Chapter 43 The boy holstered his gun. He walked away into the sunlight. He bought ammunition and food. He left the town and walked away. Through the remnants of a world gone by, one that could not be made right once more. There were no Natives. They died by themselves somewhere in the darkness. And there is no other story to say. *** The natural and original world is dwindling away, the names of things spiraling down into nothing along with those things. Pigments. The names of animals. Of lands, of winds. Of spirits. And the declination of the sun past the wall of the world darkened all that was. *** The boy wandered for years. In a time when there were the quick and the dead and the quick were dead already. Once more amid the wastes and the stones of the open plain, outlaw journeyman beyond black fate and unforgiven. *** He stood in the same rain. He stared to the stars. And the things he saw: The truth of the world in its terrible totality. The planetary motion of the earth. The crunch of the vacuum of the universe. The universe has no instinct to survive, devoid of emotion, of human sentiment, and it is not beautiful, or honorable, nor striving to be, and the entire mechanism repeats itself, in what can never be called harmony, and if war is subtracted, so, too, is mankind. *** How is what never was different from what is never to be? *** And the dead in the crust of the earth turn in the diurnal motion amid the eclipse, the stars, the nova. Their names are ancient, fable, ash. *** And now fading life, and fading memories, and fading world, and a fading human heart with which to morn it. *** And the railroad was running and there the train tracks were rusted and worn and he sat down beside them. He heard the train coming and stood and moved away. The train horn sounded sadder then he could bear, like a soul in want. And the train sped down the liquid tracks and around the bend leaving behind it in the dust and swirl of leaves such absolute loneliness that he, who had arrived to see it go, sat to the ground and dropped his head between his knees and sobbed by the rails. *** Often in the boy’s dreams Hartford came. What other encompassing icon had the boy encountered? He came as black stealth, silent and serene. Laughing, laughing. Dancing, dancing. He says the homily are presupposed on a origin of evil and if that evil were a weight it would send the world falling from the walls of the universe into night and darkness and death and through whatever ultimate nightmare it is yet capable of manifesting and into a void of blackness and nothingness. He says that he is but a man and one man is all men. He dances and laughs and says that he never dies. And whatever his ancestries may be he is something completely foreign from their sum, and there was no system to subtract him into his origin, as he would not go. And any that searched for his history by the interviewing of witnesses and the leafing through of pages must at last stare dumb into darkness, and what empiricism that could be brought up against him will discover no maelstrom blowing down through the centuries nor clue of any malicious egg to have predicted his commencing and the night does not end.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 14:03:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015