All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [197]
We went different ways in the world, as I have said, but I had with always that image of the little girl on the waters of the way, all innocence and trustfulness, under the stormy sky. Then, there came the day when that image was taken from me. I learned that Anne Stanton had become the mistress of Willie Stark, that somehow by an obscure and necessary logic I had handed her over to him. That fact was too horrible to face, for it robbed me of something out of the past by which, unwittingly until that moment, I had been living.
So I fled west from the fact, and in the West, at the end of history, the Last Man on that Last Coast, on my hotel bed, I had discovered the dream. That dream was the dream that all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve. When you flee as far as you can flee, you will always find that dream, which is the dream of our age. At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic. At least, it was so for me for a certain time. It was bracing because after the dream I felt that, in a way, Anne Stanton did not exist. The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather complicated piece of mechanism. At that time, when I first discovered that view of things–really discovered, in my own way and not from any book–I felt that I had discovered the secret source of all strength and all endurance. That dream solves all problems.
At first it was, as I have said, rather bracing and tonic. For after the dream there is no reason why you should not go back and face the fact which you have fled from (even if the fact seems to be that you have, by digging up the truth about the past, handed over Anne Stanton to Willie Stark), for any place to which you may flee will now be like the place from which you have fled, and you might as well go back, after all, to the place where you belong, for nothing was your fault or nobody’s fault, for things are always as they are. And you can go back in good spirits, for you will have learned two very great truths. First, that you cannot lose what you have never had. Second, that you are never guilty of a crime which you did not commit. So there is innocence and a new start in the West, after all.
If you believe the dream you dream when you go there.
Chapter Eight
So having lain on the bed in Long Beach, California, and seen what I had seen, I rose, much refreshed, and headed back with the morning sun in my face. I threw in my direction the shadows of white or pink or baby-blue stucco bungalows (Spanish mission, Moorish, or American-cute in style), the shadows of filling stations resembling the gingerbread house of fairy tale or Anne Hathaway’s cottage or an Eskimo igloo, the shadows of palaces gleaming on hills among the arrogant traceries of eucalyptus, the shadows of leonine hunched mountains, the shadow of a boxcar forgotten on a lonely siding, and the shadow of a man walking toward me on a white road out of the distance which glittered like quartz. It threw the beautiful purple shadow of the whole world in my direction, as I headed back, but I kept right on going, at high speed, for if you have really been to Long Beach, California, and