The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [236]
He opened his book, but after a few more pages, closed it a second time. He was too lonely, too aware of almost complete rootlessness to study. Everything of value, all his ambitions, had turned, churned on him, curdled. He remembered himself as a boy, one of the neighborhood goofs. Around the corner he was now more of a goof than ever. His nostalgias for past experiences in the neighborhood seemed to have died too. He hated it all. It was all part of a dead world; it was filthy; it was rotten; it was stupefying. It, all of the world he had known, was mirrored ins it. He had been told things, told that the world was good and just, and that the good and just were rewarded, lies completely irrelevant to what he had really experienced; lies covering a world of misery, neuroticism, frustration, impecuniousness, hypocrisy, disease, clap, syphilis, poverty, injustice.
He tried again to study. He envisioned a better world, a cleaner world, a world of ideals such as that the Russians were attempting to achieve. He had to study to prepare himself to create that world. A few more pages, and he again closed the book.
His sense of loneliness seemed to grow upon him. The air compressor behind him suddenly whirred, and he jumped with that fear that is caused by unexpected distraction in a moment of over-sensibility. He sat down again. He opened a book of readings in English literature, and read The Garden of Proserpine. His realization that death was the end terrified him. Then he was lulled, and he imagined a world when the last human had died, a world of tall grass over the gravestones of humanity, with winds sweeping the grass, through which the sunlight spread to reflect colors perceivable by no eye. Death seemed like a sensuous falling into sleep. But it was not so. It was the last slap in one’s face, a final defeat, disgusting, disintegrating, insensate. His courage ebbed. Who was he to dream of doing things? What did he know? What had he accomplished?
He wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know how. He wanted to purge himself completely of the world he knew, the world of Fifty-eighth Street, with its God, its life, its lies, the frustrations he had known in it, the hates it had welled up in him. The mere desire gave him a sense of power. Without his having seen the man enter, an old Negro, hunched, the weary price of work in his creased face, stood before him holding a gasoline can. He bought four cents worth of kerosene. They talked.
“You all is white and young. You is not black, you all has a chance in dis wort’.”
“Someday you will, too, maybe.”
“Ah, no, not in dis worl’, son!”
He watched the Negro slowly leaving, a wistful snapshot as he crossed the station driveway, and turned down Wabash Avenue. He was returning with the kerosene for the lamps. He lived in, one of the hovels along Wabash Avenue. He gave O’Neill a sense of the misery of the world, perhaps the unnecessary misery in it.
It would all go in a newer, cleaner world. He seethed with sudden dizzying adolescent dreams and visions of this new world. He, too, he would destroy the old world with his pen; he would help create the new world. He would study to prepare himself. He saw himself in the future, delivering great and stirring orations, convincing people, a leader, a savior of the world. He became aware of the clock. It was fifteen minutes past his closing time. He hurriedly closed up the station, and walked to the elevated at Twenty-sixth Street. Riding home, tired, he felt that people didn’t realize they were riding home with somebody who was destined to do big things. His dreams again collapsed on him like a tire gone suddenly flat. He repeated and repeated a line from Swinburne’s poem:
“Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.”