". . . of wandering forever and the earth again . . . of seed-time, bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest. And of the big flowers, the rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers.
Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer? And which of us shall find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in what land? Where? Where the weary of heart can abide for ever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be for ever stilled.
Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever.
Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus through the moil and horror of a thousand furious streets? He shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence and the earth: he shall speak no word through the rooted lips, the snake's cold eye will peer for him through sockets of the brain, there will be no cry out of the heart where wells the vine.
The tarantula is crawling through the rotted oak, the adder lisps against the breast, cups fall: but the earth will endure for ever. The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elm-root threads the bones of buried lovers.
The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouths crawl tunnels through the buried flesh, but the earth will endure for ever; hair grows like April on the buried breast and from the sockets of the brain the death flowers grow and will not perish.
O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent from our loneliness."
-Thomas Wolfe, 'Of Time and The River'
A nice bit of prose from Thomas Wolfe. I've never read the predecessor of this book, "Look Homeward, Angel,' or anything else by Thomas Wolfe for that matter, but I must say he's been impressing me in 'Of Time and The River.' Faulkner said he had the most talent of their generation - I think this passage could be used in support of that argument - but he also said his novels were like watching elephants trying to dance or something like that. This also seems accurate. 'Of Time and The River' is a whopping nine-hundred-and-twelve pages, the narrative leaps back and forth, narrative styles and perspectives transform passage to passage; its construction in these terms seems somewhat loose and fragile and I'm not quite two-hundred pages in. However, Wolfe makes this easy to get past with his lyrical, poetic, agile prose. It really is beautiful, and I myself find this to be in many ways more important in my reading material than the overall narrative construction. Take one of his contemporaries for contrast, F. Scott Fitzgerald, also the author of arguably the most brilliantly constructed novel, 'The Great Gatsby.' One of the main things that makes this novel (a small one at that) so great is the way he sets everything up, the progression of events and the inevitability of the climax and denouement, and how despite this it is never boring or predictable. Fitzgerald does indeed have a subtle prose of his own but it plays much more of a supporting role in Gatsby and other of his works. Then you look at 'Of Time and The River' and see a massive tome (around 8 times longer than Gatsby) of prose bursting with life, intensity of feeling, and a beautiful concept of the english language that emulates Wolfe's, or rather his characters perception of the world. Wolfe's prose is obviously at the forefront of the novel, thats where the art is, the story being told kind of exists for its sake, and I think that rather than detracting from the novels value is adds a different dimension you don't see in a lot of other writing.
ReplyDeleteThis passage is right a the beginning, and I suppose it is supposed to set the tone and set up certain themes that will run throughout the book, kind of like a play in certain types of theatre that opens up with the actors telling you what you're about to see happen in front of you. In both cases, in theatre and in literature, I think this is meant to bring your attention away from the specifics of the plot by getting them out of the way at the beginning so you can pay more attention to how it is told, which would make sense to me since, like I said before, I believe Wolfe's prose and use of language is the real meat of this novel. The passage also contains what I believe is a cool bit of metafiction in the third and fourth paragraph. Writing (if I may think of myself as a writer and speak of writing accordingly) is a solitary process, where physically you withdraw from the world, to your desk or wherever, and despite this you kind of have to summon the world to you and experience it. 'Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever.' A writer "possesses" the earth by reflecting and in turn re-experiencing. The next paragraph seems to me to talk about writing in terms of its cathartic properties. Well, I'll stop rambling. Check out the book!