Look Homeward, Angel passages


After reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, I was anxious to read Thomas Wolfe for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone who has ever read the story of King's Gunslingers. Thankfully, my gracious Aunt Gloria had already provided me with a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. It turned out to be a book that I really enjoyed and it gave me new perspectives on life, love and death. Below are the passages I highlighted, listed in the order they appear in the book. Here, I'd like to let these lines of text speak for themselves.

But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives–all that is ours in them: we cannot escape or conceal it.
•
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
•
So ran the summer by. The last grapes hung in dried and rotten clusters to the vines; the wind roared distantly; September ended.
•
In the prime of life, thought Gant. Myself like that some day. No, for others. Mother almost eighty-six. Eats like a horse, Augusta wrote. Must send her twenty dollars. Now in the cold clay, frozen. Keep till Spring. Rain, rot, rain. Who got the job? Brock or Saul Gudger? Bread out of my mouth. Do me to death-–the stranger. Georgia marble, sandstone base, forty dollars.
“A gracious friend from us is gone,
A voice we loved is fled,
But faith and memory lead us on:
He lives; he is not dead.”
Four cents a letter. Little enough, God knows, for the work you do.
•
He had heard already the ringing of remote church bells over a countryside on Sunday night; had listened to the earth steeped in the brooding of dark, and the million-noted little night things; and he had heard thus the far retreating wail of a whistle in a distant valley, and faint thunder on the rails; and he felt the infinite depth and width of the golden world in the brief seductions of a thousand multiplex and mixed mysterious odors and sensations, weaving with a blinding interplay and aural explosions, one into the other.
•
The commonness of all things in the earth he remembered with a strange familiarity–he dreamed of the quiet roads, and he thought that some day he would come to them on foot, and find them unchanged, in all the wonder of recognition. They had existed for him anciently and forever.
Eugene was almost twelve years old.
•
The creek brawls cleanly.
•
From one of the little white tables between the cots Theresa picked up an opened book incautiously left there the night before, read below her gray mustache with the still inward smile of her great-boned face, its title–The Common Law, by Robert W. Chambers–and gripping a pencil in her broad earthstained hand, scrawled briefly in jagged male letters: “Rubbish, Elizabeth–but see for yourself.” Then, on her soft powerful tread, she went downstairs, and entered her study, where Sister Louise (French), Sister Mary (History), and Sister Bernice (Ancient Languages) were waiting for the morning consultation. When they had gone, she sat down to her desk and worked for an hour on the manuscript of that book, modestly intended for school children, which has since celebrated her name wherever the noble architecture of prose is valued–the great Biology.
Then the gong rang in the dormitory, she heard the high laughter of young maidens, and rising saw, coming from the plum-tree by the wall, a young nun, Sister Agnes, with blossoms in her arms.
•
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the dessert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern because a London cut-purse went un-hung. Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.
•
There was no disorder in enchantment.
•
But he saw hopefully that he had never learned–that what remained was the tinsel and the gold. He was so bitter with his tongue because his heart believed so much.
•
Wrong forever on the throne.
•
She went away in beauty’s flower,
Before her youth was spent;
Ere life and love had lived their hour
God called her, and she went.


Yet whispers Faith upon the wind:
No grief to her was given.
She left your love and went to find
A greater one in heaven.
•
He was the Ghost and he who played the Ghost, the cause that minted legend into fact.
•
Waken, ghost-eared boy, but into darkness. Waken, phantom, O into us. Try, try, O try the way. Open the wall of light. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O lost. Ghost, ghost, who is the ghost? O whisper-tongued laughter. Eugene! Eugene! Here, O here, Eugene. Here, Eugene. The way is here, Eugene. Have you forgotten? The leaf, the rock, the wall of light. Lift the rock, Eugene, the leaf, the stone, the unfound door. Return, return.
A voice, sleep-strange and loud, forever far-near, spoke.
Eugene!
•
Most musical of mourners, weep again!
•
Come, delicate death, serenely arriving, arriving.
•
Each day, he thought, we pass the spot where some day we must die; or shall I, too, ride dead to some mean building yet unknown? Shall this bright clay, the hill-bound, die in lodgings yet unbuilt? Shall these eyes, drenched with visions yet unseen, stored with the viscous and interminable seas at dawn, with the sad comfort of unfulfilled Arcadias, seal up their cold bad dreams upon a tick, as this, in time, in some hot village of the plains?
•
••
I found this odd bookmark with the cryptic quote on the back at this point in the book (between these two passages at least).



••
•
He did not want his ghosts and marvels explained. Magic was magic.
•
And who shall say–whatever disenchantment follows–that we ever forget magic, or that we can betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold? Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away. Their world was a singing voice again: they were young and they could never die. This would endure.
•
O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.
•
The solemn tension of the war gathered about the nation. A twilight of grim effort hovered around him, above him. He felt the death of joy; but the groping within him of wonder, of glory. Out of the huge sprawl of its first delirium, the nation was beginning to articulate the engines of war–engines to mill and print out hatred and falsehood, engines to pump up glory, engines to manacle and crush opposition, engines to drill and regiment men.
•
For, it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.
•
O house of Admetus, in whom (although I was a god) I have endured so many things. Now, house, I am not afraid. No ghost need fear come by me. If there’s a door in silence, let it open. My silence can be greater than your own. And you who are in me, and who I am, come forth beyond this quiet shell of flesh that makes no posture to deny you. There is none to look at us: O come, my brother and my lord, with unbent face. If I had 40,000 years, I shall give all but ninety last to silence. I should grow to the earth like a hill or a rock. Unweave the fabric of nights and days; unwind my life back to birth; subtract me into nakedness again, and build me back with all the sums I have not counted. Or let me look upon the living face of darkness; let me hear the terrible sentence of your voice.
There was nothing but the living silence of the house: no doors were opened.
•
And yet you laugh at me! Ah, but I’ll tell you why you laugh: you are afraid of me because I am not like the others. You hate me because I don’t belong. You see I am finer and greater than anyone you know: you cannot reach me and you hate me.
•
Dearest! Dearest! We stand here on a star. We are beyond them now. Behold! They shrink, they fade, they pass–victorious, enduring, marvelous love, my dearest, we remain.
•
To go alone, as he had gone, into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth–it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
•
For the first time he saw the romantic charm of mutilation. The perfect and unblemished heroes of his childhood now seemed cheap to him–fit only to illustrate advertisements for collars and toothpaste. He longed for that subtle distinction, that air of having lived and suffered that could only be attained by a wooden leg, a rebuilt nose, or the seared scar of a bullet across his temple.
•
He felt that he might be clean and free if only he could escape into a single burning passion–hard, and hot, and glittering–of love, hatred, terror, or disgust. But he was caught, he was strangling, in the web of futility–there was no moment of hate that was not touched by a dozen shafts of pity: impotently, he wanted to seize them, cuff them, shake them, as one might a trying brat, and at the same time to caress them, love them, comfort them.
•
“…when lights are low,
Poor baby’s years
Are filled with tears.
There’s a mother there at twilight
Who’s glad to know–”
•
…we can’t turn back the days that have gone. We can’t turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire–a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron–which we cannot get back.
•
Eugene stumbled to the other side of the bed and fell upon his knees. He began to pray. He did not believe in God, nor in Heaven or Hell, but he was afraid they might be true. He did not believe in angels with soft faces and bright wings, but he believed in the dark spirits that hovered above the heads of lonely men. He did not believe in devils or angels, but he believed in Ben’s bright demon to whom he had seen him speak so many times.
•
We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death–but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?
•
Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were shaking.
•
He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality. and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in there proper places. He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stopped up in wizards’ bottles. Moreover, since Ben’s death, the conviction had grown on him that men do not escape from life because life is dull, but that life escapes from men because men are little. He felt that the passions of the play were greater than the actors. It seemed to him that he had never had a great moment of living in which he had measured up to its fullness.
•
The marvelous hills were blooming in the dusk. We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.
•
“We must try to love one another.”
The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily. It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating.
O mortal and perishing love, born with this flesh and dying with this brain, your memory will haunt the earth forever.
And now the voyage out. Where?
•
The manifold gods of Babylon.
•
He saw the billion living of the earth, the thousand billion dead: seas were withered, deserts flooded, mountains drowned; and gods and demons came out of the South, and ruled above the little rocket-flare of centuries, and sank–came to their Northern Lights of death, the muttering death-flared dusk of the completed gods.
•
And the angels on Gant’s porch were frozen in hard marble silence, and at a distance life awoke, and there was a rattle of lean wheels, a slow clangor of shod hoofs. And he heard the whistle wail along the river.