I have been plugging away at Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again for some time now. I have thoroughly enjoyed it and can't believe I put off this task for as long as I have. I was reading last night and came across something that struck me. Below is an excerpt from the afore mentioned book, judge it as you will.
The leaders of the nation had fixed their gaze so long upon the illusions of a false prosperity that they had forgotten what America looked like. Now they saw it--saw its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength--and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husks," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," the said--by which they meant to assure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen.
But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again. America had come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be, and out of the change and the uncertainty and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation, and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.
Originally published in 1934, five years after the stock market crash of 1929.
1 comment:
Excellent stuff.
From Snyder, Logging 12, Myths and Texts:
You shall live in square
gray houses in a barren land
and beside those square gray
houses you shall starve.
--Drinkswater. Who saw a vision
At the high and lonely center of the earth.
Just Snyder pointing out how crippling it was to everything the Native American knew to be pulled from a life of cycles and circles and forced into a land of squares and finite ends. They, obviously, have never been able to go home again in any sense.
What is our coming future? How much can we draw on the past and feel out a positive day to come? Do we take the above view on a changing time or do we trust in man's or America's ability to find a way forward...maybe even away from the square gray houses and back into a life more in harmony with the way it used to be lived on this land? I'd like to hope so. I'm not ready to pack it in, 2nd Great Depression and Sarah Palin be damned...I will live my enlightenment holed up with enough books to see me thru!
Anywho, interesting stuff. I never grow tired of Snyder's ability to instigate thought. As is well known.
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