OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  (Seldom in Brookline, lady. Oh, rarely, seldom, almost never in the town of Brookline, lady. But on the Esplanade--did you ever go out walking on the Esplanade at night-time, in the hot and sultry month of August, lady? They are not Frenchmen, lady: they are all Jews and Irish and Italians, lady, but the noise of their kissing is like the noise the wind makes through a leafy grove--it is like the great hooves of a hundred thousand cavalry being pulled out of the marshy places of the earth, dear lady.)

  ". . . I mean--these people really understand that sort of thing so much better than we do. . . . They're so much simpler about it. . . . I mean, so much more graceful with that kind of thing. . . . Il faut un peu de sentiment, n'est-ce pas? . . . Or do you think so?" said those light, those gay, those silvery, and half-English tones of cultivated Boston, which you, my brother, never yet have heard.

  (I got you, lady. That was French. I know. . . . But if I felt your leg, if I began by fondling gracefully your leg, if in a somewhat graceful Gallic way I felt your leg, and said, "Chérie! Petite chérie!"--would you remember, lady, this is Paris?)

  Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: their silvery voices speak an accent you will never know, and of their loins is marble made, but brother, there are corn-haired girls named Neilsen out in Minnesota, and the blond thighs of the Lundquist girl could break a bullock's back.

  Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: the French have little ways about them that we do not have, but, brother, they're still selling cradles down in Georgia, and in New Orléans their eyes are dark, their white teeth bite you to the bone.

  Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston, one time more, and of their flesh is cod-fish made. Big brother's still waiting for you with his huge, red fist, behind the barn up in the State of Maine, and they're still having shotgun marriages at home.

  Oh, brother, there are voices you will never hear--ancestral voices prophesying war, my brother, and rare and radiant voices that you know not of, as they have read us into doom. The genteel voices of Oxenford broke once like chimes of weary, unenthusiastic bells across my brain, speaking to me compassionately its judgment on our corrupted lives, gently dealing with the universe, my brother, gently and without labour--gently, brother, gently, it dealt with all of us, with easy condescension and amused disdain.

  "I'm afraid, old boy," the genteel voices of Oxenford remarked, "you're up against it over thöh. . . . I really am. . . . Thöh's no peace thö faw the individual any longah,"--the genteel voice went on, un-individual brother. "Obviously," that tolerant voice instructed me, "obviously, thöh can be no cultuah in a country so completely lackin' in tradition as is yoähs. . . . It's all so objective--if you see what I main--thöh's no place left faw the innah life," it said, oh, outward brother! ". . . We Europeans have often obsöhved (it's very curious, you know) that the American is capable of any real feelin'--it seems quite impawsible faw him to distinguish between true emotion an' sentimentality--an' he invayably chooses the lattah! . . . Curious, isn't it?--or do you think so, brother? Of co'se, thöh is yoäh beastly dreadful sex-prawblem. . . . Yoäh women! . . . Oh, deah, deah! . . . Perhaps we'd bettah say no moah . . . but, thöh you ah!"--right in the eye, my brother. "Yoäh country is a matriahky, my deah fellah . . . it really is, you know." . . . if you can follow us, dear brother. "The women have the men in a state of complete subjection . . . the male is rapidly becomin' moah sexless an' emasculated"--that genteel voice of doom went on--"No!--Decidedly you have quite a prawblem befoah you. . . . Obviously thöh can be no cultuah while such a condition puhsists. . . . That is why when my friends say to me, 'You ought to see America, . . . you really ought, you know.' . . . I say, 'No, thanks. . . . If you don't mind, I'd rathah not. . . . I think I'll stay at home . . . I'm sorry,'" the compassionate tones of Oxenford went on, "but that's the way I feel--it really is, you know. . . . Of co'se, I know you couldn't undahstand my feelin'--faw aftah all, you ah a Yank--but thöh you ah! Sorry!" it said regretfully, as it spoke its courteous but inexorable judgments of eternal exile, brother, and removed for ever the possibility of your ever hearing it. "But that's the way I feel! I hope you don't mind," the voice said gently, with compassion.

  No, sir, I don't mind. We don't mind, he, she, it, or they don't mind. Nobody minds, sir, nobody minds. Because, just as you say, sir, oceans are between us, seas have sundered us, there is a magic in you that we cannot fathom--a light, a flame, a glory--an impalpable, indefinable, incomprehensible, undeniable something or other, something which I can never understand or measure because--just as you say, sir--with such compassionate regret, I am--I am--a Yank.

  'Tis true, my brother, we are Yanks. Oh, 'tis true, 'tis true! I am a Yank! Yet, wherefore Yank, good brother? Hath not a Yank ears? Hath not a Yank lies, truths, bowels of mercy, fears, joys, and lusts? Is he not warmed by the same sun, washed by the same ocean, rotted by the same decay, and eaten by the same worms as a German is? If you kill him, does he not die? If you sweat him, does he not stink? If you lie with his wife or his mistress, does she not whore, lie, fornicate and betray, even as a Frenchman's does? If you strip him, is he not naked as a Swede? Is his hide less white than Baudelaire's? Is his breath more foul than the King of Spain's? Is his belly bigger, his neck fatter, his face more hoggish, and his eye more shiny than a Munich brewer's? Will he not cheat, rape, thieve, whore, curse, hate, and murder like any European? Aye--Yank! But wherefore, wherefore Yank--good brother?

  Brother, have we come then from a fated stock? Augured from birth, announced by two dark angels, named in our mother's womb? And for what? For what? Fatherless, to grope our feelers on the sea's dark bed, among the polyped squirms, the blind sucks and crawls and sea-valves of the brain, loaded with memory that will not die? To cry our love out in the wilderness, to wake always in the night, smiting the pillow in some foreign land, thinking for ever of the myriad sights and sounds of home?

  "While Paris Sleeps!"--By God! while Paris sleeps, to wake and walk and not to sleep; to wake and walk and sleep and wake, and sleep again, seeing dawn come at the window-square that cast its wedge before our glazed, half-sleeping eyes, seeing soft, hated foreign light, and breathing soft, dull languid air that could not bite and tingle up the blood, seeing legend and lie and fable wither in our sight as we saw what we saw, knew what we knew.

  Sons of the lost and lonely fathers, sons of the wanderers, children of hardy loins, the savage earth, the pioneers, what had we to do with all their bells and churches? Could we feed our hunger on portraits of the Spanish king? Brother, for what? For what? To kill the giant of loneliness and fear, to slay the hunger that would not rest, that would not give us rest.

  Of wandering for ever, and the earth again. Brother, for what? For what? For what? For the wilderness, the immense and lonely land. For the unendurable hunger, the unbearable ache, the incurable loneliness. For the exultancy whose only answer is the wild goat-cry. For a million memories, ten thousand sights and sounds and shapes and smells and names of things that only we can know.

  For what? For what? Not for a nation. Not for a people, not for an empire, not for a thing we love or hate.

  For what? For a cry, a space, an ecstasy. For a savage and nameless hunger. For a living and intolerable memory that may not for a second be forgotten, since it includes all the moments of our lives, includes all we do and are. For a living memory; for ten thousand memories; for a million sights and sounds and moments; for something like nothing else on earth; for something which possesses us.

  For something under our feet, and around us and over us; something that is in us and part of us, and proceeds from us, that beats in all the pulses of our blood.

  Brother, for what?

  First for the thunder of imperial names, the names of men and battles, the names of places and great rivers, the mighty names of the States. The name of The Wilderness; and the names of Antietam, Chancellorsville, Shiloh, Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbour, the Wheat Fields, Ball's Bluff, and the Devil's Den; the names of Cowpens, Brandywi
ne, and Saratoga; of Death Valley, Chickamauga, and the Cumberland Gap. The names of the Nantahalahs, the Bad Lands, the Painted Desert, the Yosemite, and the Little Big Horn; the names of Yancey and Cabarrus counties; and the terrible name of Hatteras.

  Then, for the continental thunder of the States: the names of Montana, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, and the two Dakotas; the names of Oregon and Indiana, of Kansas and the rich Ohio; the powerful name of Pennsylvania, and the name of Old Kentucky; the undulance of Alabama; the names of Florida and North Carolina.

  In the red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear--the rattle of arrows in laurel leaves, the war-cries round the painted buttes, and the majestical names of the Indian nations: the Pawnees, the Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Comanches, the Blackfeet, the Seminoles, the Cherokees, the Sioux, the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Navajos, the Utes, the Omahas, the Onondagas, the Chippewas, the Crees, the Chickasaws, the Arapahoes, the Catawbas, the Dakotas, the Apaches, the Croatans, and the Tuscaroras; the names of Powhatan and Sitting Bull; and the name of the great Chief, Rain-In-The-Face. Of wandering for ever, and the earth again: in red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear. The arrows rattle in the laurel leaves, and the elm-roots thread the bones of buried lovers. There have been war-cries on the Western trails, and on the plains the gun-stock rusts upon a handful of bleached bones. The barren earth? Was no love living in the wilderness?

  The rails go westward in the dark. Brother, have you seen starlight on the rails? Have you heard the thunder of the fast express?

  Of wandering for ever, and the earth again--the names of the mighty rails that bind the nation, the wheeled thunder of the names that net the continent: the Pennsylvania, the Union Pacific, the Santa Fé, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chicago and Northwestern, the Southern, the Louisiana and Northern, the Seaboard Air Line, the Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul, the Lackawanna, the New York, New Haven and Hartford, the Florida East Coast, the Rock Island, and the Denver and Rio Grande.

  Brother, the names of the engines, the engineers, and the sleeping-cars: the great engines of the Pacific type, the articulated Mallets with three sets of eight-yoked driving-wheels, the 400-ton thunderbolts with J. T. Cline, T. J. McRae, and the demon hawk-eyes of H. D. Campbell on the rails.

  The names of the great tramps who range the nation on the fastest trains: the names of the great tramps Oklahoma Red, Fargo Pete, Dixie Joe, Iron Mike, The Frisco Kid, Nigger Dick, Red Chi, Ike the Kike, and The Jersey Dutchman.

  By the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the rocks, and stared. He had long hair, his eyes were deep and sombre, and he wore a cape; he was a poet, and there was magic and mystery in his touch, for he had heard the horns of Elfland faintly blowing. And by the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the cold, grey rocks, and commanded the sea to break--break--break! And the sea broke, by the waters of life, by time, by time, as Lord Tennyson commanded it to do, and his heart was sad and lonely as he watched the stately ships (of the Hamburg-American Packet Company, fares forty-five dollars and up, first-class) go on to their haven under the hill, and Lord Tennyson would that his heart could utter the thoughts that arose in him.

  By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of the mighty rivers, the alluvial gluts, the drains of the continent, the throats that drink America (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song). The names of the men who pass, and the myriad names of the earth that abides for ever: the names of the men who are doomed to wander, and the name of that immense and lonely land on which they wander, to which they return, in which they will be buried--America! The immortal earth which waits for ever, the trains that thunder on the continent, the men who wander, and the women who cry out, "Return!"

  Finally, the names of the great rivers that are flowing in the darkness (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song.)

  By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of great mouths, the mighty maws, the vast, wet, coiling, never-glutted and unending snakes that drink the continent. Where, sons of men, and in what other land will you find others like them, and where can you match the mighty music of their names?--The Monongahela, the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Hudson (Sweet Thames!); the Kennebec, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, the Penobscot, the Wabash, the Chesapeake, the Swannanoa, the Indian River, the Niagara (Sweet Afton!); the Saint Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Tombigbee, the Nantahala, the French Broad, the Chattahoochee, the Arizona, and the Potomac (Father Tiber!)--these are a few of their princely names, these are a few of their great, proud, glittering names, fit for the immense and lonely land that they inhabit.

  Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber! You'd only be a suckling in that mighty land! And as for you, sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song: flow gently, gentle Thames, be well-behaved, sweet Thames, speak softly and politely, little Thames, flow gently till I end my song.

  By the waters of life, by time, by time, and of the yellow cat that smites the nation, of the belly of the snake that coils across the land--of the terrible names of the rivers in flood, the rivers that foam and welter in the dark, that smash the levees, that flood the lowlands for two thousand miles, that carry the bones of the cities seaward on their tides: of the awful names of the Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and even the little mountain rivers, brothers, in the season of the floods.

  Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station: the canoe glides gently through the portals of the waiting-room (for whites). Full fathom five the carcass of old man Lype is lying (of his bones is coral made) and delicately they dive for luncheon-room Greeks before the railway station.

  Brother, what fish are these? The floatage of sunken rooms, the sodden bridal-veils of poverty, the slime of mined parlour plush, drowned faces in the family album; and the blur of long-drowned eyes, blurred features, whited, bloated flesh.

  Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station. The stern, good, half-drowned faces of the brothers Trade and Mark survey the tides. Cardui! Miss Lillian Leitzell twists upon one arm above the flood; the clown, half-sunken to his waist, swims upward out of swirling yellow; the tiger bares his teeth above the surges of a river he will never drink. The ragged tatters of the circus posters are plastered on soaked boards. And delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station.

  Have we not seen them, brother?

  For what are we, my brother? We are a phantom flare of grieved desire, the ghostling and phosphoric flicker of immortal time, a brevity of days haunted by the eternity of the earth. We are an unspeakable utterance, an insatiable hunger, an unquenchable thirst; a lust that bursts our sinews, explodes our brains, sickens and rots our insides, and rips our hearts asunder. We are a twist of passion, a moment's flame of love and ecstasy, a sinew of bright blood and agony, a lost cry, a music of pain and joy, a haunting of brief, sharp hours, an almost captured beauty, a demon's whisper of unbodied memory. We are the dupes of time.

  For, brother, what are we?

  We are the sons of our father, whose face we have never seen, we are the sons of our father, whose voice we have never heard, we are the sons of our father, to whom we have cried for strength and comfort in our agony, we are the sons of our father, whose life like ours was lived in solitude and in the wilderness, we are the sons of our father, to whom only can we speak out the strange, dark burden of our heart and spirit, we are the sons of our father, and we shall follow the print of his foot for ever.

  XCVIII

  How long he had remained at Tours he scarcely knew: suspended in this spell of time and memory, he seemed to have detached himself not only from the infinite connections that bound him to the past, but from every project and direction that he had considered for the future. Day after day he stayed in his little room above the cobbled court of the hotel; he ate his meals there, going out at nightfall to eat and drink in a café, to walk about the streets, once or twic
e to go home with a woman of the town, and finally to come back to his room, to write furiously for hours, and then, stretched out in bed, nailed to the rock of a furiously wakeful sleep, to live again through the immense and spaceless images of night, in an alert but comatose hypnosis of the will.

  One morning he awoke with a shock of apprehension, the foreboding of calamitous mischance. It was the first time in weeks that he had taken thought of the state of his resources or felt any care or worry for the future. He counted his money with feverish haste, and discovered that less than 250 francs remained. For a moment he sat on the edge of the bed, holding the little wad of franc notes in his hand, stunned and bewildered by this sudden realization that his funds were exhausted, and for the moment not knowing what to do. His hotel bill for the week was due; he went at once to the bureau and asked for it; a hasty calculation assured him that when he had paid it, less than twenty francs would be left.