Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (96 page)

But, amid the fumbling
march of races to extinction, the giant rhythms of the earth
remained.  The seasons passed in their majestic processionals,
and germinal Spring returned forever on the land--new crops, new men,
new harvests, and new gods.

And then the voyages, the
search for the happy land.  In his moment of terrible vision he
saw, in the tortuous ways of a thousand alien places, his foiled
quest of himself.  And his haunted face was possessed of that
obscure and passionate hunger that had woven its shuttle across the
seas, that had hung its weft among the Dutch in Pennsylvania, that
had darkened his father's eyes to impalpable desire for wrought stone
and the head of an angel.  Hill-haunted, whose vision of the
earth was mountain-walled, he saw the golden cities sicken in his
eye, the opulent dark splendors turn to dingy gray.  His brain
was sick with the million books, his eyes with the million pictures,
his body sickened on a hundred princely wines.

And rising from his
vision, he cried:  "I am not there among the cities. 
I have sought down a million streets, until the goat-cry died within
my throat, and I have found no city where I was, no door where I had
entered, no place where I had stood."

Then, from the edges of
moon-bright silence, Ben replied:  "Fool, why do you look
in the streets?"

Then Eugene said: 
"I have eaten and drunk the earth, I have been lost and beaten,
and I will go no more."

"Fool," said
Ben, "what do you want to find?"

"Myself, and an end
to hunger, and the happy land," he answered. "For I believe
in harbors at the end.  O Ben, brother, and ghost, and stranger,
you who could never speak, give me an answer now!"

Then, as he thought, Ben
said:  "There is no happy land.  There is no end to
hunger."

"And a stone, a
leaf, a door?  Ben?"  Spoke, continued without
speaking, to speak.  "Who are, who never were, Ben, the
seeming of my brain, as I of yours, my ghost, my stranger, who died,
who never lived, as I?  But if, lost seeming of my dreaming
brain, you have what I have not--an answer?"

Silence spoke.  ("I
cannot speak of voyages.  I belong here.  I never got
away," said Ben.)

"Then I of yours the
seeming, Ben?  Your flesh is dead and buried in these hills: my
unimprisoned soul haunts through the million streets of life, living
its spectral nightmare of hunger and desire.  Where, Ben? 
Where is the world?"

"Nowhere," Ben
said.  "YOU are your world."

Inevitable catharsis by
the threads of chaos.  Unswerving punctuality of chance. 
Apexical summation, from the billion deaths of possibility, of things
done.

"I shall save one
land unvisited," said Eugene.  Et ego in Arcadia.

And as he spoke, he saw
that he had left the million bones of cities, the skein of streets. 
He was alone with Ben, and their feet were planted on darkness, their
faces were lit with the cold high terror of the stars.

On the brink of the dark
he stood, with only the dream of the cities, the million books, the
spectral images of the people he had loved, who had loved him, whom
he had known and lost.  They will not come again.  They
never will come back again.

With his feet upon the
cliff of darkness, he looked and saw the lights of no cities. 
It was, he thought, the strong good medicine of death.

"Is this the end?"
he said.  "Have I eaten life and have not found him? 
Then I will voyage no more."

"Fool," said
Ben, "THIS is life.  You have been nowhere."

"But in the cities?"

"There are none. 
There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one."

"On coasts more
strange than Cipango, in a place more far than Fez, I shall hunt him,
the ghost and haunter of myself.  I have lost the blood that fed
me; I have died the hundred deaths that lead to life.  By the
slow thunder of the drums, the flare of dying cities, I have come to
this dark place.  And this is the true voyage, the good one, the
best.  And now prepare, my soul, for the beginning hunt.  I
will plumb seas stranger than those haunted by the Albatross."

He stood naked and alone
in darkness, far from the lost world of the streets and faces; he
stood upon the ramparts of his soul, before the lost land of himself;
heard inland murmurs of lost seas, the far interior music of the
horns.  The last voyage, the longest, the best.

"O sudden and
impalpable faun, lost in the thickets of myself, I will hunt you down
until you cease to haunt my eyes with hunger.  I heard your
foot-falls in the desert, I saw your shadow in old buried cities, I
heard your laughter running down a million streets, but I did not
find you there.  And no leaf hangs for me in the forest; I shall
lift no stone upon the hills; I shall find no door in any city. 
But in the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall
find the forgotten language, the lost world, a door where I may
enter, and music strange as any ever sounded; I shall haunt you,
ghost, along the labyrinthine ways until?until? O Ben, my ghost, an
answer?"

But as he spoke, the
phantom years scrolled up their vision, and only the eyes of Ben
burned terribly in darkness, without an
answer.

And day came, and the
song of waking birds, and the Square, bathed in the young pearl light
of morning.  And a wind  stirred lightly in the Square,
and, as he looked, Ben, like a fume of smoke, was melted into dawn.

And the angels on Gant's
porch were frozen in hard marble silence, and at a distance life
awoke, and there was a rattle of lean wheels, a slow clangor of shod
hoofs.  And he heard the whistle wail along the river.

Yet, as he stood for the
last time by the angels of his father's porch, it seemed as if the
Square already were far and lost; or, I should say, he was like a man
who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say
"The town is near," but turns his eyes upon the distant
soaring ranges.