OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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And now, as the boy looked at the old man, he had a sense of union with the past. It seemed to him if he would only speak, the living past, the voices of lost men, the pain, the pride, the madness and despair, the million scenes and faces of the buried life — all that an old man ever knew — would be revealed to him, would be delivered to him like a priceless treasure, as an inheritance which old men owed to young, and which should be the end and effort of all living. His savage hunger was a kind of memory: he thought if he could speak, it would be fed.
And for a moment, it seemed, he saw the visages of time, dark time, the million lock-bolts shot back in man’s memory, the faces of the lost Americans, and all the million casual moments of their lives, with Bascom blazing at them from a dozen pulpits, Bascom, tortured by love and madness, walking the streets of the nation, stumping the rutted roads, muttering through darkness with clasped bony hands, a gaunt and twisted figure reeling across the continent below immense and cruel skies. Light fell upon his face and darkness crossed it:— he came up from the wilderness, from derbied men and bustled women, from all of the memories of lavish brown, and from time, dark time — from a time that was further off than Saxon thanes, all of the knights, the spearheads, and the horses.
Was all this lost?
“It was so long ago,” the old man said.
time_
Bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more: the flying leaf, the broken cloud. Was no love crying in the wilderness?
“— So long ago. I have lived so long. I have seen so much. I could tell you so many things,” his uncle said huskily, with weariness and indifference. His eye was lustreless and dead, he looked for a moment tired and old.
All at once, a strange and perplexing vision, which was to return many times in the years that followed, came to the boy. It was this: there was a company of old men and women at dinner, seated together around a table. All of them were very old, older than his uncle; the faces of the old men and women were fragile and delicate like old yellowed china, their faces were frail and sexless, they had begun to look alike. In their youth all these people had known one another. The men had drunk, fought, whored, hated one another, and loved the women. Some had been devoured by the sterile and corrupt fear and envy that young men know. In secret their lips were twisted, their faces livid, and their hearts bitter; their eyes glittered with a reptilian hatred of another man — they dreaded his success, and they exulted in his failure, laughing with a delirious joy when they heard or read of his hurt, defeat, or humiliation. They had been afraid to speak or confess what was in their hearts, they feared the mockery of their fellows; with one another their words were careful, picked, and disparaging. They gave the lie to passion and belief and they said what they knew was false. And yet along dark roads at night they had shouted out into the howling winds their great goat-cries of joy, exultancy and power; they had smelled snow in thick brooding air at night, and they had watched it come, softly spitting at the window glass, numbing the footfalls of the earth with its soft silent fall, filling their hearts with a dark proud ecstasy, touching their entrails with impending prophecy. Each had a thousand dark desires and fantasies; each wanted wealth, power, fame and love; each saw himself as great, good and talented; each feared and hated rivals in business or in love — and in crowds they glared at one another with hard hostile eyes, they bristled up like crested cocks, they watched their women jealously, felt looks and glances through their shoulder-blades, and hated men with white spermatic necks, amorous hair, and faces proud and insolent with female conquest.
They had been young and full of pain and combat, and now all this was dead in them: they smiled mildly, feebly, gently, they spoke in thin voices, and they looked at one another with eyes dead to desire, hostility, and passion.
As for the old women, they sat there on their yellowed and bony haunches. They were all beyond the bitter pain and ecstasy of youth — its frenzy, its hope, its sinew of bright blood and agony: they were beyond the pain and fear of anything save age and death. Here was a faithful wife, a fruitful mother; here was an adulterous and voluptuous woman, the potent mistress of a dozen men; here was her cuckold husband, who had screamed like a tortured animal when he had first found her in bed with another man, and here was the man he found her with; here was another man in whom the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity had aroused only a corrupt inverted joy; he exulted in it, he urged her on into new love affairs, he besought her greedily to taunt him with it, he fed upon his pain — and now they were all old and meagre and had the look of yellowed china. They turned their mild sunken faces toward one another with looks in which there was neither hate nor love nor desire nor passion; they laughed thinly, and their memory was all of little things.
They no longer wanted to excel or to be first; they were no longer mad and jealous; they no longer hated rivals; they no longer wanted fame; they no longer cared for work or grew drunk on hope; they no longer turned into the dark and struck their bloody knuckles at the wall; they no longer writhed with shame upon their beds, cursed at the memory of defeat and desolation, or ripped the sheets between convulsive fingers. Could they not speak? Had they forgotten?
Why could not the old men speak? They had known pain, death and madness, yet all their words were stale and rusty. They had known the wilderness, the savage land, the blood of the murdered men ran down into the earth that gave no answer; and they had seen it, they had shed it. Where were the passion, pain and pride, the million living moments of their lives? Was all this lost? Were they all tongueless? It seemed to the boy that there was something sly and evil in their glances as they sat together, as if they hoarded some cunning and malevolent wisdom in their brains, as if the medicine to all our grief and error was in them, but as if through the evil and conspirate communication of their glance, they had resolved to keep it from us. Or were they simply devoured with satiety, with weariness and indifference? Did they refuse to speak because they could not speak, because even memory had gone lifeless in them?
Yes. Words echoed in their throat but they were tongueless. For them the past was dead: they poured into our hands a handful of dry dust and ashes.
time_
The dry bones, the bitter dust? The living wilderness, the silent waste? The barren land?
Have no lips trembled in the wilderness? No eyes sought seaward from the rock’s sharp edge for men returning home? Has no pulse beat more hot with love or hate upon the river’s edge? Or where the old wheel and the rusted stock lie stogged in desert sand: by the horsehead a woman’s skull. No love?
No lonely footfalls in a million streets, no heart that beat its best and bloodiest cry out against the steel and stone, no aching brain, caught in its iron ring, groping among the labyrinthine canyons? Naught in that immense and lonely land but incessant growth and ripeness and pollution, the emptiness of forests and deserts, the unhearted, harsh and metal jangle of a million tongues, crying the belly-cry for bread, or the great cat’s snarl for meat and honey? All then, all? Birth and the twenty thousand days of snarl and jangle — and no love, no love? Was no love crying in the wilderness?
It was not true. The lovers lay below the lilac bush; the laurel leaves were trembling in the wood.
time_
Suddenly it seemed to the boy that if he could put his hand upon his uncle, if he could grip his fingers in his stringy arm, his own strength and youth would go into him, and he could rekindle memory like a living flame in him, he could animate for an hour that ancient heart with the exultancy, the power, the joy that pulsed in himself; he could make the old man speak.
He wanted to speak to him as people never speak to one another, he wanted to say and hear the things one never says and hears. He wanted to know what the old man’s youth beyond its grim weather of poverty, loneliness, and desperation had been like. His uncle had been over ten years old when the war had ended, and he had seen the men plod home in wreaths of dust and heard their casual voices in a room; he had breathed the air of vanished summers, he had seen cloud shadows floating on the massed green of the wilderness, the twisting of a last lone leaf upon a bough; and he had heard the desolate and stricken voices in the South long, long ago, the quiet and casual voices of lost men, a million vanished footsteps in the streets of life. And he had known the years of brown, dark lavish brown,