YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN, ---Thomas Wolfe. O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning, burning in the night. Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night. There where the hackles of the Rocky Mountains blaze in the blank and naked radiance of the moon, go make your resting stool upon the highest peak. Can you not see us now? The continental wall juts sheer and flat, its huge black shadow on the plain, and the plain sweeps out against the East, two thousand miles away. The great snake that you see there is the Mississippi River. Behold the gem-strung towns and cities of the good, green East, flung like star-dust through the field of night……… Turn now, seeker, on your resting stool atop the Rocky Mountains, and look another thousand miles or so across moon-blazing fiend worlds of the Painted Desert and beyond Sierras’ ridge. That magic congeries of lights there to the west, ringed like a studded belt round the magic setting of its lovely harbor, is the fabled town of San Francisco. Below it, Los Angeles and all the cities of the California shore. A thousand miles to north and west, the sparkling towns of Oregon and Washington……………… Don’t be frightened, it’s not so big now, when your footstool is the Rocky Mountains. Reach out and dip a hatful of cold water from Lake Michigan. Drink it—we’ve tried it—you’ll not find it bad. Take your shoes off and work your toes down in the river oozes of the Mississippi bottom—it’s very refreshing on a hot night in the summer-time…….. Here, as you pass through the brutal sprawl, the twenty miles of rails and rickets, of the South Chicago slums—here, in an unpainted shack, is a Negro boy, and, seeker, he is burning in the night. Behind him is a memory of the cotton-fields, the flat and mournful pineland barrens of the lost and buried South, and at the fringes of the pine another nigger shack, with mammy and eleven little niggers. Farther still behind, the slave driver’s whip, the slave ship, and, far off, the jungle dirge of Africa. And before him, what? A roped-in ring, a blaze of lights, across from him a white champion; the bell, the opening, and all round the vast sea-roaring of the crowd. Then the lightning feint and stroke, the black panther’s paw—the hot, rotating presses, and the rivers of sheeted print! 0 seeker, where is the slave ship now?........... bent above his table to meet the hard glare of a naked bulb, he sits with gaunt, starved face converging to his huge beaked nose, the weak eyes squinting painfully through his thick-lens glasses, his greasy hair roached back in oily scrolls above the slanting cage of his painful and constricted brow. And for what? For what this agony of concentration?.................. For what this hell of effort? For what this intense withdrawal from the poverty and squalor of dirty brick and rusty fire escapes, from the raucous cries and violence and never-ending noise? For what? Because, brother, he is burning in the night. He sees the class, the lecture room, the shining apparatus of gigantic laboratories, the open field of scholarship and pure research, certain knowledge, and the world distinction of an Einstein name. So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him—this seeker, is the promise of America…..when you use the Rockies for a footstool….
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 03:03:08 +0000
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