Thomas Wolfe, page 437
The memory of their faces, and their restless prowling of the night, familiar and unquestioned at the time, returned now with the strangeness of a dream. What did they want? What had they hoped to find as they prowled past a thousand doors in those little, bleak, and wintry towns?
Their hope, their wild belief, the dark song that the night awoke in them, this thing that lived in darkness while men slept and knew a secret and exultant triumph, and that was everywhere across the land, were written in my heart. Not in the purity and sweetness of dawn with all the brave and poignant glory of its revelation, nor in the practical and homely lights of morning, nor in the silent stature of the corn at noon, the drowsy hum and stitch of three o’clock across the fields, nor in the strange magic gold and green of its wild lyric wooded earth, nor even the land that breathed quietly the last heat and violence of day away into the fathomless depth and brooding stillness of the dusk—as brave and glorious as these times and lights have been—had I felt and found the mystery, the grandeur, and the immortal beauty of America.
I had found the dark land at the heart of night, of dark, proud, and secret night: the immense and lonely land lived for me in the brain of night. I saw its plains, its rivers, and its mountains spread out before me in all their dark immortal beauty, in all the space and joy of their huge sweep, in all their loneliness, savagery, and terror, and in all their immense and delicate fecundity. And my heart was with the hearts of all men who had heard the exultant and terrible music of wild earth, triumph, and discovery, singing a strange and bitter prophecy of love and death.
For there was something living on the land at night. There was a dark tide moving in the hearts of men. Wild, strange, and jubilant, sweeping on across the immense and sleeping earth, it had spoken to me in a thousand watches of the night, and the language of all its dark and secret tongues was written in my heart. It had passed above me with the rhythmic sustentions of its mighty wing, it had shot away with bullet cries of a demonic ecstasy on the swift howlings of the winter wind, it had come softly, numbly, with a dark impending prescience of wild joy in the dull, soft skies of coming snow, and it had brooded, dark and wild and secret, in the night, across the land, and over the tremendous and dynamic silence of the city, stilled in its million cells of sleep, trembling forever in the night with the murmurous, remote, and mighty sound of time.
And always, when it came to me, it had filled my heart with a wild exultant power that burst the limits of a little room, and that knew no stop of time or place or lonely distances. Joined to that dark illimitable energy of night, like a page to the wind, and westward, my spirit rushed across the earth with the wild post of the exultant furies of the dark, until I seemed to inhabit and hold within my compass the whole pattern of the earth, the huge wink of the enormous seas that feathered its illimitable shores, and the vast structure of the delicate and engulfing night.
And I was joined in knowledge and in life with an indubitable certitude to the great company of men who lived by night and knew and loved its mystery. I knew all joys and labors and designs that such men know. I knew the life of the engineer, lit by the intermittent flares of savage furnace fires as he sat behind his throttle, in the swaying cab of his terrific locomotive, as his eyes peered out into the darkness at the spaced and lonely beacons of the semaphores, winking into the enormous dark, green, red, and white, their small and passionate assurances, and seeing the level wall of the golden wheat, lit for a moment by his furnace flare, the huge and secret earth that leaped instantly with all its mystery into the glare of the great headlight, and that was swallowed and engulfed again beneath the terrific drive of pistoned wheels.
And I knew the passionate heart of the boy who from the darkness of his berth watched, with a wild exultancy of joy and hope and sorrow, the great stroke and fanlike sweep of the immense and imperturbable earth. Field and fold and sleeping wood, it swept past him with its strange enigma of storm-swift flight and immortal stillness, of something found and lost forever in an instant, and with a dark tongue that spoke of morning, and the sea, and the triumph of a shining city.
I knew the secret glory that the brakeman knew, as through the night he moved along his runway on the tops of reeling freights, and saw light break before him in the east and the cool blind fragrance of the night emerge into the still pure sculpture of first light. I saw the fields and woods awake then in young sunlight, peach bloom, and the singing of the birds. And I saw the outposts of the town appear in the vast spread and flare of forty rails, as the engine swept into its final destination. I knew the fear, the ecstasy, the trembling, growing resolution of a boy who prowled outside the brothels of a sleeping town. I had seen and known the dark heart of a boy’s desire a thousand times and in a hundred little places, and it had given a tongue to darkness, an animate stillness to silent streets and bolted doors, a heart of fire and passion and wild longing to all the waste and lone immensity of night.
I had known as well all other joys and labors of the night: the quiet voices of a country station, and the huge and brooding song of the dark Southern earth; the clean and quiet tremble of great dynamos in power stations and the perilous flares of bluish light that came from cutting torches, the showers of golden fire that exploded from them, and the intent and goggled faces of the men who used them.
Finally, I knew the joys and labors and designs that such men know. I had known all things living on the earth by night, and finally, I had known by night the immortal fellowship of those three with whom the best part of my life was passed—proud Death, and his stern brother, Loneliness, and their great sister, Sleep. I had watched my brother and my father die in the dark mid-watches of the night, and I had known and loved the figure of proud Death when he had come. I had lived and worked and wrought alone with Loneliness, my friend, and in the darkness, in the night, in all the sleeping silence of the earth, I had looked a thousand times into the visages of Sleep, and had heard the sound of her dark horses when they came.
Therefore, immortal fellowship, proud Death, stern Loneliness, and Sleep, dear friends, in whose communion I shall live forever, out of the passion and substance of my life, I have made this praise for you:
To you, proud Death, who sits so grandly on the brows of little men—first to you! Proud Death, proud Death, whom I have seen by darkness, at so many times, and always when you came to nameless men, what have you ever touched that you have not touched with love and pity, Death? Proud Death, wherever we have seen your face, you came with mercy, love, and pity, Death, and brought to all of us your compassionate sentences of pardon and release. For have you not retrieved from exile the desperate lives of men who never found their home? Have you not opened your dark door for us who never yet found doors to enter and given us a room who, roomless, doorless, unassuaged, were driven on forever through the streets of life? Have you not offered us your stern provender, Death, with which to stay the hunger that grew to madness from the food it fed upon, and given all of us the goal for which we sought but never found, the certitude, the peace, for which our overladen hearts contended, and made for us, in your dark house, an end of all the tortured wandering and unrest that lashed us on forever? Proud Death, proud Death, not for the glory that you added to the glory of the king, proud Death, nor for the honor that you imposed upon the dignities of famous men, proud Death, nor for the final magic that you have given to the lips of genius, Death, but because you come so gloriously to us who never yet knew glory, so proudly and sublimely to us whose lives were nameless and obscure, because you give to all of us—the nameless, faceless, voiceless atoms of the earth—the awful chrism of your grandeur, Death, because I have seen and known you so well, and have lived alone so long with Loneliness, your brother, I do not fear you any longer, friend, and have made this praise for you.
Now, Loneliness forever and the earth again! Dark brother and stern friend, immortal face of darkness and of night, with whom the half part of my life was spent, and with whom I shall abide now till my death forever, what is there for me to fear as long as you are with me? Heroic friend, blood-brother of proud Death, dark face, have we not gone together down a million streets, have we not coursed together the great and furious avenues of night, have we not crossed the stormy seas alone, and known strange lands, and come again to walk the continent of night, and listen to the silence of the earth? Have we not been brave and glorious when we were together, friend, have we not known triumph, joy, and glory on this earth—and will it not be again with me as it was then, if you come back to me? Come to me, brother, in the watches of the night, come to me in the secret and most silent heart of darkness, come to me as you always came, bringing to me again the old invincible strength, the deathless hope, the triumphant joy and confidence that will storm the ramparts of the earth again.
Come to me through the fields of night, dear friend, come to me with the horses of your sister, Sleep, and we shall listen to the silence of the earth and darkness once again, we shall listen to the heartbeats of the sleeping men as with soft and rushing thunder of their hooves the strange dark horses of great Sleep come on again.
They come! Ships call! The hooves of night, the horses of great Sleep, are coming on below their manes of darkness. And forever the rivers run. Deep as the tides of Sleep the rivers run. We call!
As from dark winds and waters of our sleep on which a few stars sparely look, we grope our feelers in the sea’s dark bed. Whether to polyped spore, blind sucks or crawls or seavalves of the brain, we call through slopes and glades of night’s dark waters on great fish. Call to the strange dark fish, or to the dart and hoary flaking of electric fins, or to the sea-worms of the brain that lash great fish to bloody froth upon the seafloor’s coral stipes. Or, in vast thickets of our sleep to call to blue gulphs and deep immensities of night, call to the cat’s bright blazing glare and ceaseless prowl; call to all things that swim or crawl or fly, all subtlest unseen stirs, all half-heard, half-articulated whisperings, O forested and far!—call to the hooves of sleep through all the waste and lone immensity of night: “Return! Return!”
They come: My great dark horses come! With soft and rushing thunder of their hooves they come, and the horses of Sleep are galloping, galloping over the land.
Oh, softly, softly the great dark horses of Sleep are galloping over the land. The great black bats are flying over us. The tides of Sleep are moving through the nation; beneath the tides of Sleep and time strange fish are moving.
For Sleep has crossed the worn visages of day, and in the night time, in the dark, in all the sleeping silence of the towns, the faces of ten million men are strange and dark as time. In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying in the darkness, and we know no death, there is no death, there is no life, no joy, no sorrow, and no glory on the earth but Sleep.
Come, mild and magnificent Sleep, and let your tides flow through the nation. Oh, daughter of unmemoried desire, sister of Death, and my stern comrade, Loneliness, bringer of peace and dark forgetfulness, healer and redeemer, dear enchantress, hear us: come to us through the fields of night, over the plains and rivers of the everlasting earth, bringing to the huge vexed substance of this world and to all the fury, pain, and madness of our lives the merciful anodyne of your redemption. Seal up the porches of our memory, tenderly, gently, steal our lives away from us, blot out the vision of lost love, lost days, and all our ancient hungers, great Transformer, heal us!
Oh, softly, softly, the great dark horses of Sleep are galloping over the land. The tides of Sleep are moving in the hearts of men, they flow like rivers in the night, they flow with lapse and reluctation of their breath, with glut and fullness of their dark unfathomed strength into a million pockets of the land and over the shores of the whole earth. They flow with the full might of their advancing and inexorable flood across the continent of night, across the breadth and sweep of the immortal earth, until the hearts of all men living are relieved of their harsh weight, the souls of all men who have ever drawn in the breath of anguish and of labor are healed, assuaged, and conquered by the vast enchantments of dark, silent, all-engulfing sleep.
Sleep falls like silence on the earth, it fills the hearts of ninety million men, it moves like magic in the mountains, and walks like night and darkness across the plains and rivers of the earth, until low upon the lowlands, and high upon the hills, flows gently sleep, smooth-sliding sleep—oh, sleep—sleep—sleep!
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NO DOOR
A Story of Time and the Wanderer
[Scribner’s Magazine, July 1933]
. . . of wandering forever and the earth again . . . of seed-time, bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest. And of the big flowers, the rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers.
Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer, and in what place, and in what land, and in what time?
Where? Where the weary of heart can abide forever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be forever stilled.
Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little space, he shall dwell in one small room forever.
Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus through the moil and horror of ten thousand furious streets? He shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence and the earth: he shall speak no word through the rooted lips, the snake’s cold eye will peer for him through the sockets of the brain, there will be no cry out of the heart where wells the vine.
The tarantula is crawling through the rotted oak, the adder lisps against the breast, cups fall: but the earth will endure forever. The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elmroot threads the bones of buried lovers.
The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouths crawl tunnels through the buried flesh, but the earth will endure forever; hair grows like April on the buried breast, and from the sockets of the brain the death-flowers will grow and will not perish.
O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent from our loneliness.
I
OCTOBER: 1931
It is wonderful with what warm enthusiasm well-kept people who have never been alone in all their life can congratulate you on the joys of solitude. I know whereof I speak. I have been alone a great deal of my life—more than anyone I know, and I also knew, for one short period of my life, a few of these well-kept people. And their passionate longing for the life of loneliness is astonishing. In the evening they are driven out to their fine house in the country where their wives and children eagerly await them; or to their magnificent apartments in the city where their lovely wife or charming mistress is waiting for them with a tender smile, a perfumed, anointed, and seductive body, and the embrace of love. And all this is as a handful of cold dust and ashes, and a little dross.
Sometimes one of them invites you out to dinner: your host is a plump and pleasant gentleman of forty-six, a little bald, healthily plump, well-nourished-looking, and yet with nothing gross and sensual about him. Indeed, he is a most aesthetic-looking millionaire, his features, although large and generous, are full of sensitive intelligence, his manners are gentle, quietly subdued, his smile a little sad, touched faintly with a whimsy of ironic humor, as of one who has passed through all the anguish, hope, and tortured fury youth can know, and now knows what to expect from life and whose “eye-lids are a bit weary,” patiently resigned, and not too bitter about it.
Yet life has not dealt over-harshly with our host: the evidences of his interest in un-monied, precious things is quietly, expensively, all around him. He lives in a penthouse apartment near the East River: the place is furnished with all the discrimination of a quiet but distinguished taste, he has several of Jacob Epstein’s heads and figures, including one of himself which the sculptor made “two years ago when I was over there,” and he also has a choice collection of rare books and first editions, and after admiring these treasures appreciatively, you all step out upon the roof for a moment to admire the view you get there of the river.
Evening is coming fast, and the tall frosted glasses in your hands make a thin but pleasant tinkling, and the great city is blazing there in your vision in its terrific frontal sweep and curtain of star-flung towers, now sown with the diamond pollen of a million lights, and the sun has set behind them, and the old red light of fading day is painted without heat or violence upon the river—and you see the boats, the tugs, the barges passing, and the winglike swoop of bridges with exultant joy—and night has come, and there are ships there—there are ships—and a wild intolerable longing in you that you cannot utter.
When you go back into the room again, you feel very far away from Brooklyn, where you live, and everything you felt about the city as a child, before you ever knew about it, now seems not only possible, but about to happen.
The great vision of the city is living in your heart in all its enchanted colors just as it did when you were twelve years old and thought about it. You think that same glorious happiness of fortune, fame, and triumph will be yours at any minute, that you are about to take your place among great men and lovely women in a life more fortunate and happy than any you have ever known—that it is all here, somehow, waiting for you and only an inch away if you will touch it, only a word away if you will speak it, only a wall, a door, a stride from you if you only knew the place where you may enter.
