Give us the sounds of Egypt on a certain day; let us hear the voice of King Menkaura and some of the words of the Lady Sennuwy; also the voices of the cotton-farmers. Let us hear the vast and casual sound of life, in these old peoples: their greetings in the street, the voices of the housewives and the merchants. And let us hear the laughter of a woman in the sixteenth century.
The cry of the wolf would always be the same; the sound of the wheel will always be the same; and the hoof5 of the horse on the roads of every time will be the same. But play us a tune on an unbroken spinet; and let us hear the voices of the knights6 at dinner. The cry of a man to his dog, and the barking of the dog; the call of the plough-driver to his horse, and the sound of the horse; the noise of the hunt, and the sound of the flowing water, will always be the same.
By the waters of life, by time, by time, play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let us hear the actual voices of old fairs; let us move backward through our memories, and through the memory of the race, let us relive the million forgotten moments of our lives, and let us see poor people sitting in their rooms in 1597, and let us see the rich man standing7 with his back before the fire, in the Middle Ages, and his wife knitting by the table, and let us hear their casual words.
Let us see the men who built the houses of Old Frankfort; let us see how they worked, and let us see them sitting on hewn timbers when they ate their lunches; let us hear their words, the sound of their voices. Unwind the fabric8 of lost time out of our entrails, repair the million little threads of actual circumstance until the seconds grow grey, bright and dusty with the living light, and we see the plain unfabled faces of the people; let us awake, and hear the people in the streets, and see Tobias Smollett pass our window.
Then, play us a tune on the unbroken spinet, let time be as the road to London and we a traveller on it; and let us enter London and find out what year it is there in the Mile End Road; let it be dark, and let us enter London in the dark, and hear men’s voices, and let us see if we could understand them; and let us then find out what year it is, a lodging10 for the night, and see if they read mystery on us, or would fly away from us.
But there are times that are stranger yet, there are times that are stranger than the young knights and the horses, and the sounds of the eating taverns11. The far time is the time of yesterday: it is the time of early America, it is the voices of the people on Broadway in 1841, it is the sounds of the streets in Des Moines in 1887, it is the engines of the early trains at Baltimore in 1853, it is the faces and voices of the early American people, who are lapped up in the wilderness13, who are hid from us, whose faces are in mystery, whose lives are more dark and strange than the lives of the Saxon thanes.
The time that is lovely is the time of the fatness and of the bright colours; it is the elfin time of the calendars, and the sad and mysterious time of the early photographs. It is the time of the early lithographs14, it is the time when the word was green and red and yellow. It is the time of the red barn and the windmill, and the house of the seven thousand gables; it is the time of the green lawn and the blue sky and the white excursion-steamer in the river, and the flags, the streamers, and gay brown-and-white buntings, the brass15 bands and the tumult16 of all the people who cry out Hurray, hurray!
It is the time of the boy rolling his hoop17 down the pink path, and of Mama in a bonnet18 and with a muff, and a stuck-out bottom, and Papa with a derby; it is the time of peace and plenty and the fair stripes of colour, and the iron stag. It is the time of the lightning-rod salesman and the summer boarder, it is the time of Farmer Hayseed and of Dusty Rhodes the tramp, it is the time when boys started on the downward path through cigarettes; it is a lovely time. It is the time of the lures20 and snares21 of the wicked city and of the Great White Way; it is the time of pitfalls22 that await the innocent country girl with a whaleboned collar and a small waist; it is the time of Palaces of Sin or the Devil on Sunday; it is the time of the Tenderloin, of the nests of vice23; it is the time of the gilded24 resorts with mirrors and soft carpets, where the mechanical piano played and you bought champagne25, and of the High Class places and the Madam who would not stand for any ungentlemanly behaviour, the time of the girls who wore evening dresses and were Perfect Ladies.
It is the time of the opera and theatre parties, and the Horse Show, and of late jolly suppers in the walnut26 dining-rooms; it is the time of elegant ladies with long gloves on naked arms, and Welsh rarebit in the chafing-dish; it is the time of the Four Hundred, and the great names of the millionaires — the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Goulds — it is the time of the powdered flunkeys and the twenty-dollar favours; it is the time of Newport, and the canopied27 red-carpeted sidewalks, and the great mansions28 on Fifth Avenue, and the splendid gilt29 and plush marble halls, and the time of the fortune-hunting foreign noblemen (London papers please copy).
It is the time of the effeminate fop, and the lisping ass9 (Oh, Percy! I’ll slap you on your wrist, you rough, rude thing, you!); it is the time of the Damned Dude who wears English clothes and has cuffs30 on his trousers (Hey, mister! Is it raining in London?), and he never did anything in his life but spend his old man’s money, he never did an honest lick of work in his life, he’s not worth powder enough to kill him, and if the son of a bitch comes fooling around any sister of mine I’ll beat the everlasting31 tar19 out of him.
When the songs that they sang were old and sweet, when the songs that they sang were like beauty’s from afar, and when people sitting on their porches in the dusk could hear (O sweet and low!) the corner quartette sing, “Sweet Adeline”; when the songs that they sang were “Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer True.”
It is the time of the wharves32 and the tangled33 shipping34, the horse-cars by the docks, of piled-up casks and kegs of rum and molasses. There are forgotten fume-flaws of bright smoke above Manhattan; where are the lost faces that came towards us over Brooklyn bridge, where are the parted ripples35 and the proud forgotten ships?
By the waters of life, before we knew that we must die, before we had seen our father’s face, before we had sought the print of his foot: by the waters of time (the tide! the tide!), before we had seen the shadows in the haunted woods, before lost moments lived again, before the shades were fleshed. Who are we, that must follow in the footsteps of the king? Who are we, that had no kings to follow? We are the unkinged men. Have we left shadows on forgotten walls? Have we crossed running water and lived for seven timeless years with the enchantress, and shall we find our son who is ourself, and will he know us?
Shall your voices unlock the gates of my brain? Shall I know you, though I have never seen your face? Will you know me, and will you call me “son”? Father, I know that you live, though I have never found you.
In the old town of Tours he quickly found lodging in an ancient hotel or tavern12 — really a congeries of old, whited buildings with separate doors, looking out on a cobbled courtyard through whose gate, in former times perhaps, the horses and post-chaise of weary travellers had often clattered36. In a cold, little room in one of the buildings facing on the court, he now settled down, and there began for him one of the most extraordinary and phantasmal time-experiences of his life. Day passed into night, night merged37 into day again like the unbroken weaving of a magic web, and he stayed on, week after week, plunged38 in a strange and legendary39 spell of time that seemed suspended and detached from the world of measurable event, fixed40 in unmoving moment, unsilent silence, changeless change.
Later, it seemed to him that that strange reverie and dream of time, in which his life was now so strangely fixed, had been induced by a series of causes, easy to understand in the light of experience, and almost logical in their consequence. It was five months since he had left America. After the overwhelming impact of impression and event which a new world, a new life, had brought to him in so many varied41, chance, and unexpected ways — after the ship, the voyage, the enormous isolation42, the whole earth-detachment of the sea (itself a life, a world, a universe of new experience), after the weeks in England, the huge web of London, the brief but poignantly43 illuminating44 days in Bristol, Bath, and Devonshire, with fleeting45 glimpses of something so strange, yet so familiar, so near, yet never to be touched, that it seemed to him he was looking in through a lighted window at a life which he had always known, but which he could never make his own; after the terrific impact of France and Paris — the month of bewildered, desperate and almost terror-stricken isolation in a new and hostile world — an atom, wordless, tongueless, almost drowned among the strange, dark faces of the Frenchmen; after all the confusion, grief, and error of that month — the night-time kaleidoscope of cafés, brothels, alcohol, and women, the frenzied46 day-time prowling through museums, bookstalls, thronging47 streets — the thousand monuments of an alien culture, the million faces of an alien race, until every atom of him was wrung48, trembling, maddened and exhausted49, sick with loss and hopelessness, weary with despair — after the huge first shock and flood-tide of immersion50 in an alien life — had come his meeting with Starwick, Elinor, and Ann, the brief, fatal, furious weeks of their relation, the bitter loss and waste and rankling51 pain of parting; and finally the sweltering and incurable52 ache, the blind and driven aimlessness of wandering, the chance encounter with the Countess, and the brief interlude of forgetfulness and oblivion that had come to him while he was with her — and now, blank, silent loneliness again, the blind fortuity of chance, the arbitrary halt and desperate entrenchment53 of his spirit in this town of Tours.
Now, after the savage54 kaleidoscope of these months of hope and grief and ecstasy55, of desolation and despair, of passion, love, and suffering, of maddened hunger and infuriate desire, after all the restless and insatiable seeking of his goaded56, driven, and unresting soul, he had come at last to a place of quietness and pause; and suddenly he was like a desperate and bewildered man who has come in from the furious street of life to seek sanctuary57 and repose58 in the numb59 stillness of a tomb.
Day and night now, from dawn to dark, from sleeping until waking, in that strange spell of time and silence that was neither dream nor sleep nor waking vision, but that like an enchantment60 was miraculously61 composed of all, obsessed62 as a man exiled, banished63, or condemned64 by fate to live upon a desert island without possibility of escape or return — he thought of home.
In that enchanted65 spell of time and silence, as men who gaze in visions across misty66 and illimitable seas, with the terrible homelessness of a man for whom there can never be return, with the terrible homelessness of a man who longs for home and has no home — with the impossible, hopeless, incurable and unutterable homesickness of the American, who is maddened by a longing67 for return, and does not know to what he can return, whose brain burns night and day with the maddened hope, whose heart aches night and day with the smothering68 and incurable ache of the houseless, homeless, and forsaken69 atom of the earth who has no goal or ending for his hunger, no final dwelling-place for his desire — he thought of home.
What was it? It was the furious desire, unceasing, unassuaged, of wandering and forsaken man — the lost American — who longs for ever for return — and who has no door to enter, no room to dwell in, no single hand’s-breadth of certain, consecrated70 earth upon that continent of wild houseless space to which he can return.
An astounding71 — an almost incredible thing — now happened. He had come to Tours telling himself that now at last, at last, he was going “to settle down and write,” that he was going to justify72 his voyage by the high purpose of creation. In his mind there swarmed73 various projects, cloudy, vague, and grandiose74 in their conception, of plays, books, stories, essays he must write: with desperate resolve he sat down grimly now to shape these grand designs into the stern and toilsome masonry75 of words. A few impatient, fragmentary beginnings, the opening pages of a story, the beginning speeches of a play — all crumpled76 in a wad and impatiently tossed aside — were the final results of this ambitious purpose.
And yet, write he did. Useless, fragmentary, and inchoate77 as were these first abortive78 efforts, he began to write now like a madman — as only a madman could write — driven by an insanity79 of sense and soul and feeling which he no longer could master or control, tranced in a hypnosis by whose fatal and insatiate compulsions he was forced, without will, to act. Gripped by that ungovernable desire, all ordered plans, designs, coherent projects for the work he had set out to do went by the board, were burned up in the flame of a quenchless80 passion, like a handful of dry straw. Seated at a table in his cold, little room that overlooked the old cobbled court of the hotel, he wrote ceaselessly from dawn to dark, sometimes from darkness on to dawn again — hurling81 himself upon the bed to dream, in a state of comatose82 awareness83, strange sleeping-wakeful visions, dreams mad and terrible as the blinding imagery that now swept constantly across his brain its blaze of fire.
The words were wrung out of him in a kind of bloody84 sweat, they poured out of his finger-tips, spat85 out of his snarling86 throat like writhing87 snakes; he wrote them with his heart, his brain, his sweat, his body; he wrote them with his blood, his spirit; they were wrenched88 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 famished89, 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 coherence90, 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.
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1
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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spinet
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| n.小型立式钢琴 | |
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turmoil
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| n.骚乱，混乱，动乱 | |
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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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hoof
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| n.(马，牛等的)蹄 | |
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6
knights
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| 骑士； （中古时代的）武士( knight的名词复数 )； 骑士； 爵士； （国际象棋中）马 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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fabric
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| n.织物，织品，布；构造，结构，组织 | |
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ass
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| n.驴；傻瓜，蠢笨的人 | |
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lodging
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| n.寄宿，住所；(大学生的)校外宿舍 | |
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taverns
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| n.小旅馆，客栈，酒馆( tavern的名词复数 ) | |
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tavern
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| n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店 | |
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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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lithographs
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| n.平版印刷品( lithograph的名词复数 ) | |
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brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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tumult
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| n.喧哗；激动，混乱；吵闹 | |
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hoop
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| n.（篮球）篮圈，篮 | |
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bonnet
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| n.无边女帽；童帽 | |
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tar
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| n.柏油，焦油；vt.涂或浇柏油/焦油于 | |
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lures
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| 吸引力，魅力（lure的复数形式） | |
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snares
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| n.陷阱( snare的名词复数 )；圈套；诱人遭受失败（丢脸、损失等）的东西；诱惑物v.用罗网捕捉，诱陷，陷害( snare的第三人称单数 ) | |
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pitfalls
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| （捕猎野兽用的）陷阱( pitfall的名词复数 )； 意想不到的困难，易犯的错误 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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gilded
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| a.镀金的，富有的 | |
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champagne
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| n.香槟酒；微黄色 | |
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walnut
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| n.胡桃，胡桃木，胡桃色，茶色 | |
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canopied
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| adj. 遮有天篷的 | |
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mansions
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| n.宅第，公馆，大厦( mansion的名词复数 ) | |
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gilt
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| adj.镀金的；n.金边证券 | |
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cuffs
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| n.袖口( cuff的名词复数 )v.掌打，拳打( cuff的第三人称单数 ) | |
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everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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wharves
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| n.码头，停泊处( wharf的名词复数 ) | |
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tangled
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| adj. 纠缠的，紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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shipping
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| n.船运（发货，运输，乘船） | |
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ripples
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| 逐渐扩散的感觉( ripple的名词复数 ) | |
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clattered
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| 发出咔哒声（clatter的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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merged
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| （使）混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 )； 相融； 融入； 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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plunged
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| v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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legendary
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| adj.传奇（中）的，闻名遐迩的；n.传奇（文学） | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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poignantly
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illuminating
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| a.富于启发性的，有助阐明的 | |
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fleeting
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| adj.短暂的，飞逝的 | |
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frenzied
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| a.激怒的；疯狂的 | |
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thronging
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| v.成群，挤满( throng的现在分词 ) | |
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48
wrung
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| 绞( wring的过去式和过去分词 )； 握紧（尤指别人的手）； 把（湿衣服）拧干； 绞掉（水） | |
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exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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50
immersion
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| n.沉浸；专心 | |
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51
rankling
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| v.（使）痛苦不已，（使）怨恨不已( rankle的现在分词 ) | |
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52
incurable
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| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
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53
entrenchment
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| n.壕沟，防御设施 | |
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54
savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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55
ecstasy
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| n.狂喜，心醉神怡，入迷 | |
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56
goaded
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| v.刺激( goad的过去式和过去分词 )；激励；（用尖棒）驱赶；驱使（或怂恿、刺激）某人 | |
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57
sanctuary
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| n.圣所，圣堂，寺庙；禁猎区，保护区 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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numb
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| adj.麻木的，失去感觉的；v.使麻木 | |
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enchantment
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| n.迷惑，妖术，魅力 | |
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miraculously
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| ad.奇迹般地 | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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banished
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| v.放逐，驱逐( banish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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64
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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misty
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| adj.雾蒙蒙的，有雾的 | |
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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smothering
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| （使）窒息， （使）透不过气( smother的现在分词 )； 覆盖； 忍住； 抑制 | |
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69
Forsaken
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| adj. 被遗忘的, 被抛弃的 动词forsake的过去分词 | |
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consecrated
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| adj.神圣的，被视为神圣的v.把…奉为神圣，给…祝圣( consecrate的过去式和过去分词 )；奉献 | |
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astounding
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| adj.使人震惊的vt.使震惊，使大吃一惊astound的现在分词) | |
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justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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73
swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 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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74
grandiose
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| adj.宏伟的，宏大的，堂皇的，铺张的 | |
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75
masonry
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| n.砖土建筑；砖石 | |
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76
crumpled
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| adj. 弯扭的, 变皱的 动词crumple的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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77
inchoate
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| adj.才开始的，初期的 | |
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78
abortive
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| adj.不成功的，发育不全的 | |
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insanity
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| n.疯狂，精神错乱；极端的愚蠢，荒唐 | |
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80
quenchless
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| 不可熄灭的 | |
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81
hurling
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| n.爱尔兰式曲棍球v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的现在分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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comatose
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| adj.昏睡的，昏迷不醒的 | |
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awareness
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| n.意识，觉悟，懂事，明智 | |
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84
bloody
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| adj.非常的的；流血的；残忍的；adv.很；vt.血染 | |
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85
spat
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| n.口角，掌击；v.发出呼噜呼噜声 | |
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86
snarling
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| v.（指狗）吠，嗥叫， （人）咆哮( snarl的现在分词 )；咆哮着说，厉声地说 | |
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87
writhing
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| （因极度痛苦而）扭动或翻滚( writhe的现在分词 ) | |
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88
wrenched
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| v.（猛力地）扭( wrench的过去式和过去分词 )；扭伤；使感到痛苦；使悲痛 | |
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89
famished
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| adj.饥饿的 | |
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90
coherence
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| n.紧凑；连贯；一致性 | |
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