Great Paper: You Can Never go Home By Thomas Wolfe
~What Man Is~
After a walk through the city streets of Brooklyn New York, Main protagonist/in-story narrator George
Webber reflects about his understandings of the world as a novelist living in the mid 1930's. Like most
of his monologues, he goes on with long sentences riddled with commas, semicolons, and adjectives
to describe with biting detail an object of his attention. This time? The truth behind what it means in life
for a boy to grow into a man. Thomas Wolfe really is an elemental force in the poetic sense. It is shown
defiantly here in this reflection over mankind.
“ If George Webber had never had gone beyond the limits of the neighborhood in which he lived, the whole chronicle of earth would have been there for him just the same. South Brooklyne was a universe.
The people in the houses all around him, whose lives in the cold, raw days of winter always seemed hermetic, sterile, and remote, as shut out from him as though they were sealed up in a tin, became in spring and summer so real to him it seemed that he had known them from his birth.
For as the days and nights grew warmer, everybody kept their windows open, and all the dwellers in these houses conducted their most intimate affairs in the loud and raucous voices which carried carried to the street and made the casual passer-by a confidant of every family secret.
God knows he saw filth and squalor and misery and despair enough, violence and cruelty and hate enough, to crust his lips forever with the hard and acrid taste of desolation.
He found a sinister and demented Italian grocer whose thin mouth writhed in a servile smile as he cringed before his customers, and the next moment it was twisted up into a snarl as his claw like fingers dug into the arm of his poor hapless son. And on Saturdays the Irishmen would come home drunk and yell at their wives for hours, publishing nakedly the course of their tempers with open windows.
But he found a beauty in southern brooklyn too. There was that tree that leaned over into the narrow alley where he lived, and George could stand at his basement window and look up at it and watch it day by day as it came into its moments glory of young and magic green. And then toward sunset, if he was tired, he could lie down to rest a while upon his iron bed and listen to the birdsong in the tree.
Thus, each spring, in that one tree, he found all of April and the Earth.
Whether we wake at morning in the city, or lie at night in darkness in the country towns, or walk the streets of the furious noon in all the dusty, homely, and enduring lights of the present time, the universe around us is the same.
Evil lives forever--so does good. Man alone has knowledge of these two, and he is such a little thing.
For what is man?
First, a child, soft-boned, unable to support himself on his rubbery legs, befouled with his excrement, and howls and laughs by turns, cries for the moon but hushes when he gets the milk bottle; a sleeper, eater, guzzler, howler, laugher, idiot, and chewer of his toe; a little tender thing all blubbered with its spit, a half walking hazard, a beloved fool.
After that, a boy, hoarse and loud before his companions, but afraid of the dark; will beat the weaker and avoid the stronger; worships strength and savagery, loves tales of war and murder, and violence done to others; Makes Heroes out of soldiers, sailors, prize fighters, football players, cowboys, gunmen, and detectives;would rather die than not out-try or out-dare any of his companions, wants to beat them and always to win, shows his muscle and demands that it be felt, boasts his victories and will never own defeat.
And then the Youth: goes after girls, is foul behind their backs among the drugstore boys, hints at a hundred seductions, but gets pimples and begins to think about his clothes. Becomes a fop, greases his hair, smokes cigarettes with dissipated air, reads novels and writes poetry on the sly. He sees the world now as a a pair of legs, and big breast; he knows hate,love, and jealousy; he is a coward and foolish, he cannot endure to be alone; he lives in a crowd, thinks with the crowd, is afraid to be marked off from his fellows by an eccentricity. He joins clubs and is afraid of ridicule; he is bored and unhappy most of the time. There is a great cavity in him, and he is dull because of it.
Then the man: busy, he full of plans and reasons, and he has work. He gets children, buys and sells packets of everlasting earth, intrigues against his rivals, is exultant when he cheats them. He wastes little three score years and ten in spendthrift and inglorious living; from his cradle to his grave he scarcely sees the sun or the moon or stars; he is unconscious of the immortal sea and earth; he talks of the future and wastes it as it comes. If he is lucky, he saves money. At the end of his fat purse buys himself some flunkeys to carry him where his shanks no longer can; he consumes rich food and golden wine that his wretched stomach has no hunger for; his weary and lifeless eyes look out upon the scenery of strange lands for which in youth he was panting. Then the slow death, prolonged by costly doctors.
Yes, this is man, and it is impossible to say the worst of him, for the record of his own obscene existence, his baseness, lust, cruelty, and treachery, is illimitable. His life is also full of toil, tumult, and suffering. His days are mainly composed of a million idiot repetitions-- in goings or comings along hot streets, in sweatings and freezings, in the senseless accumulation of fruitless tasks, in decaying and being patched, in grinding out his life so that he may buy bad food, in eating bad food so that he may grind his life out in distressful defecations. He is the dweller in that ruined tenement who, from one moment’s breathing to another, can hardly forget the bitter weight of his uneasy flesh, the thousand diseases and distresses of his body, the growing incubus of his corruption. This is man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy and happiness out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care, unseamed by aches or itches, has the power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say: “I have lived upon the earth and known glory!”.
This is man, and one wonders why he wants to live at all. A third of his life is lost and deadened under sleep; another third is given to sterile labor; a sixth is spent in all his comings and goings, in the moil and shuffle of the streets, in thrusting, shoving, pawing. How much of him is left for glory and the making of great songs? A few snatched moments only from the barren glut and suck of living. Here ,then, is a man, this mouth of time, this dupe of brevity and numbered hours, this travesty of wasted and sterile breath.
Yet if the gods could come here to a desolate, deserted earth where only the ruin of man’s cities remained, where only a few marks and carvings of his hand were eligible upon his broken tablets, where only a wheel lay rusting in the desert sand, a cry would burst out of their hearts and they would say: “He lived, and he was here!”
Behold his works: He needed speech to ask for bread-- and he had Christ!
He needed songs to sing in battle--and he had Homer!
He needed words to curse his enemies with--and he had Dante, he had Voltaire, he had Swift!
He needed cloth to cover his hairless, puny flesh against the sea of sons-- and he wove the robes of Solomon, he made the garments of great kings, he made the samite for the young knights!
He needed walls and a roof to shelter him -- and he made Blois!
He needed a temple to propitiate his God-- and he made Chartres and Fountains Abbey!
He was born to creep upon the earth--and he made great wheels, he sent great engines thundering down rails, he launched great wings into the air, he put great ships into the angry sea!
Plagues wasted him, and cruel wars destroyed his strongest sons, but fire, flood and famine could not quench him. No, nor the inexorable grave-- his sons leaped shouting from his dying lions. The shaggy bison with his thews of thunder died upon the plains; the fabled mammoths of unrecorded ages are vast scaffoldings of dry, insensate loam; the panthers have learned caution and move carefully among the tall grasses to the water hole; and man lives on amid the senseless nihilism of the universe.
For there is one belief, one faith, that is man’s glory, his triumph, his immortality-
-and that is his belief in life.
Man loves life, and, loving life, hates death, and because of this he is great, he is glorious, he is beautiful, and his beauty is everlasting.
He lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them.
He lives in fear, in toil, in agony, and in unending tumult, but if the blood foamed and bubbled from his wounded lungs at every breath he drew, he would still love life more dearly than an end of breathing.
Dying his eyes burn beautifully, and old hunger shines more fiercely in them-- he has endured all the hard purposeless suffering, and still he wants to live.
Thus it is impossible to scorn this creature. For out of his strong belief in life, this puny man made love. At his best, he loved.
Without him there can be no love, no hunger, no desire.
So this is man--the worst and best of him--this frail and petty thing who lives his day and dies like all the other animals, and is forgotten. And yet, he is immortal, too, for both the good and the evil that lives after him. Why, then, should any living man ally himself with death, and, in his greed and blindness, batten off his brother’s blood?
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