Like New

Death is an old joke, but it comes like new to everyone.

The Romantic Structure of the Earth

"...he loved the romantic structure of the earth which filled his pockets with chinking coins."

Neither Poem Nor Novel

A few thoughts on re-reading Look Homeward, Angel. 

Wolfe's style is an unfortunate example of what happens when a born poet tries to write a great novel. The result is neither poem nor novel, but a mosaic of both genres, a strained ambition to contain everything in a single narrative. It might have been a great series of poems. It might have even been a great novel.

Wolfe is a random adverb generator. They appear in his sentences at the most unexpected places. "Remembering speechlessly," "He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully," "A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach," and "The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent" are four examples from nearly the first page.

Finally, Wolfe believed in full employment for adjectives. Why use one when two or three might be lying around out of work? 

The Fruit of Forty Thousand Years

"Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time."

I Made Him Happy

"You were hastening his death, carrying him to the extreme frenzy, the consumption of all the senses. And you were satisfying your own taste for fairy tales: you were proud of your inventions."

"Perhaps. But for the short while he still lived, I made him happy."

Arrival and Ground Transportation

1.

I entered San Francisco between two ages

A young woman who overplayed the bitch

A nearsighted old man who read the news

Like he had to smell the meaning of each word.

In the awkward intimacy of strangers

Closer than friends

We tried to think of something else.

It takes a day and nearly $900 to get here

Five hours in coach, $2 headphones, two movies

Three beverage carts, four cookies, two bags of peanuts

Three new time zones, two trips to the lavatory, no meal

And always the recirculated, desiccated, and odorous air.

An arm’s length away

Outside our little metal cloud

Life was impossible.

2.

On the edge of the continent

Alone in a dark seat on the dark side of earth

I rode away in a balm of luxurious darkness

Under storm clouds the weight of one atmosphere

A black sea containing all the names of creation

Past rooms with open windows and shaded lamps

Like aids to navigation, the lights of homes

Where people hammer out of darkness

Chains of meaning released into the world
A grammar made from darkness and surrendered to it.

Koan from The Gateless Gate

趙州、因僧問、其甲乍入叢林。
A monk said to Jõshû, "I have just entered this monastery.
乞師指示。
Please teach me."
州云、喫粥了也未。
"Have you eaten your rice porridge?" asked Jõshû.
僧云、喫粥了也。
"Yes, I have," replied the monk.
州云、洗鉢盂去。
"Then you had better wash your bowl," said Jõshû.
其僧有省。
With this the monk gained insight.

The Cardinal Virtues

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

A Rare Smile of Eternal Reassurance

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

Pages and Everything

On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?” He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real—have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and—Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our scepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too—didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

Testimony to Romantic Speculation

We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The Meaning of Death

"Does death have any meaning? 

Well, yes, it does. Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love."

Its Own Improbability

"I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence." (pg. 59)

Getting Something to Happen

"Life, we can now say, is getting something to happen against the odds and remembering how to do it." (pg. 63)

All There is to Biochemistry

"And that's basically all there is to biochemistry. Every cell is packed with thousands of different kinds of enzymes, each enzyme displaying a distinctive surface topology...and each thereby able to catalyze one or several specific chemical reactions." (pg. 39)

Self Assembly

"Amino acids that prefer to be next to one another, like a group of greasy ones, might associate to form one domain; amino acids with negative charges might line up next to amino acids with positive charges to form a second domain; a bulky amino acid might cause a protuberant domain to stick out farther. This all happens spontaneously -- the process is called self-assembly -- and the result is a protein with a distinctive overall shape and size that displays a collection of very specific domains." 

A Long, Existential Shudder

"We are told that life is so many manifestations of chemistry and we shudder, a long existential shudder." (pg. 33)

Our Thermal and Chemical Circumstances

"Life from non life, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances." (pg. 28-29)

A Simplicity of Heart

Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

The Inexhaustible Variety of Life

"...high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life."

The Edge of Stale Ideas

As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York.” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

A Beautiful Little Fool

“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘all right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Deep Books and Long Words

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them."

The Dramatic Turbulence

I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

Consoling Proximity of Millionaires

I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.

Fine Health

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. (Chapter 1)

Freedom of the Neighborhood

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. (Chapter 1)

Delayed Teutonic Migration

I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man.

A Matter of Infinite Hope

"...the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth." (pg. 1)

The Mind of Man is Capable of Anything

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the night of first ages -- could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but truth -- truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder -- the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff -- with his own in-born strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags -- rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row -- is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.

The Sums Not Counted

"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas."