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- But after a while the room began to reproach me. When I came home from work every afternoon, the sun would be setting across the river in Arkansas and every day the yellow light became sadder and sadder. And Arkansas over there in the yellow West -- O my God, you have no idea how sad it looked. (180)
- It was 10 years ago that I last rode a train, from San Francisco to New Orleans, and so 10 years since I last enjoyed the peculiar gnosis of trains, stood on the eminence from which there is revealed both the sorry litter of the past and the future bright and simple as can be, and the going itself, one's privileged progress throughout the world. But trains have changed. Gone are the uppers and lowers, partitions and cranks, and the green velour; only the porter remains, the same man, I think, a black man with palms the color of shrimp and a neck swollen with dislike. (184)
- What has upset her is not the incident of the capsules but meeting the Grosses. It spoils everything, this prospect of making pleasant talk, of having a delightful time, as Sidney would put it ("There we were moping over missing the plane, when Jack Bolling shows up and we have ourselves a ball") -- when we might have gone rocking up through dark old Mississippi alone together in the midst of strangers. Still she is better. Perhaps it is her reviving hope of losing the Grosses to gin rummy or perhaps it is the first secret promise of the chemicals entering her blood. (187)
- Kate and I sway against each other and watch the headlights of the cars on the swamp road, winking through the moss like big yellow lightning bugs. (187-88)
- It begins to seem that the passengers have ridden together for a long time and have developed secret understandings and old grudges. (189)
- Staying awake is a kind of sickness and sleep is forever guarded against by a dizzy dutiful alertness. Waking wide-eyed dreams come as fitfully as swampfire. (189)
- My head, nodding like a daffodil, falls a good 3 inches toward the St Louisan before it jerks itself up. Kate sits shivering against me, but the St Louisan is as warm and solid as roast beef. As the train rocks along its unique voyage through space-time, thousands of tiny thing-events bombard us like cosmic particles. Lying in a ditch outside is a scrap of newspaper with the date May 3, 1954. My Geiger counter clicks away like a teletype. But no one else seems to notice. Everyone is buried in his magazine. Kate is shaking like a leaf because she longs to be an anyone who is anywhere and she cannot. (190)
- I have to admire the St Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed. I no longer eat and sleep regularly or write philosophical notes in my notebook and my fingernails are dirty. The search has spoiled the pleasure of my tidy and ingenious life in Gentilly. (191)
- "Are you all right?" (-) She nods slowly to the window, but her cheek is against me. Outside a square of yellow light flees along an embankment, falls away to the woods and fields, comes roaring back good as new. Suddenly a perky head pops up. Kate is leaning forward hugging herself. (-) "I am all right. I am never too bad with you." (192)
- "No kidding. And I'll tell you something else. Sam is quite a person behind that facade. An essentially lonely person." (-) "I know." (192)
- Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself. (193)
- "I don't understand--" (-) "You're right. You don't understand. It is not some one thing, as you think. It is everything. It is all so monstrous." (194)
- "Binx Binx. You're just like your aunt. When I told her how I felt, she said to me: Katherine, you're perfectly right. Don't ever lose your ideals and your enthusiasm for ideas -- she thought I was talking about something literary or political or Great Books, for God's sake. I thought to myself: is that what I'm doing?--and ran out and took four pills. Incidentally they're all wrong about that. They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself--ah then, I would. (194-95)
- None of this is new, of course. I do not, to tell the truth, pay too much attention to what she says. It is her voice that tells me how she is. Now she speaks in her "bold" tone... (195)
- Money is a better god than beauty. (196)
- Money is a good counterpoise to beauty. Beauty, the quest of beauty alone, is a whoredom. 10 years ago I pursued beauty and gave no thought to money. I listened to the lovely tunes of Mahler and felt a sickness in my very soul. Now I pursue money and on the whole feel better. (196)
- "Oh dear sweet old Binx, what a joy it is to discover at last what one is. It doesn't matter what you are as long as you _know!_" (196)
- "Don't you see? What I want is to believe in someone completely and then do what he wants me to do. If God were to tell me: Kate, here is what I want you to do; you get off this train right now and go over there to that corner by the Southern Life and Accident Insurance Company and stand there for the rest of your life and speak kindly to people -- you think I would not do it? You think I would not be the happiest girl in Jackson, Mississippi? I would." (197)
- "Now if I marry you, will you tell me: Kate, this morning do such and such, and if we go to a party, will you tell me: Kate, stand right here and have 3 drinks and talk to so and so? Will you?" (-) "Sure." (197)
- Later, just as I knew it would, her precious beauty leaves her flat and she is frightened. Another trip to the washroom and now she stands swaying against me as Sieur Iberville rocks along through north Mississippi. We leave spring behind. The moon hangs westering and yellow over winter fields as blackened and ancient and haunted as battlegrounds. (197-98)
- Her black spiky eyes fall full upon me, but not quite seeing, I think. (198)
- Kate doesn't seem to hear. She drums her fingers on the sill and gazes out at the rushing treetops. (199)
- I did neither. We did neither. We did very badly and almost did not do at all. Flesh poor flesh failed us. The burden was too great and flesh poor flesh, neither hallowed by sacrament nor despised by spirit (for despising is not the worst fate to overtake the flesh), but until this moment seen through and canceled, rendered null by the cold and fishy eye of the malaise--flesh poor flesh now at this moment summoned all at once to be all and everything, end all and be all, the last and only hope--quails and fails. The truth is I was frightened half to death by her bold (not really bold, not whorish bold but theorish bold) carrying on. I reckon I am used to my blushing little Lindas from Gentilly. Kate too was scared. We shook like leaves. (200)
- It turns out that my misgivings about Chicago were justifed. No sooner do we step down from the train than the genie-soul of Chicago flaps down like a buzzard and perches on my shoulder. (201)
- All day long before the catastrophe I stand sunk in thought, blinking and bemused, on street corners. Kate looks after me. She is strangely at home in the city, wholly impervious to the five million personal rays of Chicagoans and the peculiar smell of existence here, which must be sniffed and gotten hold of before taking a single step away from the station (if only somebody could tell me who built the damn station, the circumstances of the building, the details of the wrangling between city officials and the railroad, so that I would not fall victim to it, the station, the very first crack off the bat. Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local spacetime stuff--tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets--in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone. Oh son of a bitch but I am in a sweat. (201-02)
- Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. (202)
- But one step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. Until now, one genie-soul and only one ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco -- up and down the hills I pursued him, missed him and was pursued, by a presence, a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder. (202-03)
- This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground. (203)
- ...feeling my father's eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me -- very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship -- and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, though a child's cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give. (204)
- Trapped in this blue cave, the genie-soul of Chicago will surely catch up with us. (204)
- I find myself talking to half a dozen young men from the West Coast and liking them very much -- one in particular, a big shy fellow from Spokane named Stanley Kinchen, and his wife, a fine-looking woman, yellow-haired and bigger than Sharon, lips curling like a rose petal, head thrown back like a queen and a tremendous sparkle in the eye. What tremendous people they are. It is not at all bad being a businessman. There is a spirit of trust and cooperation here. (205)
- ...cross a hundred miles of city blocks, pass in the neighborhood of millions of souls, and come at last to a place called Wilmette which turns out not to be a place at all since it has no genie, where lives Harold Graebner the only soul known to me in the entire Midwest. Him, one soul in five million, we must meet and greet, wish good luck and bid farewell -- else we cannot be sure we are here at all -- before hopping off again into the maze of a city set down so unaccountably under the great thundering-lonesome Midwestern sky. (206)
- ...and Harold has actually gotten rich. Every Christmas he sends a card with a picture of his wife and children and a note something like: "Netted better than 35 thou this year -- now ain't that something?" You would have to know Harold to understand that this is not exactly a boast. It is a piece of cheerful news from a cheerful and simple sort of a fellow who can't get over his good fortune and who therefore has to tell you about it. (207)
- Harold loves me because he saved my life. I love him because he is a hero. I have a boundless admiration for heroes and Harold is the real thing. (208)
- Harold's wife is a thin hump-shouldered girl with a beautiful face. She stands a ways off from us holding her baby, my godson, and hesitates between a sort of living room and a peninsula bar; she seems on the point of asking us to sit down in one place or the other but she never does. I keep thinking she is going to get tired herself, holding the big baby. Looking at her, I know just how Harold sees her: as beeyoutiful. He used to say that about so-and-so, Veronica Lake maybe, we beeyoutiful -- Harold is originally from Indiana and he called me peculiar Midwestern names like "heller" and "turkey" -- and his wife is beautiful in just the same way: blond hair waving down her cheeks like a madonna, heavenly blue eyes, but stopped so that her shoulder-blades flare out in back like wings. (209)
- ...and he is restless with an emotion he can't identify. (209)
- Now it comes over him in the strongest way: what a good thing it is to see a comrade with whom one has suffered much and endured much, but also what a wrenching thing. Up and down he goes, arms upraised, restless with it and not knowing what it is. (209-210)
- It is too much for Harold, not my gratitude, not the beauty of his own heroism, but the sudden confrontation of a time past, a time so terrible and splendid in its arch-reality; and so lost--cut adrift like a great ship in the flood of years. Harold tries to parse it out, that time and the time after, the strange 10 years intervening, and it is too much for him. He shakes his head like a fighter. We stand formally in the informal living area. (210)
- Now she gazes curiously about the bus station, giving way every few seconds to tremendous face-splitting yawns. Once on the bus she collapses into a slack-jawed oblivion and sleeps all the way to the Ohio River. I doze fitfully and wake for good when the dawn breaks on the outskirts of Terre Haute. When it is light enough, I take out my paperback Arabia Deserta and read until we stop for breakfast in Evansville. Kate eats heartily, creeps back to the bus, takes one look at the black water of the Ohio River and the naked woods of the bottom lands where winter still clings like a violet mist, and falls heavily to sleep, mouth mashed open against my shoulder. (213)
- Two things I am curious about. How does he sit? Immediately graceful and not aware of it or mediately graceful and aware of it? How does he read The Charterhouse of Parma? Immediately as a man who is in the world and who has an appetite for the book as he might have an appetite for peaches, or mediately as one who finds himself under the necessity of sticking himself into the world in a certain fashion, of slumping in an acceptable slump, of reading an acceptable book on an acceptable bus? Is he a romantic? (-) He is a romantic. His posture is the first clue; it is too good to be true, this distillation of all graceful slumps. To clinch matters, he catches sight of me and my book and goes into a spasm of recognition and shyness. To put him out of his misery, I go over and ask him how he likes his book. (214-15)
- ...but merely a romantic. Now he closes his book and stares hard at it as if he would, by dint of staring alone, tear from it its soul in a word. "It's--very good," he says at last and blushes. The poor fellow. He has just begun to suffer from it, this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes. For he prizes just such a meeting, the chance meeting with a chance friend on a chance bus, a friend he can talk to, unburden himself of some of his longings. Now having encountered such a one, me, the rare bus friend, of course he strikes himself dumb. It is a case for direct questioning. (215)
- ...(he speaks in a rapid rehearsed way, a way he deems appropriate for our rare encounter, and when he is forced to use an ordinary word like "bus" -- having no other way of conferring upon it a vintage flavor, he says it in quotes and with a wry expression) (215-16)
- He means that he hopes to find himself a girl, the rarest of rare pieces, and live the life of Rudolfo on the balcony, sitting around on the floor and experiencing soul-communions. I have my doubts. In the first place, he will defeat himself, jump 10 miles ahead of himself, scare the wits out of some girl with his great choking silences, want her so desperately that by his own peculiar logic he can't have her; or having her, jump another 10 miles beyond both of them and end by fleeing to the islands where, propped at the rail of his ship in some rancid port, he will ponder at his own loneliness. (216)
- He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies. (216)
- Canal Street is dark and almost empty. The last parade, the Krewe of Comus, has long since disappeared down Royal Street with its shuddering floats and its blazing flambeau. Street cleaners sweep confetti and finery into soggy heaps in the gutters. The cold mizzling rain smells of sour paper pulp. Only a few maskers remain abroad, tottering apes clad in Spanish moss, Frankenstein monsters with bolts through their necks, and a neighborhood gang or two making their way arm in arm, wheeling and whip-popping, back to their trucks. (217-18)
- Kate is dry-eyed and abstracted. She stands gazing about as if she had landed in a strange city. (218)
- "Anger? You are mistaken. It was not anger. It was discovery." (-) "Discovery of what?" (-) "Discovery that someone in whom you had placed great hopes was suddenly not there. It is like leaning on what seems to be a good stalwart shoulder and feeling it go all mushy and queer." (221)
- I try as best I can to appear as she would have me, as being, if not right, then wrong in a recognizable, a right form form of wrongness. But I can think of nothing to say. (222)
- ..."--there is another of my hidden assumptions. All these years I have been assuming that between us words mean roughly the same thing, that among certain people, gentlefolk I don't mind calling them, there exists a set of meanings held in common, that a certain manner and a certain grace come as naturally as breathing. At the great moments of life -- success, failure, marriage, death -- our kind of folks have always possessed a native instinct for behavior, a natural piety or grace, I don't mind calling it. Whatever else we did or failed to do, we always had that. I'll make you a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity's sake. Oh I am aware that we hear a great many flattering things nowadays about your great common man -- you know, it has always been revealing to me that he is perfectly content so to be called, because that is exactly what he is: the common man and when I say common I mean common as hell. Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions." (222-23)
- "Let me tell you something. If he out yonder is your prize exhibit for the progress of the human race in the past 3,000 years, then all I can say is that I am content to be fading out of the picture. Perhaps we are a biological sport. I am not sure. But one thing I am sure of: we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology. (...) I did my best for you, son. I gave you all I had. More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women -- the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life. Ah well. Still you can tell me one thing. I know you're not a bad boy -- I wish you were. But how did it happen that none of this ever meant anything to you? Clearly it did not. Would you please tell me? I am genuinely curious." (224)
- "What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together -- or was it only I who spoke -- good Lord, I can't remember -- of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?" (-) Another cry and the ramoneur is gone. There is nothing for me to say. (-) "Don't you love these things? Don't you live by them?" (-) "No." (-) "What do you love? What do you live by?" (-) I am silent. (-) "Tell me where I have failed you." (-) "You haven't." (226)
- "Well." She closes it briskly and smiles up at me, a smile which, more than anything which has gone before, marks an ending. Smiling, she gives me her hand, head to one side, in her old party style. But it is her withholding my name that assigns me my new status. So she might have spoken to any one of a number of remotely connected person, such as a Spring Fiesta tourist encountered by accident in her own hall. (226-27)
- Then, appearing to forget herself, she drums her nails rapidly upon the windshield. (227)
- Today is my 30th birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the 31st year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies -- my only talent -- smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and 100% of people are humanists and 98% believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall -- on this my 30th birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire. (228)
- Iii-oorrr iii-oorrr goes the dry socket on its pole in a faraway childish music and the children embrace the iron struts and lay back their heads to watch the whirling world. (230)
- "Please do. I like frank people." (230)
- A watery sunlight breaks through the smoke of the Chef and turns the sky yellow. Elysian Fields glistens like a vat of sulfar; the playground looks as if it alone had survived the end of the world. At last I spy Kate; her stiff little Plymouth comes nosing into my bus stop. There she sits like a bomber pilot, resting on her wheel and looking sideways at the children and not seeing, and she could be I myself, sooty eyed and nowhere. (-) It is possible that -- For a long time I have secretly hoped for the end of the world and believed with Kate and my aunt and Sam Yerger and many other people that only after the end could the few who survive creep out of their holes and discover themselves to be themselves and live as merrily as children among the viny ruins. It is possible that -- it is not too late? (-) Iii-oorrr goes the ocean wave, its struts twinkling in the golden light, its skirt swaying to and fro like a young dancing girl. (231)
- We sit in Kate's car, a 1951 Plymouth which, with all her ups and downs, Kate has ever cared for faithfully. It is a tall gray coupe and it runs with a light gaseous sound. When she drives, head ducked down, hands placed symmetrically on the wheel, the pale underflesh of her arms trembling slightly, her paraphernalia -- straw seat, Kleenex dispenser, magnetic tray for cigarettes -- all set in order about her, it is easy to believe that the light stiff little car has become gradually transformed by its owner until it is hers herself in its every nut and bolt. When it comes fresh from the service station, its narrow tires still black and wet, the very grease itself seems not the usual muck but the thrifty amber sap of the slender axle tree. (232)
- "What do you plan to do?" (-) I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station or -- (-) "Are you going to medical school?" (-) "If she wants me to." (...) "Then let us understand each other." (-) "All right." (-) "I don't know whether I can succeed." (-) "I know you don't." (-) "It seems the wildest sort of thing to do." (-) "Yes." (-) "We had better make it fast." (-) "All right." (-) "I am so afraid." (233)
- "If I could be sure you knew how frightened I am, it would help a great deal." (-) "You can be sure." (-) "Not merely of marriage. This afternoon I wanted some cigarettes, but the thought of going to the drugstore turned me to jelly." (-) I am silent. (-) "I am frightened when I am alone and I am frightened when I am with people. The only time I'm not frightened is when I'm with you. You'll have to be with me a great deal." (-) "I will." (-) "Do you want to?" (-) "Yes." (-) "I will be under treatment a long time." (-) "I know that." (-) "And I'm not sure I'll ever change. Really change." (-) "You might." (-) "But I think I see a way. It seems to me that if we are together a great deal and you tell me the simplest things and not laugh at me -- I beg you for pity's own sake never to laugh at me -- tell me things like: Kate, it is all right for you to go down to the drugstore, and give me a kiss, then I will believe you. Will you do that?" she says with her not-quite-pure-solemnity, her slightly reflected Sarah Lawrence solemnity. (-) "Yes, I'll do that." (-) She has started plucking at her thumb in earnest, tearing away little shreds of flesh. I take her hand and kiss the blood. (-) "But you must try not to hurt yourself so much." (-) "I will try! I will!" (234)
- It is impossible to say why he (the Negro) is here. Is he part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God's own important bonus? (-) It is impossible to say. (235)
jun 29 2015 ∞
jan 5 2024 +
jan 5 2024 +