Quotation #2: Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe. Photo: Carl van Vechten.
Just wrap your chops around this…
A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces...
Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.- from Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
Isn’t that incredible? It's poetry. Prose speaks primarily to the brain, it has an intellectual message to transmit. But a poem, a poem speaks to the heart. Poetry is the direct transmission of feeling. That’s what Wolfe does so well.
What is Wolfe talking about in the above passage? I feel a yearning for some profound thing that has been lost. I think it might be the wisdom that we have all of us lost, the wisdom of a preverbal baby - the fresh-created being who can ‘remember speechlessly’ the place the place it came from - that mysterious place that we leave when we're born and return to when we die. The ‘great forgotten language’ of the soul, the ‘lost lane-end into heaven’ which cannot be put into words but can, sometimes, be approached wordlessly.
Ursula K le Guin wrote:
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this IN WORDS. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.- from Steering the Craft: a Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
What a beautiful paradox - that’s it exactly! That captures what Wolfe does, what I find so stirring about his writing. Half the time my brain has no idea what’s going on, but I feel so much when I read him. It’s rich, it’s musical, it’s words being used for their highest purpose: expressing what can’t be expressed by words.
We should all try and touch the sublime, the wordless, from time to time. Reading Wolfe is one of the things which takes me there. What does it for you?