he wrote them with his blood, his spirit; they were wrenched out of the last secret source and substance of his life.
And in those words was packed the whole image of his bitter homelessness, his intolerable desire, his maddened longing for return. In those wild and broken phrases was packed the whole bitter burden of his famished, driven, over-laden spirit—all the longing of the wanderer, all the impossible and unutterable homesickness that the American, or any man on earth, can know.
They were all there—without coherence, scheme, or reason—flung down upon paper like figures blasted by the spirit’s lightning stroke, and in them was the huge chronicle of the billion forms, the million names, the huge, single, and incomparable substance of America.
XCVII
At morning, in a foreign land, whether upon the mournful plains of Hungary or in some quiet square of Georgian houses, embedded in the immensity of sleeping London, he awakes and thinks of home; or in some small provincial town of France, he starts up from his sleep at night, he starts up in the living, brooding stillness of the night, for suddenly he thinks that he has heard there the sounds of America and the wilderness, the things that are in his blood, his heart, his brain, in every atom of his flesh and tissue, the things for which he draws his breath in labour, the things that madden him with an intolerable and nameless pain.
And what are they? They are the whistle-wail of one of the great American engines as it thunders through the continent at night, the sound of the voices of the city streets—those hard, loud, slangy voices, full of violence, humour, and recklessness, now stronger and more remote than the sounds of Asia—the sounds that come up from the harbour of Manhattan in the night—that magnificent and thrilling music of escape, mystery, and joy, with the mighty orchestration of the transatlantics, the hoarse little tugs, the ferry boats and lighters, those sounds that well up from the gulf and dark immensity of night and that pierce the entrails of the listener.
For this will always be one of the immortal and living things about the land, this will be an eternal and unchanging fact about that city whose only permanence is change: there will always be the great rivers flowing around it in the darkness, the rivers that have bounded so many nameless
