…who flit from city to city in search of something they hope to find and never even name… searching for some kind of resting place in their lives, which they never really want…
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?-it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
…fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumor and they cannot find the way. All of the gods have lost the way.
Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
This is a moment.
For he was a Southerner, and he knew that there was something wounded in the South. He knew that there was something twisted, dark, and full of pain which Southerners have known all their lives—something rooted in their souls beyond all contradiction, about which no one had dared to write, of which no one had ever spoken.
I’ve got an idea that a lot of work in this world gets done by lazy people. That’s the reason they work—because they’re so lazy… You work becuase you have to drive yourself to such a fury to begin…It’s so hard to get started that once you do you’re afraid of slipping back. You’d rather do anything than go through all that agony again…Then people say you’re a glutton for work, but it isn’t so. It’s laziness—just plain, damned, simple laziness, that’s all.”
You found the earth too great for your one life… But it has been this way with all men… You have faltered, you have missed the way… And now, because you have known madness and despair… 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, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us—we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.
…it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place. But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth?
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
…and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known—something far, near, strange, and so familiar—and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.
It is all so strange, so near, so far, so terrible, beautiful, and instantly familiar, that it seems to the traveler that he must have known these people forever…
… for once seen, and list the moment that he sees it, it is his forever 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.
“Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.”
I have for many years been in awe of Wolfe and his epic-time-description. And to put my sentiments quaintly… nothing changes. His words impress more deeply upon me each time I lift his pages. With each passing moment of my life, his literal life seems to become a greater mirror of mine. Even if you have never missed and longed for someplace so violently that even in your unconscious dreams it brings a blunt and wakeful pain to your heart… his words are worth your while.
“You found the earth too great for your one life… But it has been this way with all men… You have faltered, you have missed the way… And now, because you have known madness and despair… 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, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us—we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”
The man knew how to pull a pen across a page- and make it last, make it momentous. It is all very real, very true. He does not mimic… for there are mortal recollections and emotions more memorable than pure sadness that only those who have left their true and beloved home—left it against their better judgement—have felt. It is a unique pain, a different yearning. A desperation unknown before that first foolish, weary step.
“…it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place. But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth?”
It’s not depressing; though I know it may seem tiresome. It is rather, a companion to lonesome wanderers. A textual beacon from the past that has ceased to fade. Will never fade so long as there are restless fools such as myself who act with stubborn insistence upon a sporadic and momentary urge to move. A mistaken epiphany leads dreamers and wanderers much further into solitude with such unceremonious brevity that it is years before one can even begin to notice they are no longer home; that they have left, and kept moving. It is quite a time before one realizes that the faces surrounding are not the same, the streets have changed their course, the music sings of foreign loves; Time has passed, the past is now your future.
“…and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known—something far, near, strange, and so familiar—and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.”
Ironically, the restless wanderer has kept stagnant while the immovable past has fled. As long as there are those who once believed that love was something that one could do without, as long as we— the simply ridiculous and clearly delusional—continue to flee, his Homeric lamp will burn.
“…Must the beggar on horseback forever reel?”
“All he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”
