished writer. His name has a solid, respectable sound to it. On the cover of all his books is printed “Member of the French Academy.” But you could hardly find an intellectual in America who would say a kind word for Harold Bell Wright. Yet Harold Bell Wright—poor as he may be—is a better writer than Henri Bordeaux. If you don’t believe it, read them. Americans are very unfair about this.
The way things go: At 6:10 a.m. the street lights of Paris go off. I sit at a little all-night café in Grand Boulevard opposite Rue Faubourg de Montmartre and watch light widen across the sky behind Montmartre. At first a wide strip of blue-grey—a strip of violet light. You see the line of the two clear and sharp. The paper trucks of Hachette, Le Petit Parisien, etc., go by.
In the bar a rattling of leaden, hole-y coins—the five, ten and twenty-five centime pieces. Taxi-drivers drinking café rhum, debating loudly in hoarse sanguinary voices. A whore, the blonde all-night antiquity of the quarter streets, drinking rich hot chocolate, crunching crusty croissants at the bar. The veteran of a million loves, well known and benevolently misprized, hoarse with iniquity and wisdom. A pox upon you, Marianne: You have made Monsieur Le Président très triste; the third leg of the Foreign Legion wears a sling because of you!
A swart-eyed fellow, oiled and amorous, sweetly licks with nozzly tongue his whore’s rouge-varnished face: with choking secret laughter and with kissy, wetty talkie he cajoles her; she answers in swart choked whisperings with her sudden shrill whore’s scream of merriment.
A morning rattle of cans and ashes on the pavements. With rich jingle-jangle and hollow clitter-clatter a Paris milk wagon passes. Suddenly, a screak of brakes: all over the world the moaning screak of brakes, and racing, starting motors.
Across the street in faint grey-bluish light the news kiosque is opening up.
“Est-ce que vous avez Le New York ’Erald?”
“Non, monsieur. Ce n’est pas encore arrivé.”
“Et Le Tchicago Treebune?”
“Ça pas plus, monsieur. C’est aussi en retard ce matin.”
“Merci. Alors: Le Matin.”
“Bien, monsieur.”
Passage of leaden sous: the smell of ink-worn paper, dear to morning throughout the world. A big Hachette truck swerves up an instant halt, the flat heavy smack of fresh-corded ink-warm paper on the pavement, a hoarse cry and instant loud departure!
Ça aussi, monsieur. Sing ye bi-i-i-rds, sing! Lift up your heart, O son of man!
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, with charm of earliest birds!
Some things will never change: some things will always be the same: brother we cannot die, we must be saved; we are united at the heart of night and morning.
A good time now, just before dawn and morning. Surfeit of sterile riches: harvests of stale bought love: the burnt-out candle-end of night, the jaded blaze of crimson light, in shuttered bars; numb weary lust—which one, which one?
The whores at daybreak, the dead brilliance of electric smiles.
Tired, tired, tired.
Tuesday: Woman who sang tonight at Concert Mayol—She was near 50—magnificent teeth—so good they made me uneasy—Those things in her head—but how? They keep them so. This comes to me—that they spend all their time looking after them: there is something filthy about this.
On the Boulevards—3.20 du matin. Reading the Sourire for whore-house items—I want to find me a Ballon of Champagne—First of all—préservatif right to my left around corner Rue Faubourg de Montmartre; all-night pharmacy.
Along the quais again this afternoon to the bookstalls—Made afraid by the junk—Bought a dozen books or so, but no “prints” or “etchings”—Countless old-fashioned prints—pictures of Versailles—the Palais Royale, the Revolution—Sentimental and cheap pictures—Florid ones—“La Courtisane Passionée,” etc. Stage-coach pictures, etc. Works of Eugène Scribe—The little books bound or tied, so you can’t look—nothing in them—Vie à la Campagne—countless cheap books—ah, I have a little of it all!—Strasbourg.
Christmas Week—Colmar, Alsace-Lorraine—Written on the Spot.
The Isentheimer Altar of Mathias Grünewald in the Cloisters of the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar:
There is nothing like it in the world. I have spent over 4 months getting here—it is much more wonderful than one imagines it will be. The altar is set up not in one piece but in three sections in a big room with groined ceilings, a long groined room like a Dominikaner Cloister.
The first two “volets” of the altar—Everything is distorted and out of perspective. The figure of the Christ is twice as big as the other figures—the pointing finger of Saint Antoine is much too big for his body—but everything in this figure points along the joints and elbows of that arm and ends in the pointing finger.
The Lamb with its straight brisk feet, its dainty right foreleg bent delicately about the Cross and red blood spouting from its imperturbable heart into a goblet of rich gold, is a masterpiece of symbolic emotion that strikes far beyond intelligence.
The body of Christ, and its agony, are indescribable. The hands and the feet are enlarged to meet the agony—the hands are tendons of agony, the feet are not feet but lengths of twisted tendons driven through by a bolt and ending in bent, broken, bleeding toes. A supernatural light falls upon the immense twisted length of the body (a grey-white-green) and yet completely solid light—you can count the ribs, the muscles, (the head falling to the right), full of brutal agony—it is crowned with long thorns and rusty blood—it droops over, it is too big, Christ is dead.
The great figure of the woman in white comes up and breaks backward at the middle and is caught in the red arms of the pitiful Saint. The fingers of the Magdalen are bent in eloquent supplication.
The blackness of hell’s night behind—the unearthly greenish supernatural light upon the figures—on Christ’s dead, sinewed, twisted, riven gigantic body and on the living flesh of the other figures.
The sly face of the Virgin in the wing of The Annunciation—the eyes slanting up under lowered lids in a sly leer—the fat loose sensual mouth half open, with the tongue visible—a look of sly bawdiness over all.
The enormous and demoniac intelligence that illuminates the piece in Grunewald’s Altar—the angels playing instruments in “La Vierge Glorifiée par les Anges”—the faces have a sinister golden light—an almost unholy glee. You can hear mad heavenly music. This is not true with Italians—syrup and sugar.
This is the greatest and also the most “modern” picture I have ever seen.
Christmas Week—1924: Returning to Paris from Strasbourg: The approach to Paris through the Valley of the Marne—Winter—The very magnificent rainbow—the rocking clacketing train.
The suburbs of Paris—Dark—The little double-deckers rattling past loaded with people—The weary approaches to a great city—Endless repetition—monotonous endlessness—The sadness of seeing people pass you in a lighted train or subway. Why is this?
PARIS: There is nothing that I do not know about Paris—That sounds like the foolishest boast but that is true—I am sitting on the Terrace of The Taverne Royale—Rue Royale—It is winter—it is cold—but it is the same—to one hand the Madeleine—to the other the Place de la Concorde—to the right that of the Champs-Elysées—the Arc—the Bois—the fashionable quarters—the whore-houses of that district—the rue—the Troc—the Tower—the Champs de Mars—the Montparnasse section—the Latin-Quarter—the bookshops—the cafés—the Ecole—the Institute—the St. Mich—the Ile—the Notre Dame—The Old Houses—the Rue de Rivoli—the Tour St. Jacques—the Carnavalet—the Hugo—Vosges—the Bastille—the Gare de Lyon—the Gare de l’Est—Du Nord—the Montmartre—the Butte—the cafés—houses—the Rue Lepic—the Port Clignancourt—the La Villette—The Parc Monceau—the Bois—Great circle, unending universe of life, huge legend of dark time!
But unannealed by water the gaunt days sloped into the grots of time.
Paris, Saturday Night: Today has been a horrible one—I was able to sleep only the most diseased and distressed sleep (the worst sort of American-in-Europe sleep) last night after leaving Mrs. Morton. I was sick with my loss (the loss of the picture and several letters Helen sent me) and I got up sick and with the shakes this morning—I came to the Abiga bar—I went to the Am Ex Co—I went to Wepler’s in Montmartre—At each place, as I knew they would, with mean and servile regret cut by mocking, they were sorry, sorry, sorry.
The day was of the most horrible European sort—Something that passes understanding—the wet heavy air, that deadens the soul, puts a lump of indigestible lead in the solar plexus, depresses and fatigues the flesh until one seems to lift himself leadenly through the thick wet steaming air with a kind of terrible fear—an excitement that is without hope, that awaits only the news of some further grief, failure, humiliation, and torture. There is a lassitude that enters the folds and lappings of the brain, that makes one hope for better things and better work tomorrow, but hope without belief or conviction.
The grey depression of the wet buildings—the horrible nervous pettiness of the French, swarming, honking, tooting along the narrow streets and the two-foot sidewalks, while the heavy busses beetle past——
A chapter called PARIS or So You’re Going to “Paris”? (Perhaps a piece for a magazine in This.)
The fear always of the corners—you are coming out into the open, there will be waiting to thrust at you, the heavy grinding busses, the irritation of the horns, etc.
A chapter to be called “The Arithmetic of the Soul.”
The music deepened like a passion.
All of our hearts are fulfilled of you, all of our souls are growing warm with you, all of our lives are beating out their breath for you, and the strange feel of our pulses is playing through our blood for you, immortal and unending living.
Sunday—Up at noon, bathed, etc. Lunch at Casenave’s—Went to Delacroix and Louvre—Something over-rich and bloody about it.—Note how French love to paint blood (Delacroix)—then along Seine bookstalls—found only junk—then to Lipp’s for beer and cervelas—then back to hotel where worked from 6:30–10.30—Then out to eat at Taverne Royale—Walk back through Vendôme and Rue St. Honoré—Read a little and worked from one to 3:00—6 hours today.
Sunday Night: I feel low—discouraged by the mass of things again tonight. I must make some decisive action—the new web of streets behind the dome has depressed me.
The mind grows weary with such a problem as mine, by constantly retracing its steps, by constantly feeling around the same cylinder from which there seems at present to be no escape.
The European temper is one that has learned control—that is it has learned indifference—Each man writes his own book without worrying very much about what the other has written—he reads little or if he reads much, it is only a trifle—a spoonful of the ocean of print that inundates everything—Picture Anatole France—with a reputation for omniscience—picking daintily here and there among the bookstalls of the Seine. To go by them affects me with horror and weariness—as it does Paul Valéry—but I lack his power to resist. I must go by there—and if I do again and again I cannot keep away from them.
More and more I am convinced that to be a great writer a man must be something of an ass. I read of Tolstoi that he read no newspapers, that he went away and lived among peasants for 7 years at a time, and that for six years he read nothing except the novels of Dumas. Yet such a man could write great books. I almost think it is because of this that he did.
Bernard Shaw, one of our prophets at the present time, is worshiped past idolatry by many people who consider that he knows everything or practically everything.
From what I have been able to discover of his reading from his writing, I can be sure that he has read Shakespeare—not very carefully, Ibsen very carefully, a book by Karl Marx, which made a deep impression on him, the tracts of the Fabian Society, and the writings of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb.
There is always the moment when we must begin to write. There are always the hundreds, the thousands, of struggle, of getting up, of pacing about, of sitting down, of laborious uneven accomplishment. During the time of actual work, what else besides ourselves, can help us? Can we call to mind then the contents of 20,000 books? Can we depend on anything other than ourselves for help?
At La Régence:
How certain trivial words and phrases haunt the brain—cannot be forgotten—come back again even when years have passed. Today, have been hearing old voices, old songs, fleeting forgotten words of twenty years ago—my mother’s—my father’s—the voices of the summer boarders on the porches—most of all, Dinwood Bland, sitting in pleasant backyard of his house in Norfolk, a drink in his hand, his blind eyes blindly fixed upon the flashing sparkling waters of Hampton Roads, blindly on a white ship passing—his thin, senile, evil, strangely attractive face touched with bitterness, revulsion, and his weary disgust with life as he said:
“My father was an educated loafer.”
And now, all day long, “the sound of these words rings and echoes in my mind until I can listen to nothing else.” And sitting here I feel like Coleridge when the rhyme for Youth and Age came to him (10 Sept. 1823 Wed. morning 10 o’clock)—“An Air,” he says, “that whizzed dia engkefalou” (right across the diameter of my brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee—etc.
So, too, with me, all afternoon—and Dinwood Bland’s haunting phrase about his father has now become:
“My father was an educated loafer,
My mother was an alcoholic bum,
My sister’s name was Nelly, she had a lovely belly,
Aside from that she was a lousy scum.
“My brother Pete, he went and joined the navy,
My brother Hank, he went and caught the clap,
My little sister Anny, fell down and bruised her fanny——
Because we had an educated Pap,”—etc.
Obscure, ridiculous—but old words, old phrases, and forgotten sayings—why do they come back to haunt our meaning?
At La Régence:
On quotations—The practice of nineteenth century “good” writers was to decorate their compositions with neat little patterns of quotations. That practice still persists in a great deal of the correct writing of the present—viz., the essays and leading articles of The Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, Harpers, The Century, The London Mercury, etc.—The quotation habit is generally a vicious one, often it has not even so worthy a design as to borrow from stronger and greater people an energy and clearness that we do not have, but rather serves as a sort of diploma to certify our culture—said culture consisting in our ability to quote scraps from Lamb, Dickens, John Keats, Browning, Doctor Johnson, and Matthew Arnold. The distortion this works upon the original sinew of the mind is incalculable—writing becomes a meeting of pseudo-courtliness neatly designed to arrive before Lamb with a bow and to be handed by Dickens to Lord Tennyson with a graceful flourish. The phrase “apt quotation” is one of the most misleading phrases ever invented. Most quotations so far from being apt to any purpose, are distinguished by all the ineptitude a politician displays when having spoken for twenty minutes on the Nicaraguan question, he says: “That reminds me of a little story I heard the other day. It seems there were two Irishmen whose names were Pat and Mike”—then proceeds to a discussion of the Prohibition issue, after his convulsed audience is somewhat recovered.
Europe and America are still too far apart—the “interminable” day is far too long—six days is far too long—for the intense impression—to compare and observe their essential difference——
Results: We must have them closer together—as the English and the French—as Dover and Calais—things that matter in our life cannot be recalled so easily. I have lived deeply, intensely, vividly, on the whole unhappily, for six months. Some people say that is all that matters. I do not think it is. But things cannot be called up so easily.
