It is true that some of them might have known, had their interest and attention been directed toward this geographic1 fact, had they been looking for it. Just at this moment, indeed, as the train, scarcely slackening its speed, was running through the last of the Catawba towns, one of the men glanced up suddenly from the conversation in which he and the others were earnestly engaged, which was exclusively concerned with the fascinating, ever-mounting prices of their property and the tempting2 profits undoubtedly3 to be derived4 from real-estate speculation5 in their native town. He had looked up quickly, casually6, and absently, with that staggering indifference7 of prosperous men who have been so far, so often, on such splendid trains, that a trip across the continent at night toward the terrific city is no longer a grand adventure of their lives, but just a thing of custom, need, and even weariness, and who, therefore, rarely look out of windows any more:
“What is this?” he said quickly. “Oh, Maysville, probably. Yes, I guess this must be Maysville,” and had then returned vigorously from his brief inspection8 of the continent of night, a few lights, and a little town, to the enticing9 topic which had for several hours absorbed the interests of the group.
Nor was there any good reason why this traveller who had glanced so swiftly and indifferently from the window of the train should feel any greater interest than he showed. Certainly the briefest and most casual inspection would have convinced the observer that, in Baedeker’s celebrated10 phrase, there was “little here that need detain the tourist.” What the man saw in the few seconds of his observation was the quiet, dusty and sparsely11 lighted street of a little town in the upper South. The street was shaded by large trees and there were some level lawns, more trees, and some white frame-houses with spacious12 porches, gables, occasionally the wooden magnificence of Georgian columns.
On everything — trees, houses, foliage13, yards, and street — there was a curious loneliness of departure and October, an attentive14 almost mournful waiting. And yet this dark and dusty street of the tall trees left a haunting, curiously15 pleasant feeling of strangeness and familiarity. One viewed it with a queer sudden ache in the heart, a feeling of friendship and farewell, and this feeling was probably intensified16 by the swift and powerful movement of the train which seemed to slide past the town almost noiselessly, its wheels turning without friction17, sound, or vibrancy18 on the pressed steel ribbons of the rails, giving to a traveller, and particularly to a youth who was going into the secret North for the first time, a feeling of illimitable and exultant19 power, evoking20 for him the huge mystery of the night and darkness, and the image of ten thousand lonely little towns like this across the continent.
Then the train slides by the darkened vacant-looking little station and for a moment one has a glimpse of the town’s chief square and business centre. And as he sees it he is filled again with the same feeling of loneliness, instant familiarity, and departure. The square is one of those anomalous21, shabby-ornate, inept22, and pitifully pretentious23 places that one finds in little towns like these. But once seen, if only for this fraction of a moment, from the windows of a train, the memory of it will haunt one for ever after.
And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the combination of two things: the ghastly imitation of swarming24 life and metropolitan25 gaiety in the scene, and the almost total absence of life itself. The impression one gets, in fact, from that brief vision is one of frozen cataleptic silence in a world from which all life has recently been extinguished by some appalling26 catastrophe27. The lights burn, the electric signs wink28 and flash, the place is still horribly intact in all its bleak29 prognathous newness, but all the people are dead, gone, vanished. The place is a tomb of frozen silence, as terrifying in its empty bleakness30 as those advertising31 backdrops one saw formerly32 in theatres, where the splendid buildings, stores, and shops of a great street are painted in the richest and most flattering colours, and where there is no sign of life whatever.
So was it here, save that here the illusion of the dead world gained a hideous33 physical reality by its stark34, staring, nakedly concrete dimensions.
All this the boy had seen, or rather sensed, in the wink of an eye, a moment’s vision of a dusty little street, a fleeting35 glimpse of a silent little square, a few hard lights, and then the darkness of the earth again — these half-splintered glimpses were all the boy could really see in the eye-wink that it took the train to pass the town. And yet, all these fragmentary things belonged so completely to all the life of little towns which he had known, that it was not as if he had seen only a few splintered images, but rather as if the whole nocturnal picture of the town was instantly whole and living in his mind.
Beyond the station, parked in a line against the curb36, is a row of empty motor cars, and he knows instantly that they have been left there by the patrons of the little moving-picture theatre which explodes out of the cataleptic silence of the left-hand side of the square into a blaze of hard white and flaming posters which seem to cover the entire fa?ade. Even here, no movement of life is visible, but one who has lived and known towns like these feels for the first time an emotion of warmth and life as he looks at the gaudy37, blazing bill-beplastered silence of that front.
For suddenly he seems to see the bluish blaze of carbon light that comes from the small slit-like vent-hole cut into the wall and can hear again — one of the loneliest and most haunting of all sounds — the rapid shuttering sound of the projection38 camera late at night, a sound lonely, hurried, unforgettable, coming out into those cataleptic squares of silence in the little towns — as if the operator is fairly racing39 through the last performance of the night like a weary and exhausted40 creature whose stale, over-driven life can find no joy in what is giving so much joy to others, and who is pressing desperately41 ahead toward the merciful rewards of food, sleep, and oblivion which are already almost in his grasp.
And as he remembers this, he also suddenly sees and knows the people in the theatre, and in that instant greets them, feels his lonely kinship with them, with the whole family of the earth, and says farewell. Small, dark, lonely, silent, thirsty, and insatiate, the people of the little town are gathered there in that one small cell of radiance, warmth, and joy. There for a little space they are united by the magic spell the theatre casts upon them. They are all dark and silent leaning forward like a single mind and congeries of life, and yet they are all separate too.
Yes, lonely, silent, for a moment beautiful, he knows the people of the town are there, lifting the small white petals42 of their faces, thirsty and insatiate, to that magic screen: now they laugh exultantly43 as their hero triumphs, weep quietly as the mother dies, the little boys cheer wildly as the rascal44 gets his due — they are all there in darkness, under immense immortal45 skies of time, small nameless creatures in a lost town on the mighty46 continent, and for an instant we have seen them, known them, said farewell.
Around the four sides of the square at even intervals47, the new standards of the five-bulbed lamps cast down implacably upon those cataleptic pavements the cataleptic silence of their hard white light. And this, he knows, is called “the Great White Way,” of which the town is proud. Somehow the ghastly, lifeless silence of that little square is imaged nowhere else so cruelly as in the harsh, white silence of these lights. For they evoke48 terribly, as nothing else can do, the ghastly vacancy49 of light without life. And poignantly50, pitifully, and unutterably their harsh, white silence evokes51 the moth-like hunger of the American for hard, brilliant, blazing incandescence52.
It is as if there may be in his soul the horror of the ancient darkness, the terror of the old immortal silences, which will not down and must be heard. It is as if he feels again the ancient fear of — what? Of the wilderness53, the wet and lidless eye of shame and desolation feeding always on unhoused and naked sides. It is as if he fears the brutal54 revelation of his loss and loneliness, the furious, irremediable confusion of his huge unrest, his desperate and unceasing flight from the immense and timeless skies that bend above him, the huge, doorless and unmeasured vacancies55 of distance, on which he lives, on which, as helpless as a leaf upon a hurricane, he is driven on for ever, and on which he cannot pause, which he cannot fence, wall, conquer, make his own.
Then the train, running always with its smooth, powerful, almost noiseless movement, has left the station and the square behind it. The last outposts of the town appear and vanish in patterns of small, lonely light, and there is nothing but huge and secret night before us, the lonely, everlasting56 earth, and presently Virginia.
And surely, now, there is little more to be seen. Surely, now, there is almost nothing that by day would be worthy57 of more than a glance from those great travellers who have ranged the earth, and known all its wild and stormy seas, and seen its rarest glories. And by night, now, there is nothing, nothing by night but darkness and a space we call Virginia through which the huge projectile58 of the train is hurtling onward59 in the dark.
Field and fold and gulch60 and hill and hollow, forest and stream and bridge and bank and cut, the huge earth, the rude earth, the wild, formless, infinitely61 various, most familiar, ever-haunting earth, the grand and casual earth that is so brown, so harsh, so dusty, so familiar, the strange and homely62 earth wrought63 in our blood, our brain, our heart, the earth that can never be forgotten or described, is flowing by us, by us, by us in the night.
What is it that we know so well and cannot speak? What is it that we want to say and cannot tell? What is it that keeps swelling64 in our hearts its grand and solemn music, that is aching in our throats, that is pulsing like a strange wild grape through all the conduits of our blood, that maddens us with its exultant and intolerable joy and that leaves us tongueless, wordless, maddened by our fury to the end?
We do not know. All that we know is that we lack a tongue that could reveal, a language that could perfectly65 express the wild joy swelling to a music in our heart, the wild pain welling to a strong ache in our throat, the wild cry mounting to a madness in our brain, the thing, the word, the joy we know so well, and cannot speak! All that we know is that the little stations whip by in the night, the straggling little towns whip by with all that is casual, rude, familiar, ugly, and unutterable. All that we know is that the earth is flowing by us in the darkness, and that this is the way the world goes — with a field and a wood and a field! And of the huge and secret earth all we know is that we feel with all our life its texture66 with our foot upon it.
All that we know is that having everything we yet hold nothing, that feeling the wild song of this great earth upwelling in us we have no words to give it utterance67. All that we know is that here the passionate68 enigma69 of our lives is so bitterly expressed, the furious hunger that so haunts and hurts Americans so desperately felt — that being rich, we all are yet so poor, that having an incalculable wealth we have no way of spending it, that feeling an illimitable power we yet have found no way of using it.
Therefore we hurtle onward in the dark across Virginia, we hurtle onward in the darkness down a million roads, we hurtle onward driven by our hunger down the blind and brutal tunnel of ten thousand furious and kaleidoscopic70 days, the victims of the cruel impulse of a million chance and fleeting moments, without a wall at which to thrust the shoulder of our strength, a roof to hide us in our nakedness, a place to build in, or a door.
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1
geographic
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| adj.地理学的，地理的 | |
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tempting
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| a.诱人的, 吸引人的 | |
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undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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inspection
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| n.检查，审查，检阅 | |
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enticing
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| adj.迷人的；诱人的 | |
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celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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sparsely
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| adv.稀疏地；稀少地；不足地；贫乏地 | |
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spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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foliage
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| n.叶子，树叶，簇叶 | |
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attentive
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| adj.注意的，专心的；关心(别人)的，殷勤的 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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friction
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| n.摩擦，摩擦力 | |
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vibrancy
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| n.活跃；震动 | |
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exultant
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| adj.欢腾的，狂欢的，大喜的 | |
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evoking
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| 产生，引起，唤起( evoke的现在分词 ) | |
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anomalous
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| adj.反常的；不规则的 | |
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inept
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| adj.不恰当的，荒谬的，拙劣的 | |
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pretentious
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| adj.自命不凡的，自负的，炫耀的 | |
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swarming
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| 密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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metropolitan
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| adj.大城市的，大都会的 | |
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appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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wink
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| n.眨眼，使眼色，瞬间；v.眨眼，使眼色，闪烁 | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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bleakness
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| adj. 萧瑟的, 严寒的, 阴郁的 | |
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advertising
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| n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的 | |
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formerly
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| adv.从前，以前 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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stark
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| adj.荒凉的；严酷的；完全的；adv.完全地 | |
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fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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curb
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| n.场外证券市场，场外交易；vt.制止，抑制 | |
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gaudy
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| adj.华而不实的；俗丽的 | |
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projection
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| n.发射，计划，突出部分 | |
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racing
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| n.竞赛，赛马；adj.竞赛用的，赛马用的 | |
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exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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petals
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| n.花瓣( petal的名词复数 ) | |
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exultantly
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| adv.狂欢地，欢欣鼓舞地 | |
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rascal
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| n.流氓；不诚实的人 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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evoke
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| vt.唤起，引起，使人想起 | |
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vacancy
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| n.（旅馆的）空位，空房，（职务的）空缺 | |
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poignantly
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51
evokes
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| 产生，引起，唤起( evoke的第三人称单数 ) | |
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incandescence
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| n.白热，炽热；白炽 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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vacancies
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| n.空房间( vacancy的名词复数 )；空虚；空白；空缺 | |
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everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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projectile
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| n.投射物，发射体；adj.向前开进的；推进的；抛掷的 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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gulch
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| n.深谷，峡谷 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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homely
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| adj.家常的，简朴的；不漂亮的 | |
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wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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enigma
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| n.谜，谜一样的人或事 | |
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kaleidoscopic
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| adj.千变万化的 | |
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