Page:Wolfe - Of Time and the River.djvu/599

morass of the dark wilderness of America, when we, who were the children of a hundred gold-recorded centuries and the heirs of all the rich accumulations of tradition, have really done so little—and have come to this? What profit do you hope to gain—what reward could you achieve that would repay you for all the anguish, hunger, and the desperate effort of your life? At its rare infrequent best, out of your blind and famished gropings in the jungle-depths, you may pluck out a shining word—achieve a moment’s flash of grace and intuition—a half-heard whisper of the vast unuttered language that you seek—perhaps a moment’s taste of fame, a brief hour’s flash of the imagined glory that you thirst for. For just a moment, you, like other men, will play the lion, will feed upon the older lion’s blood, will triumph for a moment through his defeat, will taste joy for a moment through the blood of his despair—and then, like him, you too will be thrown to the mercy of the coming lion, the wilderness will rise again to engulf you, your little hour of glory for which your soul thirsts and your life is panting will be over before it has well begun, and the myriad horde of all your thousand mongrel races will rise with snarl and jeer and curse and lie and mocking to do your life to death, with all the hatred of their mongrel rancour and their own self-loathing, to kill the lion they have crowned for just a day, to hurl you back into a nameless and dishonourable oblivion, drowned down beneath the huge mock and jibe of the old scornmaker’s pride. Therefore, short-lived, your life will soon be ended; your youth, but just begun, will shortly be consumed, and all the labour of your anguish and your hunger will be mocked to scorn by the same mongrel fools who praised it, and forgotten by the very knaves who gave it fame. Such is the infrequent good, the flash of brief fame, to which you may aspire, the huge oblivion of failure, misery and dishonour which will follow. But if, by miraculous good chance, you should escape from this—be not devoured and slain and drowned out and forgotten in the brutal swarming shades of jungle time—what greater glory is there that you can achieve? Some such as ours, perhaps—then look at us, and see the state to which we’ve come. To lie forgotten on the rich shelves of a rich man’s library—to be a portion of his idle wealth—the evidence of his arrogant possession—to rise, as all the earth must rise—these dreaming hills and haunted woods, the mighty river and this great moon-haunted hill where stands this house—shout the tributes of a rich man’s glory—to bow before him—to lie bought, owned, forgotten and possessed—the greatest poets that ever walked