Thomas Wolfe, page 443
Then Esther, with her merry, quick, and sharp observance, had caught and fixed him in her memory, had looked quietly at him day by day and then, one day, with laughter, had pointed to him, saying, “There’s our friend in the Distributing Corp. again! What do you suppose he distributes? I’ve never seen him do anything but look out the window! Have you noticed him? Hah?” she said eagerly and merrily, clapping her small hand to her ear. “God! It’s the strangest thing I ever saw! He sits there day by day, and he does nothing!” she cried with a rich laugh of astonishment. “Have you seen him? He spends all his time in looking out the window.” She paused, making a slight movement of bewildered protest. “Isn’t it queer?” she said, after a moment, with serious wonder. “What do you suppose a man like that can do? What do you suppose he’s thinking of?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said indifferently. “Of nothing, I suppose.”
And yet from that moment the man’s face had been fixed in my memory.
For several weeks thereafter when she came in every day, she would look across the street and cry out in a jolly voice that had in it the affectionate satisfaction and assurance that people have when they see some familiar and comforting object in their memory.
“Well, I see our old friend, the Distributing Corp., is still looking out his window! I wonder what he’s thinking of today?” And she would turn away, laughing, her faced flushed with merriment and good humor. Then, for a moment, with child-like fascination which words and rhythms had for her, she meditated their strange beat with an abstracted gravity, silently framing and pronouncing with her lips a series of meaningless sounds such as “Corp—Borp—Forp—Dorp—Torp—,” and at length singing out in an earnest and gleeful chant, and with an air of triumphant discovery: “The Distributing Corp, the Distributing Corp, He sits all day and he does no Worp!” And in spite of my protest that her rhyme had neither sense nor reason in it, she cast back her encrimsoned face, and roared with laughter, a rich full woman’s yell of delight and triumph.
Then we had laughed no more about the man. For incredible, comical as his indolence had been when we first noticed it, as obscure and mysterious as his employment seemed, there came to be something formidable, immense, and impressive in the quality of that fixed stare. Day by day a thronging traffic of life and business passed before him in the street. Day by day the great vans and wagons came, the drivers, handlers, packers, swarmed before his eyes, filling the air with their harsh cries, irritably intent with driving labor, but the man in the window never wavered in his fixed abstracted stare.
That man’s face remained forever in my memory. It was fixed there like one of those unforgettable images that a man remembers from his whole city life, and became for me a timeless image of fixity and judgment, the impartial, immutable censor of all the blind confusion and oblivion of a thousand city days, and of the tortured madness and unrest of my own life.
For night would come, and I would see the night’s dark face again, and live again the crowded century of darkness that stretched from light to light, from midnight until morning.
From the meditation of a half-heard phrase, the hard mockery of a scornful eye, a young thug’s burst of jeering laughter as he passed below my window with his comrades, or from some incident remembered, the inflection of a tone, the protraction of a smile, the hideous distortion of any casual act or word or circumstance, or from no visible cause whatever, the tidal flood of madness, hatred, and despair would awake with evil magic, poisoning me, bone, brain, and blood, swarming through every tissue of my life the foul corruption of its malignant taint, becoming the instant and conclusive proof of the faithlessness and treachery of my mistress.
Then would I call the woman on the phone, and if she answered me, I would curse and taunt her foully, ask her where her lover was, and if she had him with her at that moment, and believe I heard him whispering and snickering behind her even when she swore no one was there. Feeling even as I cursed at her a rending anguish of inexpiable regret, I would tell her never to come back, rip the phone out of its moorings in the wall, hurl it on the floor, and smash and trample it to fragments underneath my feet, as if the instrument itself had been the evil agent of my ruin.
I would drain the bottle to its last raw drop, feel for a moment its fatal, brief, and spurious illusions of deliberation and control, and then rush out into the streets of night to curse and fight with people, with the city, with all life. Into the tremendous fugue of all-receiving night was packed a century of living, the death, despair, and ruin of a hundred lives. Night would reel about me lividly the huge steps of its demented dance, and day would come incredible like birth, like hope, like joy again, and I would be rescued out of madness to find myself upon the Bridge again, walking home across the Bridge, and with morning, bright, shining morning, blazing incredible upon the terrific frontal cliff and wall of the great city.
I would come home into my street at morning, and find the living stillness of my rooms that had been waiting to receive me, and see again, after all the madness, death, and million blind confusions of the night, the stolid, fixed, unchanging judgment of that face set in the warehouse window, staring out into the street forever with its look of sorrow, stern repose, and tranquil prophecy, its immutable judgment of dark time.
The man’s thick white face, fixed there like the symbol of some permanence among the blind rush and sweep of all the million things that pass, the furious and immeasurable erosions of time, was connected somehow with another image which came to me that Spring among all the blazing stream of visions that passed constantly, a train of fire across my brain and this one, unlike the others, was wordless and inexplicable, and neither dream nor fantasy.
And that image, which was to haunt me sorrowfully, was this:
In an old house at the end of day, a man was sitting by the window. Without violence or heat the last rays of the sun fell on the warm brick of the house, and painted it with a sad unearthly light. In the window the man sat always looking out. He never spoke, he never wavered in his gaze, and his face was neither the face of the man in the warehouse window, nor any other face that I had ever seen, but it looked at me quietly, and the immutable exile of an imprisoned spirit was legible upon it, and it was the calmest and the most sorrowful face that I had ever seen.
I saw that image plainly; I knew it utterly, like something I had lived and made my own. And that man’s face became for me the face of darkness and of time. It was fixed above the memory of that Spring like some dark judge or destiny, some sorrowful and yet impassive witness of all the fury and anguish in the lives of men.
It never spoke a word to me that I could hear, its mouth was closed, its language was unspeakable—and yet what it said to me was more plain and inevitable than any spoken word could ever be. It was a voice that seemed to have the whole earth in it, and to resume into itself that murmurous and everlasting sound of time, that, day and night, hovers forever above the earth, and all the furious streets of life, unchanging and eternal in its sustenance, no matter what men live or die.
It was the voice of evening and of night, and in it were all the million tongues of all those men who have passed through the heat and fury of the day, and who now lean quietly upon the sills at evening. In it was the whole vast hush and weariness that seemed to come upon the city at the hour of dusk, when the blind and savage chaos of another day is ended—and when everything, streets, buildings, and ten million men and women seem to breathe slowly with a sorrowful and weary joy, and when all sound, all violence and movement in the city’s life, seems stilled in this same light of sorrow, peace, and resignation.
The knowledge of their million tongues was in that single tongueless voice, the wisdom of man’s life of labor, fury, and despair, spoke to me from it in the hour of evening, and remained with me in all the madness and despair that I would know at night. And what this tongueless image said to me, was this:
“Child, child,” it said. “Have patience and belief, for life is many days, and all this present grief and madness of your life 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. Your thirst and hunger were so great you thought that you could eat and drink the earth, but it has been this way with all men dead or living in their youth. 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 child, this is the chronicle of the earth and of all life. And now because you have known madness and despair, because you will grow mad and desperate again before this night is over, we, made of your earth and quality, men who have known all of the madness, anguish, and despair that youth can know, 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, the passion of hatred and desire, of faith and jealousy, grief and longing, we who can now lean quietly on the sills of evening, watching the tumult, pain, and frenzy of this life, now call upon you to take heart and hope again, for we can swear to you that these things pass, and we can tell you there are things that never change and are the same forever.
“Because we shall not go into the dark again, nor suffer madness, nor admit despair; because we have found doors—Because we shall build walls about us now, and find a place, and see a few things clearly, letting millions pass. . . .
“Because we have known so many things, we have seen so many things, we have lived so long and lived alone so much and thought so many things; and because there is a little wisdom in us now; because, belly and back and bone and blood, we have made our own a few things now, and we know what we know, we have what we have, we are what we are . . .
“We shall not strike against the wall at night and cry, ‘No more!’; we shall not hear the clocks of time strike out on foreign air, we shall not wake at morning in some foreign land to think of home, nor hear the hoof and wheel come down the streets of memory again; because we shall not go again, we shall not go again, because our wandering is over and our hunger fed—O brother, son and comrade, famished youth, over the dust and fury of ten thousand days, over all the madness of our hunger and unrest, we had a vision of things that never change, we had a vision of things that last forever, and we made this song for you:
“Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and remember there are things that last forever. Behold: because we have been set here in the shift and glitter of so many fashions, because we have seen so many things that come and go, so many words forgotten, so many fames that flared and were destroyed; because our brains were bent and sick and driven by the rush, the jar, the million shocks of multitude and number, because we were a grain of dust, a cellulate and dying atom, a dwarfed wanderer among the horror of immense architectures, a stranger whose footfalls had not worn away the millionth part of an inch from the million streets of life; a sinew of bright blood and agony staggering under the weight of its desire, exploded by its everlasting hunger; and because our proudest songs were lost in all the snarl of voices, our vision broken and bewildered by the buildings, because we thought men so much less than mortar, our hearts grew mad and desperate, and we had no hope.
“But we know that the vanished step is better than the stone it walked upon, that one lost word will live when all the towers have fallen down, we know that the vanished men, the dead that they motored to swift burials and at once forgot, the cry that was wasted, the gesture that was half remembered, the forgotten moments of a million obscure lives, will live here when these pavements are forgotten, and the dust of the buried lovers will outlast the city’s dust. Lift up your heart, then, as you look at those proud towers: for we tell you they are less than blade and leaf, for the blade and leaf will last forever.
“Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will always be the same. The sound of the hoof in the street will never change, the glitter of the sunlight on the roughened water will always be the same, and the leaf that strains there in the wind upon the boughs will always be the same. April again! Patches of sudden green, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of Spring, the sharp, the tongueless cry! These things will always be the same.
“The voice of forest water in the night, the silence of the earth that lives forever, the glory of the proud and deathless stars, a woman’s laughter in the dark—and a cry! a cry!—these things will always be the same.
“Hunger and pain and death will never change, the lids of dark, the innocence of morning, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of mid-day in hot meadows, the stir and feathery stumble of hens upon the roost, the smell of sea in harbors, and the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air, 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.
“Under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, the hoof of the beast again above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, forever bursting from the earth, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.”
[¬]
THE FOUR LOST MEN
Long Version
[Scribner’s Magazine, February 1934]
Suddenly, at the green heart of June, beneath the starred tent of deep-breasted night, I heard my father’s voice again. That year I was sixteen, [the week before I had come home from my first year at college,] and the huge thrill and menace of the war, which we had entered just two months before, in April, filled our hearts. And war gives life to men as well as death. It fills the hearts of young men with wild song and jubilation. It wells up in their throats in great-starred night with a savage goat-cry of exultant pain and joy. And it fills them with a wild and wordless prophesy not of death, but life, for it speaks to them of new lands, triumph, and discovery, of heroic deeds, the fame and fellowship of heroes, and the love of glorious unknown women—of a shining triumph and a grand success in a heroic world, and of a life more fortunate and happy than they have ever known.
So was it with us all that year. Over the immense and waiting earth, the single pulse and promise of the war impended. One felt it in the little towns at dawn, with all their quiet, casual, utterly familiar acts of life beginning. One felt it in the route-boy deftly flinging the tight-folded block of paper on a porch, a man in shirt-sleeves coming out upon the porch and bending for the paper, the slow-clopping hooves of the milk horse in a quiet street, the bottle-clinking wagon, and the sudden pause, the rapid footsteps of the milkman and the clinking bottles, then clopping hoof and wheel, and morning stillness, the purity of light, and the dew-sweet bird-song rising in the street again.
In all these ancient, ever-new, unchanging, always magic acts of life and light and morning one felt the huge impending presence of the war. And one felt it in the brooding hush of noon, in the warm dusty stir and flutter and the feathery clucking of the sun-warm hens at noon. One felt it in the ring of the ice-tongs in the street, the cool whine of the ice-saws droning through the smoking block. One felt it poignantly, somehow, in the solid lonely liquid leather shuffle of men in shirt-sleeves coming home to lunch in one direction in the brooding hush and time-enchanted spell of noon, and in screens that slammed and sudden silence. And one felt it in the humid warmth and hungry fragrance of the cooking turnip greens, in leaf and blade and flower, in smell of tar, and the sudden haunting green-gold summer absence of a street-car after it had gone.
In all these ancient, most familiar things and acts and colors of our lives, one felt, with an intolerable entrail-numbing ecstacy, the huge impending presence of the war. The war had got in everything: it was in things that moved and in things that were still, in the animate red silence of an old brick wall as well as in all the thronging life and traffic of the streets. It was in the faces of the people passing, and in ten thousand familiar acts and moments of man’s daily life and business.
And lonely, wild, and haunting, calling us on forever with the winding of its far-lost horn, it had got into the time-enchanted loneliness of the magic hills around us, in all the sudden, wild and lonely lights that came and passed and vanished on the massed green of the wilderness.
The war was in far cries and broken sounds and cow bells tinkling in the gusting wind, and in the far wild wailing joy and sorrow of a departing train, as it rushed eastward, seaward, war-ward through a valley of the South in the green spell and golden magic of full June. The war was in the ancient red-gold light of fading day, that fell without violence or heat upon the streets of life, the houses where men lived, the brief flame and fire of sheeted window panes.
—
And it was in field and gulch and hollow, in the sweet green mountain valleys fading into dusk, and in the hill-flanks reddened with the ancient light, and slanting fast into steep cool shade and lilac silence. It was in the whole earth breathing the last heat and weariness of day out in the huge hush and joy and sorrow of oncoming night.
Finally, the war had got into all sounds and secrecies, the sorrow, longing, and delight, the mystery, hunger, and exultant joy that came from the deep-breasted heart of fragrant, cool, and all-engulfing night. It was in the sweet and secret rustling of the leaves in summer streets, in footsteps coming quiet, slow, and lonely along the darkness of a leafy street, in screen doors slammed, and silence, the distant barking of a dog, far voices, laughter, faint pulsing music at a dance, and in all the casual voices of the night, far, strangely near, most intimate and familiar, remote as time, as haunting as the briefness of our days.
