Of Time and the River: A legend of mans hunger in his youth.

OF TIME AND THE RIVER: A LEGEND OF MAN'S HUNGER IN HIS YOUTH

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George, it makes me sick to think about it--that poor old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer, with that horrible smell about him all the time--everything he wears gets simply stiff with that rotten corrupt matter--Do you know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year after year, never knowing when he's going to die, to have him hang on by a thread until it seems you've lived forever--that there'll never be an end--that you'll never have a chance to live your own life--to have a moment's peace or rest or happiness yourself?

My God, does it always have to be this way? Can I never have a moment's happiness? Must they always come to me? Does everything have to be put on my shoulders? Will you tell me that? She was glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress of her hysteria. Good heaven's, Papa's life means more to me than anything on earth. I'd keep him alive at any cost as long as there was a breath left in him. But it's the strain of it, the strain of it--to wait, to wait year after year, to feel it hanging over you all the time, never to know when he will die--always the strain, the strain--do you see what I mean, George?

How is Uncle Will now? But it does no real good, George. They can't cure him. We know that now. They've told us that. It only prolongs the agony. They help him for a little while and then it all begins again. They can't save him! Nothing can save him! Papa's a dead man now! George looked gravely sympathetic for a moment, winced swiftly, dug hard fingers in his thigh, and then said:.

Gant looks much better already--eats well, you know, has a good appetite--and Luke says he's in good spirits. He's not getting any better. Papa's a sick man--dying--good God! Can no one ever get that into their heads! You'll be floatin' around there so far up in the clouds that you won't even see a roughneck like me, much less talk to him"--As he went on with this kind of sarcasm, his speech had become almost deliberately illiterate, as if trying to emphasize the superior virtue of the rough, hearty, home-grown fellow in comparison with the bookish scholar.

I reckon," she said, in the same puzzled tone, "it's all right--I guess he knows what he's about. Says he's made up his mind to go--I told him," she said, and shook her head again, "that I'd send him for a year if he wanted to try it--an' then he'll have to get out an' shift for himself. We'll see," she said.

See a Problem?

What you goin' to do up there? Now don't fly so high you never get back to earth again! You know the rest of us who didn't go to Harvard still have to walk around upon the ground down here," he said. George Pentland looked at the boy's big feet for a moment, shaking his head slowly in much wonderment. But if you cut 'em off," he said, "he'd go right up like a balloon, wouldn't he? Give 'em hell when you get up there! You're the only one of us who ever had guts enough to go through college, and we're proud of you! And remember me to your father and Luke when you get to Baltimore.

Good-bye, Gene--I've got to leave you now. Good luck, son," and with a friendly grip of his powerful hand he turned to go.

Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth

At this moment, all up and down the platform, people had turned to listen to the deep excited voice of a young man who was saying in a staccato tone of astounded discovery:. You swear she did! And you were there and saw it with your own eyes! Well, if that don't beat all I ever heard of! What do you know about that? He approached the mother and her children rapidly, at his stiff, prim and somewhat lunging stride, his thin face fixed eagerly upon them, bearing towards them with a driving intensity of purpose as if the whole interest and energy of his life were focussed on them, as if some matter of the most vital consequence depended on his reaching them as soon as possible.

Arrived, he immediately began to address the other youth without a word of greeting or explanation, bursting out with the sudden fragmentary explosiveness that was part of him:. Are you going today? Well, what did you decide to do? Pett Barnes says you've decided on Harvard. You'd better come on with me. What ever got into your head to do a thing like that?

You're taking this train, too, you say? How d'ye do, Mrs. The older woman still holding his hand in her rough worn clasp looked up at him a moment calmly, her lips puckered in tranquil meditation:. I know your face. Just give me a moment and I'll call you by your name. Gene and I went to school together. We were in the same class at the University.

I knew you all along! I knew that I'd seen you just as soon as I saw your face! Your name just slipped my mind a moment--and then, of course, it all flashed over me. You're Robert Weaver's boy! And you are," she still held his hand in her strong, motherly and friendly clasp, and looking at him with a little sly smile hovering about the corners of her mouth, she was silent a moment, regarding him quizzically--"now, boy," she said quietly, "you may think I've got a pretty poor memory for names and faces--but I want to tell you something that may surprise you.

I know more about you than you think I do. Now," she said, "I'm going to tell you something and you can tell me if I'm right. You're absolutely right," he cried, and then in an astounded and admiring tone, he said: If that don't beat all! How on earth did you ever remember it! I remember the day you were born, boy--because it was on that very day that one of my own children--my son, Luke--was allowed to get up out of bed after havin' typhoid fever.

That very day, sir, when Mr. Gant came home to dinner, he said--'Well, I was just talking to Robert Weaver on the street and everything's all right. His wife gave birth to a baby boy this morning and he says she's out of danger. McGuire was here this morning and he said Luke is now well enough to be up and about.

He's out of danger. But that's how I know--September 2nd, that's when it was, all right, the very day when you were born. Well, if that don't beat all! You tell him that," she said.

That is certainly a remarkable thing. Beats all I ever heard of! Ah-hah-hah," he kept bowing and smiling to the young woman and her husband, and muttering "ah-hah-hah! Pleased to have met you. Got to go now: Gene, I'll see you on the train. Glad to have met you all. Certainly a remarkable thing. The younger woman looked after the boy's tall form as he departed, stroking her chin in a reflective and abstracted manner:.

Well," she went on, nodding her head vigorously in a movement of affirmation. He's got good manners. He looks and acts like a gentleman. You can see he's had a good bringing up. And he certainly seems to be intelligent enough. I'm not saying that he isn't. He may turn out all right, after all. Why, of course he's all right. What makes you think he's not? The other woman was silent for another moment: What do you call it? It's a mighty funny thing that they all seem to get along now--better than we do.

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Turning to her brother with a little frowning smile, she said wearily: They know it all, don't they? Well, I don't care," she muttered. He looks like a nice boy and--" with an impressed look over towards Robert's friends, she concluded, "he goes with a nice crowd. You stick to that kind of people. I'm all for him. Now the mother was talking again: I hope you find us all alive. Why do you have to act like this every time someone goes away! I beg of you, for God's sake, not to do it!

Why, good heavens, you act as if someone is dead! Boston's not so far away you'll never see him again! The trains are running every day, you know. Besides," she said abruptly and with an assurance that infuriated the boy, "he's not going today, anyway. Why, you haven't any intention of going today, you know you haven't," she said to him. He's going to wait over until tomorrow. I've known it all along. The boy went stamping away from them up the platform, and then came stamping back at them while the other people on the platform grinned and stared.

You know I'm going away today!

Why did we come here? What in Christ's name are we waiting for if you don't think I'm going? The young woman laughed her high, husky laugh which was almost deliberately irritating and derisive--"Hi! Then, almost wearily, she turned away, plucking at her large chin absently, and said: It's your own funeral!

Of Time and the River

If you're determined to go today, no one can stop you. But I don't see why you can't just as well wait over till tomorrow. Now, it's not going to do a bit of harm to anyone if you're a day or so late in gettin' there. Now I've never been there myself," she went on in her tone of tranquil sarcasm, "but I've always heard that Harvard University was a good big sort of place--and I'll bet you'll find," the mother now said gravely, with a strong slow nod of conviction--"I'll bet you'll find that it's right there where it always was when you get there.

I'll bet you find they haven't moved a foot," she said, "and let me tell you something, boy," she now continued, looking at him almost sternly, but with a ghost of a smile about her powerful and delicate mouth--"now I haven't had your education and I reckon I don't know as much about universities as you do--but I've never heard of one yet that would run a feller away for bein' a day late as long as he's got money enough to pay his tuition. Now you'll find 'em waitin' for you when you get there--and you'll get in," she said slowly and powerfully.

But now the train was coming. Down the powerful shining tracks a half-mile away, the huge black snout of the locomotive swung slowly round the magnificent bend and flare of the rails that went into the railway yards of Altamont two miles away, and with short explosive thunders of its squat funnel came barging slowly forward. Across the golden pollenated haze of the warm autumnal afternoon they watched it with numb lips and an empty hollowness of fear, delight, and sorrow in their hearts.

And from the sensual terror, the ecstatic tension of that train's approach, all things before, around, about the boy came to instant life, to such sensuous and intolerable poignancy of life as a doomed man might feel who looks upon the world for the last time from the platform of the scaffold where he is to die. He could feel, taste, smell, and see everything with an instant still intensity, the animate fixation of a vision seen instantly, fixed for ever in the mind of him who sees it, and sense the clumped dusty autumn masses of the trees that bordered the tracks upon the left, and smell the thick exciting hot tarred caulking of the tracks, the dry warmth and good worn wooden smell of the powerful railway ties, and see the dull rusty red, the gaping emptiness and joy of a freight car, its rough floor whitened with soft siltings of thick flour, drawn in upon a spur of rusty track behind a warehouse of raw concrete blocks, and see with sudden desolation, the warehouse flung down rawly, newly, there among the hot, humid, spermy, nameless, thick-leaved field-growth of the South.

Then the locomotive drew in upon them, loomed enormously above them, and slowly swept by them with a terrific drive of eight-locked pistoned wheels, all higher than their heads, a savage furnace-flare of heat, a hard hose-thick hiss of steam, a moment's vision of a lean old head, an old gloved hand of cunning on the throttle, a glint of demon hawk-eyes fixed for ever on the rails, a huge tangle of gauges, levers, valves, and throttles, and the goggled blackened face of the fireman, lit by an intermittent hell of flame, as he bent and swayed with rhythmic swing of laden shovel at his furnace doors.

The locomotive passed above them, darkening the sunlight from their faces, engulfing them at once and filling them with terror, drawing the souls out through their mouths with the God-head of its instant absoluteness, and leaving them there, emptied, frightened, fixed for ever, a cluster of huddled figures, a bough of small white staring faces, upturned, silent, and submissive, small, lonely, and afraid. Then as the heavy rust-black coaches rumbled past, and the wheels ground slowly to a halt, the boy could see his mother's white stunned face beside him, the naked startled innocence of her eyes, and feel her rough worn clasp upon his arm, and hear her startled voice, full of apprehension, terror, and surprise, as she said sharply:.

It was his train and it had come to take him to the strange and secret heart of the great North that he had never known, but whose austere and lonely image, whose frozen heat and glacial fire, and dark stern beauty had blazed in his vision since he was a child. For he had dreamed and hungered for the proud unknown North with that wild ecstasy, that intolerable and wordless joy of longing and desire, which only a Southerner can feel. With a heart of fire, a brain possessed, a spirit haunted by the strange, secret and unvisited magic of the proud North, he had always known that some day he should find it--his heart's hope and his father's country, the lost but unforgotten half of his own soul,--and take it for his own.

And now that day had come, and these two images--call them rather lights and weathers of man's soul--of the world-far, lost and lonely South, and the fierce, the splendid, strange and secret North were swarming like a madness through his blood. And just as he had seen a thousand images of the buried and silent South which he had known all his life, so now he had a vision of the proud fierce North with all its shining cities, and its tides of life.

He saw the rocky sweetness of its soil and its green loveliness, and he knew its numb soft prescience, its entrail-stirring ecstasy of coming snow, its smell of harbours and its traffic of proud ships. He could not utter what he wished to say and yet the wild and powerful music of those two images kept swelling in him and it seemed that the passion of their song must burst his heart, explode the tenement of bright blood and agony in which they surged, and tear the sinews of his life asunder unless he found some means to utter them.

But no words came. He only knew the image of man's loneliness, a feeling of sorrow, desolation, and wild mournful secret joy, longing and desire, as sultry, moveless and mysterious in its slow lust as the great rivers of the South themselves. And at the same moment that he felt this wild and mournful sorrow, the slow, hot, secret pulsings of desire, and breathed the heavy and mysterious fragrance of the lost South again, he felt, suddenly and terribly, its wild strange pull, the fatal absoluteness of its world-lost resignation.

Then, with a sudden feeling of release, a realization of the incredible escape that now impended for him, he knew that he was waiting for the train, and that the great life of the North, the road to freedom, solitude and the enchanted promise of the golden cities was now before him. Like a dream made real, a magic come to life, he knew that in another hour he would be speeding worldward, lifeward, Northward out of the enchanted, time-far hills, out of the dark heart and mournful mystery of the South for ever.

And as that overwhelming knowledge came to him, a song of triumph, joy, and victory so savage and unutterable, that he could no longer hold it in his heart was torn from his lips in a bestial cry of fury, pain, and ecstasy. He struck his arms out in the shining air for loss, for agony, for joy.

The whole earth reeled about him in a kaleidoscopic blur of shining rail, massed heavy greens, and white empetalled faces of the staring people. And suddenly he was standing there among his people on the platform of the little station. All things and shapes on earth swam back into their proper shape again, and he could hear his mother's voice, the broken clatter of the telegraph, and see, there on the tracks, the blunt black snout, the short hard blasts of steam from its squat funnel, the imminent presence, the enormous bigness of the train.

The journey from the mountain town of Altamont to the tower-masted island of Manhattan is not, as journeys are conceived in America, a long one. The distance is somewhat more than miles, the time required to make the journey a little more than twenty hours. But so relative are the qualities of space and time, and so complex and multiple their shifting images, that in the brief passage of this journey one may live a life, share instantly in 10,, other ones, and see pass before his eyes the infinite panorama of shifting images that make a nation's history. First of all, the physical changes and transitions of the journey are strange and wonderful enough.

In the afternoon one gets on the train and with a sense of disbelief and wonder sees the familiar faces, shapes, and structures of his native town recede out of the last fierce clasp of life and vision. Then, all through the waning afternoon, the train is toiling down around the mountain curves and passes. The great shapes of the hills, embrowned and glowing with the molten hues of autumn, are all about him: And from the very toiling slowness of the train, together with the terrific stillness and nearness of the marvellous hills, a relation is established, an emotion evoked, which it is impossible to define, but which, in all its strange and poignant mingling of wild sorrow and joy, grief for the world that one is losing, swelling triumph at the thought of the strange new world that one will find, is instantly familiar, and has been felt by every one.

The train toils slowly round the mountain grades, the short and powerful blasts of its squat funnel sound harsh and metallic against the sides of rocky cuts. One looks out the window and sees cut, bank, and gorge slide slowly past, the old rock wet and gleaming with the water of some buried mountain spring.

The train goes slowly over the perilous and dizzy height of a wooden trestle; far below, the traveller can see and hear the clean foaming clamours of rock-bright mountain water; beside the track, before his little hut, a switchman stands looking at the train with the slow wondering gaze of the mountaineer. The little shack in which he lives is stuck to the very edge of the track above the steep and perilous ravine.

His wife, a slattern with a hank of tight-drawn hair, a snuff-stick in her mouth, and the same gaunt, slow wondering stare her husband has, stands in the doorway of the shack, holding a dirty little baby in her arms. It is all so strange, so near, so far, so terrible, beautiful, and instantly familiar, that it seems to the traveller that he must have known these people for ever, that he must now stretch forth his hand to them from the windows and the rich and sumptuous luxury of the Pullman car, that he must speak to them.

And it seems to him that all the strange and bitter miracle of life--how, why, or in what way, he does not know--is in that instant greeting and farewell; for once seen, and lost the moment that he sees it, it is his for ever and he can never forget it. And then the slow toiling train has passed these lives and faces and is gone, and there is something in his heart he cannot say.

At length the train has breached the last great wall of the soaring ranges, has made its slow and sinuous descent around the powerful bends and cork-screws of the shining rails which now he sees above him seven times and towards dark, the lowland country has been reached. The sun goes down behind the train a tremendous globe of orange and pollen, the soaring ranges melt swiftly into shapes of smoky and enchanted purple, night comes--great-starred and velvet-breasted night--and now the train takes up its level pounding rhythm across the piedmont swell and convolution of the mighty State.

Towards nine o'clock at night there is a pause to switch cars and change engines at a junction town. The traveller, with the same feeling of wild unrest, wonder, nameless excitement and wordless expectancy, leaves the train, walks back and forth upon the platform, rushes into the little station luncheon room or out into the streets to buy cigarettes, a sandwich--really just to feel this moment's contact with another town. He sees vast flares and steamings of gigantic locomotives on the rails, the seamed, blackened, lonely faces of the engineers in the cabs of their great engines, and a little later he is rushing again across the rude, mysterious visage of the powerful, dark, and lonely earth of old Catawba.

Toward midnight there is another pause at a larger town--the last stop in Catawba--again the feeling of wild unrest and nameless joy and sorrow. The traveller gets out, walks up and down the platform, sees the vast slow flare and steaming of the mighty engine, rushes into the station, and looks into the faces of all the people passing with the same sense of instant familiarity, greeting, and farewell,--that lonely, strange, and poignantly wordless feeling that Americans know so well.

Then he is in the Pullman again, the last outposts of the town have slipped away from him and the great train which all through the afternoon has travelled eastward from the mountains half across the mighty State, is now for the first time pointed northward, worldward, towards the secret borders of Virginia, towards the great world cities of his hope, the fable of his childhood legendry, and the wild and secret hunger of his heart, his spirit and his life. Already the little town from which he came in the great hills, the faces of his kinsmen and his friends, their most familiar voices, the shapes of things he knew seem far and strange as dreams, lost at the bottom of the million-visaged sea-depth of dark time, the strange and bitter miracle of life.

He cannot think that he has ever lived there in the far lost hills, or ever left them, and all his life seems stranger than the dream of time, and the great train moves on across the immense and lonely visage of America, making its great monotone that is the sound of silence and for ever. And in the train, and in ten thousand little towns, the sleepers sleep upon the earth. Then bitter sorrow, loneliness and joy come swelling to his throat--quenchless hunger rises from the adyts of his life and conquers him, and with wild wordless fury horsed upon his life, he comes at length, in dark mid-watches of the night, up to the borders of the old earth of Virginia.

Who has seen fury riding in the mountains? Who has known fury striding in the storm? Who has been mad with fury in his youth, given no rest or peace or certitude by fury, driven on across the earth by fury, until the great vine of the heart was broke, the sinews wrenched, the little tenement of bone, blood, marrow, brain, and feeling in which great fury raged, was twisted, wrung, depleted, worn out, and exhausted by the fury which it could not lose or put away? Who has known fury, how it came? How have we breathed him, drunk him, eaten fury to the core, until we have him in us now and cannot lose him anywhere we go?

It is a strange and subtle worm that will be for ever feeding at our heart. It is a madness working in our brain, a hunger growing from the food it feeds upon, a devil moving in the conduits of our blood, it is a spirit wild and dark and uncontrollable forever swelling in our soul, and it is in the saddle now, horsed upon our lives, rowelling the spurs of its insatiate desire into our naked and defenceless sides, our owner, master, and the mad and cruel tyrant who goads us on for ever down the blind and brutal tunnel of kaleidoscopic days at the end of which is nothing but the blind mouth of the pit and darkness and no more.

Then, then, will fury leave us, he will cease from those red channels of our life he has so often run, another sort of worm will work at that great vine, whereat he fed. Then, then, indeed, he must give over, fold his camp, retreat; there is no place for madness in a dead man's brain, no place for hunger in a dead man's flesh, and in a dead man's heart there is a place for no desire.

At what place of velvet-breasted night long, long ago, and in what leafy darkened street of mountain summer, hearing the footsteps of approaching lovers in the night, the man's voice, low, hushed, casual, confiding, suddenly the low rich welling of a woman's laughter, tender and sensual in the dark, going, receding, fading, and then the million-noted silence of the night again?

by Wolfe, Thomas

In what ancient light of fading day in a late summer; what wordless passion then of sorrow, joy, and ecstasy--was he betrayed to fury when it came? Or in the black dark of some forgotten winter's morning, child of the storm and brother to the dark, alone and wild and secret in the night as he leaned down against the wind's strong wall towards Niggertown, blocking his folded papers as he went, and shooting them terrifically in the wind's wild blast against the shack-walls of the jungle-sleeping blacks, himself alone awake, wild, secret, free and stormy as the wild wind's blast, giving it howl for howl and yell for yell, with madness, and a demon's savage and exultant joy, up-welling in his throat!

Oh, was he then, on such a night, betrayed to fury--was it then, on such a night, that fury came? He never knew; it may have been a rock, a stone, a leaf, the moths of golden light as warm and moving in a place of magic green, it may have been the storm-wind howling in the barren trees, the ancient fading light of day in some forgotten summer, the huge unfolding mystery of undulant, oncoming night.

Oh, it might have been all this in the April and moist lilac darkness of some forgotten morning as he saw the clean line of the East cleave into morning at the mountain's ridge. It may have been the first light, bird-song, an end to labour and the sweet ache and pure fatigue of the lightened shoulder as he came home at morning hearing the single lonely hoof, the jinking bottles, and the wheel upon the street again, and smelled the early morning breakfast smells, the smoking wheat cakes, and the pungent sausages, the steaks, biscuits, grits, and fried green apples, and the brains and eggs.

It may have been the coil of pungent smoke upcurling from his father's chimney, the clean sweet gardens and the peach-bloom, apples, crinkled lettuce wet with dew, bloom and cherry bloom down-drifting in their magic snow within his father's orchard, and his father's giant figure awake now and astir, and moving in his house! Oh, ever to wake at morning knowing he was there! To feel the fire-full chimney-throat roar up a-tremble with the blast of his terrific fires, to hear the first fire crackling in the kitchen range, to hear the sounds of morning in the house, the smells of breakfast and the feeling of security never to be changed!

Oh, to hear him prowling like a wakened lion below, the stertorous hoarse frenzy of his furious breath; to hear the ominous muttering mounting to faint howls as with infuriated relish he prepared the roaring invective of the morning's tirade, to hear him muttering as the coal went rattling out upon the fire, to hear him growling as savagely the flame shot up the trembling chimney-throat, to hear him muttering back and forth now like a raging beast, finally to hear his giant stride racing through the house prepared now, storming to the charge, and the well-remembered howl of his awakened fury as springing to the door-way of the back-room stairs he flung it open, yelling at them to awake.

Was it in such a way, one time as he awoke, and heard below his father's lion-ramp of morning that fury came? He never knew, no more than one could weave the great web of his life back through the brutal chaos of ten thousand furious days, unwind the great vexed pattern of his life to silence, peace, and certitude in the magic land of new beginnings, no return.

He never knew if fury had lain dormant all those years, had worked secret, silent, like a madness in the blood. But later it would seem to him that fury had first filled his life, exploded, conquered, and possessed him, that he first felt it, saw it, knew the dark illimitable madness of its power, one night years later on a train across Virginia. It was a little before midnight when the youth entered the smoking room of the Pullman where, despite the lateness of the hour, several men still sat.

At just this moment the train had entered the State of Virginia, although, of course, none of the men who sat there talking knew this. It is true that some of them might have known, had their interest and attention been directed toward this geographic fact, had they been looking for it. Just at this moment, indeed, as the train, scarcely slackening its speed, was running through the last of the Catawba towns, one of the men glanced up suddenly from the conversation in which he and the others were earnestly engaged, which was exclusively concerned with the fascinating, ever-mounting prices of their property and the tempting profits undoubtedly to be derived from real-estate speculation in their native town.

He had looked up quickly, casually, and absently, with that staggering indifference of prosperous men who have been so far, so often, on such splendid trains, that a trip across the continent at night toward the terrific city is no longer a grand adventure of their lives, but just a thing of custom, need, and even weariness, and who, therefore, rarely look out of windows any more:. Yes, I guess this must be Maysville," and had then returned vigorously from his brief inspection of the continent of night, a few lights, and a little town, to the enticing topic which had for several hours absorbed the interests of the group.

Nor was there any good reason why this traveller who had glanced so swiftly and indifferently from the window of the train should feel any greater interest than he showed. Certainly the briefest and most casual inspection would have convinced the observer that, in Baedeker's celebrated phrase, there was "little here that need detain the tourist. The street was shaded by large trees and there were some level lawns, more trees, and some white frame-houses with spacious porches, gables, occasionally the wooden magnificence of Georgian columns.

On everything--trees, houses, foliage, yards, and street--there was a curious loneliness of departure and October, an attentive almost mournful waiting. And yet this dark and dusty street of the tall trees left a haunting, curiously pleasant feeling of strangeness and familiarity. One viewed it with a queer sudden ache in the heart, a feeling of friendship and farewell, and this feeling was probably intensified by the swift and powerful movement of the train which seemed to slide past the town almost noiselessly, its wheels turning without friction, sound, or vibrancy on the pressed steel ribbons of the rails, giving to a traveller, and particularly to a youth who was going into the secret North for the first time, a feeling of illimitable and exultant power, evoking for him the huge mystery of the night and darkness, and the image of ten thousand lonely little towns like this across the continent.

Then the train slides by the darkened vacant-looking little station and for a moment one has a glimpse of the town's chief square and business centre. And as he sees it he is filled again with the same feeling of loneliness, instant familiarity, and departure. The square is one of those anomalous, shabby-ornate, inept, and pitifully pretentious places that one finds in little towns like these. But once seen, if only for this fraction of a moment, from the windows of a train, the memory of it will haunt one for ever after.

And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the combination of two things: The impression one gets, in fact, from that brief vision is one of frozen cataleptic silence in a world from which all life has recently been extinguished by some appalling catastrophe. The lights burn, the electric signs wink and flash, the place is still horribly intact in all its bleak prognathous newness, but all the people are dead, gone, vanished.

The place is a tomb of frozen silence, as terrifying in its empty bleakness as those advertising backdrops one saw formerly in theatres, where the splendid buildings, stores, and shops of a great street are painted in the richest and most flattering colours, and where there is no sign of life whatever. So was it here, save that here the illusion of the dead world gained a hideous physical reality by its stark, staring, nakedly concrete dimensions. All this the boy had seen, or rather sensed, in the wink of an eye, a moment's vision of a dusty little street, a fleeting glimpse of a silent little square, a few hard lights, and then the darkness of the earth again--these half-splintered glimpses were all the boy could really see in the eye-wink that it took the train to pass the town.

And yet, all these fragmentary things belonged so completely to all the life of little towns which he had known, that it was not as if he had seen only a few splintered images, but rather as if the whole nocturnal picture of the town was instantly whole and living in his mind. Even here, no movement of life is visible, but one who has lived and known towns like these feels for the first time an emotion of warmth and life as he looks at the gaudy, blazing bill-beplastered silence of that front.

For suddenly he seems to see the bluish blaze of carbon light that comes from the small slit-like vent-hole cut into the wall and can hear again--one of the loneliest and most haunting of all sounds--the rapid shuttering sound of the projection camera late at night, a sound lonely, hurried, unforgettable, coming out into those cataleptic squares of silence in the little towns--as if the operator is fairly racing through the last performance of the night like a weary and exhausted creature whose stale, over-driven life can find no joy in what is giving so much joy to others, and who is pressing desperately ahead toward the merciful rewards of food, sleep, and oblivion which are already almost in his grasp.

And as he remembers this, he also suddenly sees and knows the people in the theatre, and in that instant greets them, feels his lonely kinship with them, with the whole family of the earth, and says farewell. Small, dark, lonely, silent, thirsty, and insatiate, the people of the little town are gathered there in that one small cell of radiance, warmth, and joy.

There for a little space they are united by the magic spell the theatre casts upon them. They are all dark and silent leaning forward like a single mind and congeries of life, and yet they are all separate too. Yes, lonely, silent, for a moment beautiful, he knows the people of the town are there, lifting the small white petals of their faces, thirsty and insatiate, to that magic screen: Around the four sides of the square at even intervals, the new standards of the five-bulbed lamps cast down implacably upon those cataleptic pavements the cataleptic silence of their hard white light.

And this, he knows, is called "the Great White Way," of which the town is proud. Somehow the ghastly, lifeless silence of that little square is imaged nowhere else so cruelly as in the harsh, white silence of these lights. For they evoke terribly, as nothing else can do, the ghastly vacancy of light without life.

And poignantly, pitifully, and unutterably their harsh, white silence evokes the moth-like hunger of the American for hard, brilliant, blazing incandescence. It is as if there may be in his soul the horror of the ancient darkness, the terror of the old immortal silences, which will not down and must be heard. It is as if he feels again the ancient fear of--what?

Of the wilderness, the wet and lidless eye of shame and desolation feeding always on unhoused and naked sides. It is as if he fears the brutal revelation of his loss and loneliness, the furious, irremediable confusion of his huge unrest, his desperate and unceasing flight from the immense and timeless skies that bend above him, the huge, doorless and unmeasured vacancies of distance, on which he lives, on which, as helpless as a leaf upon a hurricane, he is driven on for ever, and on which he cannot pause, which he cannot fence, wall, conquer, make his own.

Then the train, running always with its smooth, powerful, almost noiseless movement, has left the station and the square behind it. The last outposts of the town appear and vanish in patterns of small, lonely light, and there is nothing but huge and secret night before us, the lonely, everlasting earth, and presently Virginia.

And surely, now, there is little more to be seen. Surely, now, there is almost nothing that by day would be worthy of more than a glance from those great travellers who have ranged the earth, and known all its wild and stormy seas, and seen its rarest glories. And by night, now, there is nothing, nothing by night but darkness and a space we call Virginia through which the huge projectile of the train is hurtling onward in the dark.

Field and fold and gulch and hill and hollow, forest and stream and bridge and bank and cut, the huge earth, the rude earth, the wild, formless, infinitely various, most familiar, ever-haunting earth, the grand and casual earth that is so brown, so harsh, so dusty, so familiar, the strange and homely earth wrought in our blood, our brain, our heart, the earth that can never be forgotten or described, is flowing by us, by us, by us in the night. What is it that we know so well and cannot speak?

What is it that we want to say and cannot tell? What is it that keeps swelling in our hearts its grand and solemn music, that is aching in our throats, that is pulsing like a strange wild grape through all the conduits of our blood, that maddens us with its exultant and intolerable joy and that leaves us tongueless, wordless, maddened by our fury to the end? We do not know. All that we know is that we lack a tongue that could reveal, a language that could perfectly express the wild joy swelling to a music in our heart, the wild pain welling to a strong ache in our throat, the wild cry mounting to a madness in our brain, the thing, the word, the joy we know so well, and cannot speak!

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What makes Biblio different? Sign In Register Help Cart. Near Fine in Good dust jacket. First Printing Publisher's "A" on Copyright page. Publisher's full black cloth, gilt lettering on green letterboxes on spine with gilt borders; gilt lettering on green labels on cover with gilt borders; fore-edge deckle. Head and heel of spine have very slight shelf-wear, upper and lower tips of front cover are lightly bumped, else pristine, unmarked, tight, square and clean. The unclipped dust jacket is heavily creased at the spine ends, the bottom edge of the front cover, and has tiny chips at the tips.

Thomas Wolfe , American writer best known for his first book, Look Homeward, Angel , and his other autobiographical novels. Maxwell Perkins , influential American editor who discovered many of the most prominent American writers of the first half of the 20th century. Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. Of Time and the River. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered.

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