OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Perhaps you're right. . . . Perhaps you and I do belong in different worlds . . . must go different ways. . . . If that is true," Joel turned and looked directly at his friend and in his eyes there was an infinite quiet depth of regret and acceptance "--if that is true, I'm sorry. . . . At any rate, it was good to have known you. . . . And now, good-bye, Eugene--Good night, I mean," he hastily concluded, in his former whispered, quick and casual tones, "I'll see you in the morning."

  With these words he turned quickly and left him.

  He stayed there long into the night in that rich room, while the great house sank to sleep and silence all around him. And at first he moved there quietly like a man living in an enchanted dream, almost afraid to draw a breath lest he dispel the glory and the magic of enchantment, and all the time the voices of the living books around him seemed to speak to him, to say to him: "Now it is night and silence and the sleep-time of the earth, the all-exultant time of youth and loneliness, and of your spirit's proud accession. Now take us, plunder us, and take us, for you are alone and living in the world tonight while all the sleepers sleep, immortal knowledge will be yours tonight, the secrets of an everlasting and triumphal wisdom; the huge compacted treasure of the earth speaks to you from these storeyed shelves, and it is yours, you are the richest man in all the earth if you will take us, only take us, we have waited for you long, dear friend, tonight the world is yours, and will be yours for ever, if you will only take us, take us, take us."

  And like a man drunk with joy, half through the night he plundered the living treasure of those shelves. They were all there--the great chroniclers and recorders, the marvellous and enchanted lies of old Herodotus, and Sir Thomas Malory, and the voyages of Hakluyt and of Purchas, the histories of Mandeville and Hume. There was Burton's marvellous Anatomy, his staggering erudition never smelling of the dust or of the lamp, his lusty, pungent ever-rushing-onward style, and the annihilating irony of Gibbon's latinized sonority, and the savage, burning, somehow magic plainness of Swift's style. There was the dark tremendous music of Sir Thomas Browne, and Hooker's sounding and tremendous passion made great by genius and made true by faith, and there was the giant dance, the vast storm-rounding cadence, now demented and now strong as light, of great Carlyle; and beside the haunting cadences of this tremendous piece, there was the pungent worldliness of life-loving men; the keen diaries of John Evelyn, the lusty tang and calculation and sensual rumination of old Pepys, the writing bright as noon, natural as morning, and the plain and middle-magic of the eighteenth century, the flawless grace and faultless clearness of Addison and Steele, and then all the pageantry of living character, the pages crowded with the immortal flesh of Sterne, Defoe, and Smollett, the huge comic universe of Fielding, the little one of Austen, and the immortal and extravagant one of Charles Dickens, the magnificent proliferation of Sir Walter Scott's tremendous gallery--and Thackeray's sentimental gallantry and magic, and all the single magics of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Meredith, and Melville, of Landor, Peacock, Lamb, and of De Quincey, of Hazlitt, and of Poe.

  There were, as well, the works of all the poets, the Kelmscott Chaucers, the Dove editions, the doe-skin bindings, white and soft and velvet to the touch, the splendid bodies in all their royal pageantry of blue and gold and dense rich green--the Greek anthologies, and all the poets of antiquity, and the singing voices of the great Elizabethans--of Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, and of Spenser, Webster, Ford and Massinger, of Kyd and Greene and Marlowe, of Beaumont, Lyly, Nash and Dekker, of Jonson, Shakespeare, Herrick, Herbert, Donne.

  They were all there, from thundering Æschylus to the sweet small voice of perfect-singing Herrick, from grand plain Homer to poignant Catullus, from acid and tart-humoured Horace, from the lusty, vulgar and sweet-singing voice of Geoffrey Chaucer, the great bronze ring and clangorous sonority of John Dryden, to the massy gold, the choked-in richness, the haunting fall and faery, of John Keats.

  They were all there--each stored there in his little niche upon the living shelves, and at first he looted them, he plundered through their golden leaves as a man who first discovers a buried and inestimable treasure, and at first is dumb with joy at his discovery, and can only plunge his hands in it with drunken joy, scoop handfuls up and pour it over him and let the massy gold leak out again in golden ruin through his spread hands; or as a man who discovers some enchanted spring of ageless youth, of ever-long immortality, and drinks of it, and can never drink enough, and drinks and feels with every drink the huge summation of earth's glory in his own enrichment, the ageless fires of its magic youth.

  Then, as the night wore on, another feeling crept across his heart, the living voices of the books spoke to him with another tone. From those great tongues of life and power and soaring immortality there had now departed all the sonorous conviction of their overwhelming, all-triumphant chant. The grand and ringing tongue and joy now spoke the language of a quiet and illimitable despair, confided the legend of an inevitable defeat, an inexorable fatality.

  From those high-storeyed shelves of dense rich bindings the great voices of eternity, the tongues of mighty poets dead and gone, now seemed to speak to him out of the living and animate silence of the room. But in that living silence, in the vast and quiet spirit of sleep which filled the great house, out of the grand and overwhelming stillness of that proud power of wealth and the impregnable security of its position, even the voices of those mighty poets dead and gone now seemed somehow lonely, small, lost, and pitiful. Each in his little niche of shelf securely stored--all of the genius, richness, and whole compacted treasure of a poet's life within a foot of space, within the limits of six small dense richly-garnished volumes--all of the great poets of the earth were there, unread, unopened, and forgotten, and were somehow, terribly, the mute small symbols of a rich man's power, of the power of wealth to own everything, to take everything, to triumph over everything--even over the power and genius of the mightiest poet--to keep him there upon his little foot of shelf, unopened and forgotten, but possessed.

  Thus, for the first time in his life, even the voices of the mighty poets seemed lost and small and pitifully defeated. Their great voices, which had given to the heart of youth the added fire of their triumphant magic, had borne his spirit high upon the wings of the soaring and invincible belief that no might on earth was equal to the might of poetry, no immortality could equal the immortality of a poet's life and fame, no glory touch his glory, or no strength his strength--now seemed to speak to him the mute and small and lonely judgment of defeat.

  "Child, child," they said to him, "look at us and reflect: what shall it profit you to feed upon the roots of all-engulfing night, desiring glory? Do not the rats of death and age and dark oblivion feed so for ever at the roots of sleep, and can you tell us where a man lies buried now, whose substance they have not devoured? Oh, child, for ever in the dark old house of life to go alone, to prowl the barren avenues of night, and listen while doors swing and creak in the old house of life, and ponder on the lids of night, and ruminate the vast heart of sleep and silence and the dark, and so consume yourself--desiring what? Poor child, you son of an unlettered race, you nameless atom of the nameless wilderness, how have you let us dupe you with our fictive glories? What power is there on earth, in sea or heaven, what power have you in yourself, you son of your unuttered fathers, to find a tongue for your unuttered brothers, and to make a frame, a shape, a magic and eternal form out of the jungle of the great unuttered wilderness from which you came, of which you are a nameless and unuttered atom? What can you hope to do, poor nameless child, and would-be chronicler of the huge unhistoried morass of the dark wilderness of America, when we, who were the children of a hundred gold-recorded centuries and the heirs of all the rich accumulations of tradition, have really done so little--and have come to this? What profit do you hope to gain--what reward could you achieve that would repay you for all the anguish, hunger, and the desperate effort of your life? At its rare infrequent best, out of your blind and famished gropings
in the jungle-depths, you may pluck out a shining word--achieve a moment's flash of grace and intuition--a half-heard whisper of the vast unuttered language that you seek--perhaps a moment's taste of fame, a brief hour's flash of the imagined glory that you thirst for. For just a moment, you, like other men, will play the lion, will feed upon the older lion's blood, will triumph for a moment through his defeat, will taste joy for a moment through the blood of his despair--and then, like him, you too will be thrown to the mercy of the coming lion, the wilderness will rise again to engulf you, your little hour of glory for which your soul thirsts and your life is panting will be over before it has well begun, and the myriad horde of all your thousand mongrel races will rise with snarl and jeer and curse and lie and mocking to do your life to death, with all the hatred of their mongrel rancour and their own self-loathing, to kill the lion they have crowned for just a day, to hurl you back into a nameless and dishonourable oblivion, drowned down beneath the huge mock and jibe of the old scornmaker's pride. Therefore, short-lived, your life will soon be ended; your youth, but just begun, will shortly be consumed, and all the labour of your anguish and your hunger will be mocked to scorn by the same mongrel fools who praised it, and forgotten by the very knaves who gave it fame. Such is the infrequent good, the flash of brief fame, to which you may aspire, the huge oblivion of failure, misery and dishonour which will follow. But if, by miraculous good chance, you should escape from this--be not devoured and slain and drowned out and forgotten in the brutal swarming shades of jungle time--what greater glory is there that you can achieve? Some such as ours, perhaps--then look at us, and see the state to which we've come. To lie forgotten on the rich shelves of a rich man's library--to be a portion of his idle wealth--the evidence of his arrogant possession--to rise, as all the earth must rise--these dreaming hills and haunted woods, the mighty river and this great moon-haunted hill where stands this house--shout the tributes of a rich man's glory--to bow before him--to lie bought, owned, forgotten and possessed--the greatest poets that ever walked the earth or built, like you, great dreams of glory--to be obsequious tributes to a rich man's fame. Yes, you, even you--poor naked child--may come to this--to reach this state, to be entombed here, bought and idle among the forgotten huge encumbrance of a rich man's arrogant possession--and to know at last that all the glory, genius, and magic of a poet's life may lie condensed in six rich bindings, forgotten, purchased and unread--and finally defeated by the only thing in life that lusts and will triumph for ever--the all-causing tyranny of wealth that makes a slave of its great poets--that makes us the barren prostitutes of fame, the pimps of wealth--unused and empty on a rich man's shelf."

  So did that great treasure of unread, purchased, and forgotten books speak to him in the silent watches of the night, as they stood there, lonely, small and bought, on a rich man's shelf.

  Towards morning, as he sat there with a great book propped upon his knees, his mind filled with the thought of those dead, forgotten, and still-living voices and of his rich young friend and the strange and bitter enigma of the fatal severance which had seemed that day to close a great door between their lives for ever, he turned the pages of the book idly, and suddenly the blurred characters on the page before him swam legibly to view. And what those words upon the page before him said was this:

  "The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet?

  "Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

  "But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions."

  LXVII

  As he and Joel drove to the station it seemed to Eugene that he was returning to a world from which he had been absent for years. And the return was not a pleasant one. As they entered the little town, and began to drive swiftly down a street that led to the station, the little frame houses with their new architectures--their faded little strips of "front-yard" grass, cement walks, and cement-yard walls, looked cheap, flimsy, new and dreary--the image of a life that was itself as rootless, insecure, and drearily pretentious as the little painted frames it lived in.

  It was Sunday, and as they drove up to the station he saw before a Greek confectionery and newspaper store a group of the town sports. They were dressed up in their cheap Sunday finery, and their faces wore a smirk. As Joel got out of the car, the sports tried to look nonchalant and easy in their relations with one another, but a kind of uneasy constraint had fallen upon them and held them until he had gone. And yet he had not noticed them or done anything that might have caused them this discomfort.

  In the gravelled parking space before the station several cars were drawn up. Their shining bodies glittered in the hot sunlight like great beetles of machinery, and in the look of these great beetles, powerful and luxurious as most of them were, there was a stamped-out quality, a kind of metallic and inhuman repetition that filled his spirit, he could not say why, with a vague sense of weariness and desolation. The feeling returned to him--the feeling that had come to him so often in recent years with a troubling and haunting insistence--that "something" had come into life, "something new" which he could not define, but something that was disturbing and sinister, and which was somehow represented by the powerful, weary, and inhuman precision of these great, glittering, stamped-out beetles of machinery. And consonant to this feeling was another concerning people themselves: it seemed to him that they, too, had changed, that "something new" had come into their faces, and although he could not define it, he felt with a powerful and unmistakable intuition that it was there--that "something" had come into life that had changed the lives and faces of the people, too. And the reason this discovery was so disturbing--almost terrifying, in fact--was first of all because it was at once evident and yet indefinable; and then because he knew it had happened within the years of his own life, few and brief as they were--had happened, indeed, within "the last few years," had happened all around him while he lived and breathed and worked among these very people to whom it had happened, and that he had not observed it at the "instant" when it came. For, with an intensely literal, an almost fanatically concrete quality of imagination, it seemed to him that there must have been an "instant"--a moment of crisis, a literal fragment of recorded time in which the transition of this change came. And it was just for this reason that he now felt a nameless and disturbing sense of desolation--almost of terror; it seemed to him that this change in people's lives and faces had occurred right under his nose, while he was looking on, and that he had not seen it when it came, and that now it was here, the accumulation of his knowledge had burst suddenly in this moment of perception--he saw plainly that people had worn this look for several years, and that he did not know the manner of its coming.

  They were, in short, the faces of people who had been hurled ten thousand times through the roaring darkness of a subway tunnel, who had breathed foul air, and been assailed by smashing roar and grinding vibrance, until their ears were deafened, their tongues rasped and their voices made metallic, their skins and nerve-ends thickened, calloused, mercifully deprived of aching life, moulded to a stunned consonance with the crashing uproar of the world in which they lived. These were the dead, the dull, lack-lustre eyes of men who had been hurled too far, too often, in the smashing projectiles of great trains, who, in their shining beetles of machinery, had hurtled down the harsh and brutal ribbons of their concrete roads at such a savage speed that now the earth was lost for ever, and they never saw the earth again: whose weary, desperate ever-seeking eyes had sought so often, seeking man, amid the blind horror and proliferation, the everlasting shock and flock and flooding of the million-footed crowd, that all the life and lustre and fire of youth had gone from them; and seeking so for ever in the man-swarm for man's face, now saw the blind blank wall of faces, and so would never see man's living, loving, radiant, and merciful face again.

  Such were the
faces that he now saw waiting on the station platform of this little Hudson River town--two dozen faces from the mongrel and anonymous compost of like faces that made up America--and with a sudden blinding flash of horror and of recognition, it now came to him that they were just the faces he had seen everywhere, at a thousand times and places in "the last few years."

  He had seen them in their last and greatest colony--the huge encampment of the innumerable submerged, the last and largest colony of the great mongrel and anonymous compost that makes up America: he had seen them there, hurtling for ever, from the roaring arch of the great bridge, with their unceasing flight, projectile roar, unnumbered flood, in their great and desolate beetles of glittering machinery--boring for ever through the huge and labyrinthine horror of that trackless jungle of uncounted ways, beneath the grime and rust and swarm and violence and horror of Fulton Street, past all the vast convergences, the threat and menace of the empty naked corners, the swarming and concentric chaos of Borough Hall, and with beetling and unceasing flight through Clinton Street, on Henry Street, through the Bedford section, out through the flat and limitless swelter known as "the Flatbush section," beneath the broad and humid light of solid skies, through ten thousand rusty, grimy, nameless streets that make up that huge and trackless swelter--and most horrible of all, a flood of nameless faces, rootless and unnumbered lives, hurtling blindly past for ever in hot beetles of machinery along those broad, wide, and splendidly desolate "avenues," that were flanked upon each side by the cheap raw brick, the gaudy splendour, of unnumbered new apartment houses, the brick and stucco atrocities of unnumbered new cheap houses, and that cut straight and brutal as a spoke across the labyrinthine chaos of the Brooklyn jungle--and that led to God knows where--to Coney Island, to the beaches, to the outer districts of that trackless web, the unknown continent of Long Island--but that, no matter where or how they led, were always crowded with the blind horror of those unnumbered, hurtling faces, the blind horror of those great glittering beetles of machinery drilling past for ever in projectile flight, unceasing movement and unending change, the blind horror of these unknown nameless lives hurtling on for ever, lost for ever, going God knows where!