Читать книгу The Journal of Arthur Stirling : ("The Valley of the Shadow") - Upton Sinclair - Страница 5
ОглавлениеBanners yellow, glorious, golden!
And then something happens, and they fall upon me with the weight of mountains.
Ten weeks! And yet it is not that which goads me most.
What goads me most is that I am a captive in a dungeon, and am fighting for the life of my soul.
I shall win, I do not fear—the fountains of my being will not fail me. I saw my soul a second time to-day; it was no longer the bubble, blown large, palpitating. It was a bird resting upon a bough. The bough was tossed and flung about by a tempest; and a chasm yawned below; but the bough held, and the bird was master of its wings, and sang.
The name of the bough was Faith.
April 27th.
I have read a great deal of historical romance, and a great deal of local color fiction, and a great deal of original character-drawing—and I have wished to get away from these things.
There is no local color, and no character-drawing, in The Captive. You do not know the name of the hero; you do not know how old he is, or of what rank he is, at what period or in what land he lives. He is described but once. He is “A Man.”
My philosophy is a philosophy of will. All virtue that I know is conditioned upon freedom. The object of all thinking and doing, as I see it, is to set men free.
There is the tyranny of kings—the tyranny of force; there is the tyranny of priests—the tyranny of ignorance; there is the tyranny of society—the tyranny of selfishness and indolence; and above all, and including all, and causing all—there is the tyranny of self—the tyranny of sin, the tyranny of the body. So it is that I see the world.
So it is that I see history; I can see nothing else in history. The tyranny of kings and nobles, the tyranny of the mass and the inquisition, the tyranny of battle and murder and crime—how was a man to live in those ages?
How is a man to live in this age? The tyranny of kings and of priests is gone, and from the tyranny of industrialism the individual can escape. But the lightning—is not that an inquisition? And if it comes after you, will it not find out all your secrets? And the tyranny of hurricane and shipwreck, of accident, disease, and death? Any tyranny is all tyranny, I say; and the existence of tyranny is its presence.
It is conceivable that some day the sovereign mind may shake off its shackles, and the tyranny of matter be at an end. But that day is not yet; and meanwhile, the thing existing, how shall a man be free? That has been the matter of my deepest brooding.
This much I have learned:
The man may accept this life, if it please him, and its chances; but while he does he can never be a soul. So long as he accepts this life and its chances, he is the slave of tyranny. When the day comes that mind is sovereign, I will give myself into the hands of this life. But meanwhile I will know myself for what I am—a bubble upon the surface of a whirling torrent, an insect borne aloft upon a flying wheel.
It is by your will that you are free; by your will you are one with the infinite freedom, by your will you are master of time and your fate, lord of the stars and the endless ages, thinker of all truth, hearer of all music, beholder of all beauty, doer of all righteousness. That is the truth which I have brought out of my deepest brooding.
So long as your happiness is in anything about yourself—your wealth, or your fame, or your life—you are not free. So long as your happiness is in houses and lands, in sons and in daughters, you are not free. You give one atom of your soul to these things at your own peril; for when your hour comes you tear them from you, though they be as your eyes; and by your will you save your soul alive.
Therefore I write The Captive. I put aside childish things—I grip my hands upon naked Reality.
There are nine characters in The Captive: a tyrant, two slaves, six guests, and a man. There are two scenes—a dungeon, and a banquet-hall.
A tyrant: I understand by a tyrant a man whose happiness is the unhappiness of others. I read of the discoverers of Mexico, and how they found a pyramid of human skulls, raised as a monument; that has been to me, ever since, the type of tyranny. The forms of tyranny vary through the ages, but the principle is always the same; a tyrant is a man who is made great by the toil and sorrow of others.
The slave also remains the same through all time; and likewise the guest. The guest is the man who takes the world as he finds it, and likes a good dinner. The population of society is made up of tyrants, slaves, and guests.
The man is a character of my own imagining.
The first scene of The Captive is the dungeon. When I was very young I was in Europe, and I was in a dungeon; I have never forgotten it. There enter the tyrant and the two slaves with the man. They chain him to the wall, and then the tyrant speaks. That first speech—I have written it now—I have gotten the hammer-thuds! Tyranny is an iron thing—you had to feel the tread of it, the words had to roll like thunder. It is an advantage to me that I am full of Wagner; I always hear the music with my poetry. (I shall be disappointed if some one does not make an opera out of The Captive.)
The man is there, and he is there forever. After that, once a day, bread and water are shoved in through an opening. But the door of the dungeon does not open again until the last act—when ten years have passed.
That is all. And now the man will battle with that problem. Will he go mad with despair? Will he sink into a wild beast? Will he commit suicide? Or what will he do? Day by day he sinks back from the question, numb with agony; day by day the grim hand of Fate drags him to it; and so, until from the chaos of his soul he digs out, blow by blow, a faith.
Here there will be Reality; no shams and no lies will do here—here is iron necessity, and cries out for iron truth. God—duty—will—virtue—let such things no more be names, let us see what they are!
These are awful words. Sometimes I shrink from this thing as from fire, sometimes I rush to it with a song; I am writing about it now because I am worn out, and yet I can not think of anything else.
This man will find the truth; being delivered from the captivity of the world and set free to be a soul. Superstition blinds him; doubt and despair and weakness blind him; but still he gropes and strives, cries out and battles for truth; until at last, shut up in his own being, he tears his way out to the very source of it, and knows for himself what it is. Infinite it is, and unthinkable; glorious, all-consuming, all-sufficing; food and drink, friendship and love, ambition and victory, joy, power, and eternity it is to him who finds it; and all things in this world are nothing to him who finds it.
And so comes the victory to this soul. Hour by hour he catches gleams of the light; day by day he toils toward it, with fear and agony and prayer; until at last he knows his salvation—to rest never, and to toil always, and to dwell in this Presence of his God. In one desperate hour he flings away the world and the hope of the world, and vows this consecration, and lives.
He keeps the vow; it is iron necessity that drives him. He finds himself, he finds his way—each day his step is surer.
Each day the channels of his being deepen. He lays broad plans for his life—he gathers all knowledge, he solves all problems; lord of the infinite mind, he ranges all existence, and beholds it as the symbol of himself. Into the deeps and yawning spaces of it he plunges; blind, he sees what men have never seen; deaf, he hears what men have never heard—singer he is, prophet and poet and maker. New worlds leap into being in the infinite fulness of his heart, visions of endless glory that make his senses reel; as a column of incense towering to the sky is the ecstasy of his adoration and his joy.
And so the long years roll by; and the unconquered spirit has left the earth: left time and space and self, and dwells where never man has dwelt before. And then one day the door of the dungeon is opened, and his chains are shattered, and the slaves lead him up to the light of day.
It is the banquet-hall; and there is the tyrant, and there the guests—there is the world.
He is aged, and weak, and white, and terrible. They stare at him; and he stares at them, for he is dazed. They begin to mock at him, and then at last he realizes, and he covers his face and weeps—beholding the world, and the way that it must come. They jeer at him, they strike him; and when he answers not, they call to the slaves to torture him.
This man has lived for ten years with himself. He is nothing but a will. And now they will conquer him!
I recall the highest moment of my being. I saw that moment, and all the others of my life. I saw them as something that I could not bear to see, and I cried out that from that hour I would change them. I have not kept the vow; there was no one to drive me.
But this man they drive; they pinch him and burn him and tear him; they crush his limbs, they break his bones, they grind his flesh, they make his brain a living fire of anguish. And he fights them.
Into the deep recesses of his being goes the cry—for all that he has—for all that he is! For every ounce of his strength, for every throb of his will, for every vision, every truth that he knows! To bear this, to save him here! And so he wrestles, so he rises, so he gropes and gasps; and in the moment of his fiercest straining, with the throb of all his being he bursts the barrier, he rends the veil; and infinite passion rolls in in floods upon him, he clutches all existence in his arms; and from his lips there bursts a mad frenzied shout of rapture—that makes his torturers stand transfixed, listening, trembling with terror.
And so they drag him back to his dungeon; and there, unable to move, he lies upon the stones and pants out his ecstasy and his life.
That is The Captive.
April 29th.
What counts in this thing is momentum—spiritual momentum. You are filled with it all the time, it never leaves you; it drives behind you like a gale of wind; it roars in your ears when you are awake, it rocks you to sleep when you are weary; whenever you are dull or do not heed it, it nags at you, it goads you, it beats into your face. Each day it is more, each day it is harder, more unattainable; but only do not stop, it carries you with it like a wave; you mount upon each day's achievement to reach the next, you move with the power of all the days before. It is momentum that counts.
Do not stop!—I cry it all day—Do not stop!
April 30th.
It is weak of me, but sometimes I can not help but look ahead—and think that it is done! I could not find any words to tell the joy that that will be to me—to be free, after so long—to be free!
I do not care anything about the fame—it would not be anything to me to be a great author. If it could be done, nothing would please me better than to publish it anonymously—to let no one ever know that it was mine. If I could only have the little that I need to be free, I would publish all that I might ever write anonymously.
Yes, that is the thing that makes my blood bound. To be free! Let it only be done—let it only be real, as it will be—and the naked force of it will shake men to the depths of their souls. I could not write it, if I did not believe that I was writing words that would grip the soul of any man—I care not how dull or how coarse he might be.
I finished the first act just now.
May 1st.
I am wild to-day. Oh, how can I bear this—why should I have to contend with such things as this! Is it not hard enough—the agony that I have to bear, the task that takes all my strength and more? And must I be torn to pieces by such hideous degradation as this? Oh, my God, if my life is not soon clear of these things I shall die!
Oh, it is funny—yes, funny!—Let us laugh at it. The dance-hall musician has brought home his 'cello! I heard him come bumping up the stairs with it—God damn his soul! And there he sits, sawing away at some loathsome jig tunes! And he has two friends in there—I listen to their wit between the tunes.
Here I sit, like a wild beast pent in a cage. I tell you I can bear any work in the world, but I can not bear things such as this. That I, who am seeking a new faith for men—who am writing, or trying to write, what will mean new life to millions—should have my soul ripped into pieces by such loathsome, insulting indignities!
Oh, laugh!—but I can't laugh—I sit here foaming at the lips, and crying! And suppose he's lost his position, and does this every day!
Now every day I must lay aside what I am doing and sit and shudder when I hear him coming up the steps—and wait for him to begin this! I tell you, I demand to be free—I demand it! I want nothing in this world but to be let alone. I don't want anybody to wait on me.—I don't want anything from this hellish world but to be let alone!
It is pouring rain outside, and my overcoat is thin; but I must go out and pace the streets and wait until a filthy Dutchman gets through scraping ragtime on a 'cello.
All day wasted! All day! Does it not seem that these things persecute you by system? I came in, cold and wet, and got into bed, and then he began again! And the friends came back and they had beer, and more music. And I had to get up and put on the wet clothes once more.
May 2d.
I was crouching out on one of the docks last night. I had no place else to go. I can think anywhere, if it is quiet.
A wonderful thing is the night. I bless Thee for the night, oh “süsse, heilige Natur”!
It was a voice in my soul, as clear as could be.
—She can not bear too long the sight of men, sweet, holy Nature: the swarming hives—the millions of tiny creatures, each drunk and blind with his own selfishness; and so she lays her great hand upon it all, and hides it out of her sight.
Once it was all silent, and formless as the desert; soon it shall all be silent and formless again; and meanwhile—the night, the night!
Oh, I hunger for the desert! I do not care for beauty—I have no time for beauty, I want the earth stern and forbidding. Give me some place where no one else would want to go—an iron crag where the oceans beat—a mountain-top where the lightning splinters on the rocks.
I go at it again. But I am nervous—these things get me into such a state that I simply can not do anything. It was not merely yesterday—I have it constantly. The dirty chambermaid singing, or yelling down to the landlady; the drunken man swearing at his wife; the boys screaming in the street and kicking a tomato-can about. When I think of how much beauty and power has been shattered in my life by such things as these, it brings tears of impotent rage into my eyes.
I must be free—oh, I must be free!
It comes strangely from the author of The Captive, does it not?
I give all my life to my work, and sometimes, when I am broken like this, I wonder if I do not give too much. Once I climbed to a dizzy height, and I cried out a dizzy truth:
“O God, how as nothing in Thy sight are my writings!”
I do not know if I shall ever reach that height again.
May 3d.
I have not one single beautiful memory in my life. I have nothing in my life that, when I think of it, does not make me writhe.
To all that I have lived, and known, and seen, I have but one word, one cry—Away! Away! Let me get away from it! Let me get away from cities, let me get away from men, let me out of my cage! Let me go with my God, let me forget it all—put it away forever and ever! Let me no longer have to plot and plan, to cringe and whimper, to barter my vision and my hours for bread!
Who knows what I suffer—who has any idea of it? To have a soul like a burning fire, to be hungry and swift as the Autumn wind, to have a heart as hot as the wild bird's, and wings as eager—and to be chained here in this seething hell of selfishness, this orgy of folly.
Ah, and then I shut my hands together. No, I am not weak, I do not spend my time chafing thus! I have fought it out so far—
“I was ever a fighter, so one fight more!”
I will go back, and I will hammer and hammer again—grimly—savagely—day by day. And out of the furnace of my soul I will forge a weapon that will set me free in the end—I think.
May 4th.
I wrote a little poem once. I remembered two lines of it—a nature description; they were not great lines, but there flashed over me to-day an application of them that was a stroke of genius, I believe. I was passing the Stock Exchange. It was a very busy day. I climbed one of the pillars, in spirit, and wrote high above the portals:
Where savage beasts through forest midnight roam,
Seeking in sorrow for each other's joy.
May 5th.
A dreadful thing is unbelief! A dreadful thing it is to be an infidel!
—That is what all men cry nowadays—there is so much infidelity in the world—it is the curse of our modern society—it is everywhere—it is all-prevailing!
I had a strange experience to-day, Sunday. I went into a church, and high up by the altar, dressed in solemn garb and offering prayers to God—I saw an infidel!
He preached a sermon. The theme of his sermon was “Liberalism.”
“These men,” cried the preacher, “are blinding our eyes to our salvation, they are undermining, day by day, our faith! They tell us that the sacred word of God is 'literature'! And they show us more 'literature'; but oh, my friends, what new Bible have they shown us!”
As I got up and went out of that church, I whispered: “What a dreadful thing it is to be an infidel!”
Oh Dante and Goethe and Shakespeare—oh Wordsworth and Shelley and Emerson! Oh thrice-anointed and holy spirits! What a dreadful thing it is to be an infidel!
What a dreadful thing it is to believe in a Bible, and not to believe in literature—to believe in a Bible and not to believe in a God!
You think that this world lives upon the revelation of two thousand years ago! Fool—this world lives as your body lives by the beating of its heart—upon the revelation and the effort of each instant of its life. And to-day or to-morrow the great Revealer might send to some lonely thinker in his garret a new word that would scatter to dust and ashes all laws and all duties that now are known to men.
There are many ways to look at the world, and always a deeper one. I see it as a fearful thing, towering, expanding, upheld by the toil and the agony of millions. Who will bring us the new hope, the new song of courage, that it go not down into the dust to-day?
To do that there is the poet; to live and to die unheeded, and to feed for ages upon ages the hungry souls of men—that is to be a poet. Therefore will he sing, and sing ever, and die in the sweetness of his song.
When I think of that—not now as I write it here in bare words—but in quivering reality, it is a hand upon my forehead, and a presence in the room.
May 6th.
Chiefest of all I think of my country! Passionately, more than words can utter, I love this land of mine. If I tear my heart till it bleeds and pour out the tears of my spirit, it is for this consecration and this hope—it is for this land of Washington and Lincoln. There never was any land like it—there may never be any like it again; and Freedom watches from her mountains, trembling.
—It is a song that it needs, a song and a singer; to point it to its high design, to thrill it with the music of its message, to shake the heart of every man in it, and make him burn and dare! For the first time there is Liberty; for the first time there is Truth, and no shams and no lies, enthroned. The news of it has gone forth like the sound of thunder, and has shaken all the earth: that man at last may live, may do what he can and will!
—And to what is it? Is it to the heaping up of ugly cities, the packing of pork and the gathering of gold? That is the thing that I toil for—to tear this land from the grasp of mean men and of merchants! To take the souls of my countrymen into the high mountains with me, to thrill them with a soaring, strong resolve! Living things shall come from this land of mine, living things before I die, for the hunger of it burns me, and will not ever let me rest. Freedom! freedom! And stern justice and honor, and knowledge and power, and a noonday blaze of light!
Arise in thy majesty, confronting the ages!
Stretch out thine arms to the millions that shall be!
Justice thine inheritance, God thy stay and sustenance,
My country, to thee!
Those are feeble words. If this were a book, I would tear it all up.
I wonder if any one will ever read this. As a matter of fact, I suppose ten people will read gossip about the book for every one who reads the book.
This is just a month from the beginning. A month to-day! Yes—I have done my share, I have done a third of it—a third!
But the end is so much harder!
May 9th.
I have been for two days in the mire. I was disturbed, and then I was sluggish. Oh, the sluggishness of my nature!
If ever I am a great poet, I will have made myself that by the power of my will; that is a fact. I am by nature a great clod—I feel nothing, I care about nothing. I look at the flowers as a cow chewing its cud.—It is only that I will to do right.
Sometimes the sight of my dulness drives me wild. Then again I merely gaze at it. I try time and again to get my mind on my work, and something—anything, provided it is trivial enough—turns me aside. Just now I saw a spider-web, and that made me think of Bruce, and thence I went by way of Walter Scott to Palestine, and when I came to I was writing a song for—who was the minstrel?—to sing outside of the prison of Coeur de Lion.
I go wandering that way—sometimes I sit so for an hour; and then suddenly I leap up with a cry. But I may try all I please—I don't care anything about the work—it doesn't stir me—the verses I think of make me sick. And then I remember that I have only so many weeks more; and what it will mean to fail; and that makes me desperate, but doesn't help.
When I have stopped at some resting-place in the poem, I can get going again. But now I have stopped in the middle of a climax; and the number of times that I have read that last line, trying to find another—Great heavens!
But I can not find another word. I am in despair.
I know perfectly well what I shall do, only I am a coward, and do not do it. I shall stay in this state till my rage has heaped itself up enough and breaks through everything at last. And then I shall begin to hammer myself! to swear at myself in a way that would make a longshoreman turn white. And I shall spend perhaps two or three hours—perhaps two or three days—doing that, until I am quite in a white heat; and then—I shall go to my work.
That is the price I pay for being distracted.
May 11th.
I said to myself the day before yesterday—with a kind of a dry sob—“I can't do it! I can't do it!”
Oh how tormented I am by noises—noises! What am I not tormented by? Some days ago I was writing in a frenzy—and the landlady came for her rent. And the horrible creature standing there, talking at me! “So lonely!—don't ever see people! Mrs. Smithers was a-saying—” Oh, damn Mrs. Smithers!
I thought I could never do it—I was really about to give it up. I went out on the street—I roamed about for hours, talking I don't know what nonsense to myself. And then at last I came home, and I knelt down there at the bedside and said: “Here you stay without anything to eat until you've written ten lines of that poem!”
And that was how I did it. I stayed there, and I prayed. I don't often pray, but that time I prayed like one possessed—I was so lonely and so helpless—and the work was so beautiful. I stayed there for nine blessed hours, and then the clock stopped and I couldn't count after that.
But the day came, and then the ten lines! And so I had my breakfast.
These things leave you weak, but a little less dull.
May 13th.
I have been working with a kind of wild desperation all day to-day. Oh it hurts—it hurts—but I am doing it! Whenever I read some lines of it that are real—whenever some great living phrase flashes over me—then I laugh like a man in the midst of a battle.
I shall be just as a man who has been through a battle; haggard and wild and desperate. Oh, I don't think I shall ever have the courage to do it again!
I did not know what it meant! I did not! It was giving myself into the hands of a fiend!
All great books will be something different to me after this. Did Shakespeare write thus with the blood of his soul? Or am I weak? Did he ever cry out in pain, as I have?
May 14th.
Another day of raw torture. It is like toiling up a mountain side; and your limbs are of lead. It is like struggling in a nightmare,—that is just what it is like. It is sickening.
But then you dare not stop. It is hard to go on, but it is ten times as hard to start if you stop.
I could hardly stand up this afternoon! but the thing was ringing in my ears—it went on and on—I had to go after it! I was in the seventh heaven—I could see anything, dare anything, do anything. It made no difference how hard—it called to me—on—on! And I said: “Suppose I were to be tortured—could I go then?” And so I went and went.
I haven't written it down yet; I felt sick. But I know it all.
Oh men—oh my brothers—will you love me for this thing?
May 16th.
I did no writing yesterday or to-day. I have been terribly frightened.
I wrote what I had to write the day before yesterday—I could not help it. But when I stopped my head was literally on fire, and the strangest mad throbbing in it—I stood still in fear, it felt so as if something were going to burst—my head seemed to weigh a ton. I poured cold water over it, but it made no difference—it stayed that way all night and all yesterday.
What am I to do? I dare not think—I took a long walk, and even now I find myself thinking of the book without knowing it. Imagine me sitting on a doorstep and playing for two hours with a kitten!
Why should I be handicapped in such a way as this? I had never thought of such a thing.
I was thinking about The Captive—it is my own. Nobody has helped me—I have told not one person of it. Everything in it has come out of my soul.
May 17th.
I feel better to-day, but I hardly know what to do.
Meantime I was happy!—Think of a poet's being happy with city flowers! of a poet's being happy with store-flowers—prostitute-flowers—flowers for sale!
It was all about a narcissus—“Very flower of youth, and morning's golden hour!”—as I called it once. And it danced so! (It was out on the curbstone)—and I went off happy.
Then I thought of a poem that is pure distilled ecstasy to my spirit. I will write it, and be happy again:
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright;
Spirit of a winter's night!— ...
Sit thee there, and send abroad,
With a mind self-overaw'd,
Fancy, high-commission'd:—send her!
She has vassals to attend her;
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth;
She will mix those pleasures up,
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shall quaff it!—
Ah! And so I went along, “sun, moon, and stars forgot”—laughing and half dancing. People stared at me—and I laughed. And then I passed three pretty girls, and I laughed, and they laughed too. I guess they thought I was going to follow them.
—But that pleasure was not in my cup, dear girls.
Some of these days I hope to live in a beautiful world, where a man may speak to a pretty girl on the street. Badness is its own punishment, let the bad world observe.
I would rather look at a beautiful woman than do anything else I know of in this world, except listen to music.
May 18th.
I often think how I shall spend my money after The Captive is done. I shall take a band of chosen youths, seekers and worshipers, and we shall build a house on a mountain-top and worship the Lord in the beauty of music!
I shall have to begin at the beginning—I have never had any one to teach me music. But oh, if I did know!—And if I ever got hold of an orchestra—how I would make it go!
And in the middle of it the astonished orchestra would see the conductor take wings unto himself and fly off through the roof.
A book that I mean to write some day will be called The Pleasures of Music, and it will sing the joys of being clean and strong, of cold water and the early morning and a free heart. It will show how all the unhappiness of men is that they live in the body and in self, and how the world is to be saved through music, which is not of the body, nor of self—which is free and infinite, swift as the winds, vast as the oceans, endless as time, and happy as whole meadows of flowers! The more who come to partake of it, the better it is; for generous is “Frau Musika,” her heart is made wholly of love.
—And when I have shown all these things, Frau Musika, I shall tell of the golden lands that I have visited upon the wings of thy spirit!—
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain!
What fields or waves or mountains,
What shapes of sky or plain!
What love of thine own kind, what ignorance of pain!
May 20th.
I live among the poor people and that keeps me humble. There is not much chance for freedom, I hear them say, there are not many who can dwell in the forests. Prove your right to it—prove what you can do—the law is stern. I am not afraid of the challenge; I will prove what I can do.
But I see one here and there with whom the law is not so strict, I think.
I met a merchant the other night. I dreamed of him. He said: “I buy such goods as men need; I buy them as cheaply as I can, since life is grim. I sell them as cheaply as I can, since men are poor and suffering. I make of profit what I need to live humbly. I am not of the world's seekers; I am of the finders.”
I met also a guileless fool.
We passed a great mansion. “I should like to know the man who lives there,” said the fool.
“Should you?” said I.
“Is he a hero?” asked the fool.
“No,” said I.
“Is he a poet?” asked the fool.
“No,” said I.
“Must he not be very beautiful,” said the fool, “that men judge him worthy of so much beauty?”
May 21st.
I must finish this thing this time! That cry rings in my ears night after night. I am toiling upward—upward—I can see no sign of the end yet—but I must finish this time! If I had to stop with this thing haunting me—if I had to go out into that jungle of a world with this weight upon me—to repress myself with this fire in my heart—I could not bear it—I could not bear it!
And if I stopped and went out into that world again—how many weeks of agony would it cost me to get back to where I am now!
I must finish this time!
May 22d.
“No, officer, I am neither a burglar nor a highwayman, nor anything else worth bothering; I'm just a poet, and I'm crazy, to all practical purposes, so please get used to me and let me wander about the streets at these strange hours of the night without worrying!”
Poor, perplexed policeman! Poor, perplexed world! Poor, perplexed mothers and fathers, sisters and cousins and aunts of poets!
Mit deinen schwarzbraunen Augen
Siehst du mich forschend an:
“Wer bist du, und was fehlt dir,
Du fremder, kranker Mann!”
Who does not love the poet Heine—melodious, beautiful, bitter soul? Is there any other poet who can mingle, in one sentence, savage irony and tenderness that brings tears into the eyes? Who can tell the secret of his flower-like verses?
Ich bin ein deutscher Dichter,
Bekannt im deutschen Land;
Nennt man die besten Namen
So wird auch der meine genannt.
Und was mir fehlt, du Kleine,
Fehlt manchem im deutschen Land;
Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen,
So wird auch die meine genannt!
I have never seen but one beautiful thing in New York, and that is its mighty river in the night-time. I wander down to the docks when my work is done, and when it is still; I sit and gaze at it until the city is quite gone, and all its restlessness,—until there is but that grave presence, rolling restlessly, silently, as it has rolled for ages. It makes no comments; it has seen many things.
To-night I sat and watched it till a tangled forest sprang up about me, and I saw a strange, high-bowed, storm-beaten craft glide past me, ghostly white, its ghostly sailors gazing ahead and dreaming of spices and gold.
The old, old river—my only friend in a whole city! It goes its way—it is not of the hour.
It fascinates me, and I sit and sit and wonder. I gaze into its black and gurgling depths, and whisper what Shelley whispered: “If I should go down there, I should know!”
But no, I should not know anything.
The days when thou wert not, did they trouble thee? The days when thou art not shall trouble thee as much.
May 24th.
