Thomas Wolfe, page 439
“Yuh musta been away,” said one, in that sad light.
“Yeah, I been away. I just got back,” the other said.
“Yeah? Dat’s just what I was t’inkin’,” said the other. “I been t’inkin’ dat yuh musta been away.”
“Yeah, I been away on my vacation. I just got back.”
“Oh, yeah? Dat’s what I t’ought meself. I was t’inkin’ just duh otheh day dat I hadn’t seen yuh f’r some time, ‘I guess she’s gone away,’ I says.”
And then for seconds there was silence—save for the dying birdsong, voices in the street, faint sounds and shouts and broken calls, and something hushed in evening, far, immense, and murmurous in the air.
“Well, wat’s t’ noos since I been gone?” the voice went on in quietness in soft tragic light. “Has anyt’ing happened sinct I was away?”
“Nah! Nuttin’s happened,” the other made reply. “About duh same as usual—you know?” it said with difficult constraint, inviting intuitions for the spare painfulness of barren tongues.
“Yeah, I know,” the other answered with a tranquil resignation—and there was silence then in Brooklyn.
“I guess Fatheh Grogan died sinct you was gone,” a voice began.
“Oh, yeah?” the other voice replied with tranquil interest.
“Yeah.”
And for a waiting moment there was silence.
“Say, dat’s too bad, isn’t it?” the quiet voice said with comfortless regret.
“Yeah. He died on Sattidy. When he went home on Friday night he was O.K.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
And for a moment they were balanced in strong silence.
“Gee, dat was tough, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. Dey didn’t find him till duh next day at ten o’clock. When dey went to look for him, he was lyin’ stretched out on duh bat’ room floeh.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Dey found him lyin’ deh,” it said.
And for a moment more the voices hung in balanced silence.
“Gee, dat’s too bad. . . . I guess I was away when all dat happened.”
“Yeah. Yuh musta been away.”
“Yeah, dat was it, I guess. I musta been away. Oddehwise I woulda hoid. I was away.”
“Well, so long, kid. . . . I’ll be seein’ yuh.”
“Well, so long!”
A window closed, and there was silence; evening and far sounds and broken cries in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, in the formless, rusty, and unnumbered wilderness of life.
And now the old red light fades swiftly from the old red brick of rusty houses, and there are voices in the air, and somewhere music, and we are lying there, blind atoms in our cellar-depths, gray voiceless atoms on the manswarm desolation of the earth, and our fame is lost, our names forgotten, our powers are wasting from us like mined earth, while we lie here at evening and the river flows . . . and dark time is feeding like a vulture on our entrails, and we know that we are lost, and cannot stir . . . and there are ships there! there are ships! . . . and Christ! we are all dying in the darkness! . . . and yuh musta been away . . . yuh musta been away. . . .
And that is a moment of dark time, that is one of strange, million-visaged time’s dark faces. Here is another:
II
OCTOBER: 1923
My life, more than the life of any one I know, has been spent in solitude and wandering. Why this is true, or how it happened, I have never known; yet it is so. From my fifteenth year—save for a single interval—I have lived about as solitary a life as modern man can have. I mean by this that the number of hours, days, months, and years—the actual time that I have spent alone—has been immense and extraordinary.
And this fact is all the more astonishing because I never seemed to seek out solitude, nor did I shrink from life or seek to build myself into a wall away from all the fury and turmoil of the earth. I loved life so dearly that I was driven mad by the thirst and hunger that I felt for it, a hunger so literal, cruel, and physical that it wanted to devour the earth and all the people in it.
At college, I would prowl the stacks of the great library at night pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading them like a mad man. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive me mad; the more I read, the less I seemed to know; the greater the number of books I read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which I could never read would seem to be. Within a period of ten years I read at least twenty thousand volumes—deliberately I have set the figure low—and opened the pages and looked through many times that number. If this seems unbelievable, I am sorry for it, but it happened. Yet all this terrific orgy of the books brought me no comfort, peace, or wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, my fury and despair increased from what it fed upon, my hunger mounted with the food it ate.
And it was the same with everything I did.
For this fury which drove me on to read so many books had nothing to do with scholarship, nothing to do with academic honors, nothing to do with formal learning. I was not in any way a scholar and did not want to be one. I simply wanted to know about everything on earth, and it drove me mad when I saw that I could not do this. In the midst of a furious burst of reading in the enormous library, the thought of the streets outside and the great city all around me would drive through my body like a sword. It would now seem to me that every second that I passed among the books was being wasted—that at this moment something priceless, irrecoverable, was happening in the streets, and that if I could only get to it in time and see it, I would somehow get the knowledge of the whole thing in me—the source, the well, the spring from which all men and words and actions and every design upon this earth proceed.
And I would rush out in the streets to find it, be hurled through the tunnel into Boston and then spend hours in driving myself savagely through a hundred streets, looking into the faces of a million people, trying to get an instant and conclusive picture of all they did and said and were, of all their million destinies. And I would search the furious streets until bone and brain and blood could stand no more—until every sinew of my life and spirit was wrung, trembling and exhausted, and my heart sank down beneath its weight of despair and desolation.
Yet a furious hope, a wild extravagant belief was burning in me all the time. I would write down enormous charts and plans and projects of all that I proposed to do in life—a program of work and living which would have exhausted the energies of ten thousand men. I would get up in the middle of the night to scrawl down insane catalogs of all that I had seen and done: the number of books I had read, the number of miles I had traveled, the number of people I had known, the number of women I had slept with, the number of meals I had eaten, the number of towns I had visited, the number of states I had been in.
And at one moment I would gloat and chuckle over these stupendous lists like a miser gloating over his hoard, only to groan bitterly with despair the next moment, and to beat my head against the wall, as I remembered the overwhelming amount of all I had not seen or done, or known. Then I would begin another list filled with enormous catalogs of all the books I had not read, all the food I had not eaten, all the women I had not slept with, all the states I had not been in, all the towns I had not visited. Then I would write down plans and programs whereby all these things must be accomplished, how many years it would take to do it all, and how old I would be when I had finished. An enormous wave of hope and joy would surge up in me, because it now looked easy, and I had no doubts at all that I could do it.
I never asked myself how I was going to live while this was going on, where I was going to get the money for this gigantic adventure, and what I was going to do to make it possible. Although I had a good mind in some respects, I was no better than a child when it came to things like this; the fact that to explore and devour the world, as I was going to do, would require the fortune of a millionaire had no meaning to me at all. If I thought about it, it seemed to have no importance or reality whatever—I just dismissed it impatiently, or with a conviction that some old man would die and leave me a fortune; that I was going to pick up a purse containing hundreds of thousands of dollars while walking in the Fenway, and that the reward would be enough to keep me going; or that a beautiful and rich young widow, true-hearted, tender, loving and voluptuous, who had carrot-colored hair, little freckles on her face, a snub nose and luminous gray-green eyes with something wicked, yet loving and faithful, in them, and one gold filling in her solid little teeth, was going to fall in love with me, marry me, and be forever true and faithful to me while I went reading, eating, drinking, whoring, and devouring my way around the world; or finally that I would write a book or play every year or so, which would be a great success, and yield me fifteen or twenty thousand dollars at a crack.
Thus I went storming away at the whole earth about me, sometimes mad with despair, weariness, and bewilderment; and sometimes wild with jubilant and exultant joy and certitude as the conviction came to me that everything would happen as I wished. Then at night I would hear the vast sounds and silence of the earth and of the continent of night, until it seemed to me it was all spread before me like a map—rivers, plains, and mountains and ten thousand sleeping towns; it seemed to me that I saw everything at once.
Then I would think about the State of Kansas, of Wyoming, Colorado, or some other place where I had never been, and I could sleep no more, and I would twist about in bed, and tear the sheets, get up and smoke, and walk around the room. I would feel an intolerable desire to go and see these places, to hear the voices of the people, to step out of the train upon the earth, and it seemed to me if I could do this only for five minutes I would be satisfied. I would become obsessed with the notion that the earth of these places would look and feel different from anything I had ever known, that it had a quality and texture of its own, a kind of elastic quality so that the foot would spring upon it, and also a feeling of depth and solidity which the earth in the East did not have. And I felt that I could never rest in peace again until I had stepped upon this earth, and tested it.
Meanwhile, the great antagonists of fixity and everlasting change, of wandering forever and return, of weariness intolerable and insatiate thirst, of certitude and peace and no desire and everlasting torment of the soul, had begun to wage perpetual warfare in me. And now I hardly ever thought of home. Rather, like a man held captive in some green land of sorcery who does not know the years are passing while he dreams his life away, the enormous plant of time, desire, and memory flowered and fed forever with a cancerous growth through all the tissues of my life until the earth I came from, and the life that I had known seemed remote and buried as the sunken cities of Atlantis.
Then, one day I awoke at morning and thought of home. A lock-bolt was shot back in my memory, and a door was opened. Suddenly, as if a curtain of dark sorcery had been lifted from my vision, I saw the earth I came from, and all the people I had known in shapes of deathless brightness. And instantly an intolerable desire to see them all again began to burn in me. I said: “I must go home again!” And this, too, all men who ever wandered on the earth have said.
Three years had passed by like a dream. During this time my father had died. That year I went home for the last time in October.
October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to the massed brilliant hues of blazing colors, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow, and delight. Sometimes, and often, there was warmth by day, and ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and pollinated haze in afternoon, but over all the earth there was the premonitory breath of frost, an exultancy for all men who were returning and for all those who were gone and would not come again.
My father was dead, and now it seemed to me that I had never found him. He was dead, and yet I sought him everywhere, and could not believe that he was dead, and was sure that I would find him. It was October and that year, after years of absence and of wandering, I had come home again.
I could not think that he had died, but I had come home in October, and all the life that I had known there was strange and sorrowful as dreams. And yet I saw it all in shapes of deathless brightness—the town, the streets, the magic hills, and the plain prognathous faces of the people I had known as if I had revisited the shores of this great earth with a heart of fire, a cry of pain and ecstasy, a memory of intolerable longing and regret for all that glorious and exultant life which I must visit now forever as a fleshless ghost, never to touch, to hold, to have its palpable warmth and substance for my own again. I had come home again, and yet I could not believe that he was dead, and I thought I heard his great voice ringing in the street again and that I would see him striding toward me across the Square with his gaunt earth-devouring stride, or find him waiting every time I turned the corner, or lunging toward the house bearing the tremendous provender of his food and meat, bringing to us all the deathless security of his strength and power and passion, bringing to us all again the roaring message of his fires that shook the firefull chimney throat with their terrific blast, giving to us all again the exultant knowledge that the good days, the magic days, the golden weather of our lives, would come again, and that this dream-like and phantasmal world in which I found myself would waken instantly, as it had once, to all the palpable warmth and glory of the earth, if only my father would come back to make it live, to give us life, again.
Therefore, I could not think that he was dead. And at night, in my mother’s house, I would lie in my bed in the dark, hearing the wind that rattled dry leaves along the empty pavement, hearing far-off across the wind, the barking of a dog, feeling dark time, strange time, dark secret time, as it flowed on around me, remembering my life, this house, and all the million strange and secret visages of time, thinking, feeling, thinking:
“October has come again, has come again. . . . I have come home again and found my father dead . . . and that was time . . . time . . . time. . . . Where shall I go now? What shall I do? For October has come again, but there has gone some richness from the life we knew, and we are lost.”
Storm shook the house at night—the old house, my mother’s house—where I had seen my brother die. The old doors swung and creaked in the darkness, darkness pressed against the house, the darkness filled us, filled the house at night, it moved about us soft and secret, palpable, filled with a thousand secret presences of sorrowful time and memory, moving about me as I lay below my brother’s room in darkness, while storm shook the house and something creaked and rattled in the wind’s strong blast.
Wind beat at us with burly shoulders in the night. The darkness moved there in the house like something silent, palpable—a spirit breathing in my mother’s house, a demon and a friend—speaking to me its silent and intolerable prophecy of flight, of secrecy and of storm, moving about me constantly, prowling about the edges of my life, ever beside me, in me, whispering:
“Child, child—come with me—come with me to your brother’s grave tonight. Come with me to the places where the young men lie whose bodies have long since been buried in the earth. Come with me where they walk and move again tonight, and you shall see your brother’s face again, and hear his voice, and see again, as they march toward you from their graves, the company of the young men who died, as he did, in October, speaking to you their messages of flight, of triumph, and the all-exultant darkness, telling you that it all will be again as it was once.”
And I would lie there thinking:
“October has come again—has come again”—feeling the dark around me, not believing that my father could be dead, thinking: “The strange and lonely years have come again. . . . I have come home again . . . come home again . . . and will it not be with us as it has been again?”—feeling darkness as it moved about me, thinking, “Is it not the same darkness that I knew in Childhood, and have not I lain here in bed before, and felt this darkness moving all about me? . . . Did we not hear dogs that barked in darkness, in October,” I then thought. “Were not their howls far-broken by the wind? . . . And hear dry leaves that scampered on the streets at night . . . and the huge and burly rushes of the wind . . . and hear limbs that stiffly creak in the remote demented howlings of the wind . . . and something creaking in the wind at night . . . and think, then, as we think now, of all the men who have ever gone and never will come back again, and of our friends and brothers who lie buried in the earth? . . . Oh, has not October now come back again,” I cried, “as always—as it always was?”—and hearing the great darkness softly prowling in my mother’s house at night, and thinking, feeling, thinking, as I lay there in the dark:
“And now October has come again, which in our land is different from October in other lands. The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinquapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again. The country is so big you cannot say the country has the same October. In Maine, the frost comes sharp and quick as driven nails; just for a week or so the woods, all of the bright and bitter leaves, flare up: the maples turn a blazing bitter red, and other leaves turn yellow like a living light, falling about you as you walk the woods, falling about you like small pieces of the sun, so that you cannot say where sunlight shakes and flutters on the ground, and where the leaves.
“Meanwhile the Palisades are melting in massed molten colors, the season swings along the nation, and a little later in the South dense woodings on the hill begin to glow and soften, and when they smell the burning wood-smoke in Ohio, the children say, ‘I’ll bet that there’s a forest fire in Michigan.’ As the mountaineer goes hunting down in North Carolina, he stays out late with mournful flop-eared hounds; a rind of moon comes up across the rude lift of the hills: what do his friends say to him when he stays out late? Full of hoarse innocence and laughter, they will say: ‘Mister, yore ole woman’s goin’ to whup ye if ye don’t go home.’”
