It would be strange if I could sit here, as I am doing
now, while my own face floated across the picture
made by the yellow house and the window. It would
be strange and beautiful if I could meet my wife, come
into her presence.
The woman whose face floated across my picture just
now knows nothing of me. I know nothing of her.
She has gone off, along a street. The voices
of her mind are talking. I am here in this room,
as alone as ever any man God made.
It would be strange and beautiful if I could float
my face across my picture. If my floating face
could come into her presence, if it could come into
the presence of any man or any woman—that
would be a strange and beautiful thing to have happen.
* * * *
*
Napoleon went down into
a battle riding on a horse.
General Grant went into a wood.
Alexander went down into a battle riding
on a horse.
* * * *
*
I’ll tell you what—sometimes the
whole life of this world floats in a human face in
my mind. The unconscious face of the world stops
and stands still before me.
Why do I not say a word out of myself to the others?
Why, in all our life together, have I never been able
to break through the wall to my wife?
Already I have written three hundred, four hundred
thousand words. Are there no words that lead
into life? Some day I shall speak to myself.
Some day I shall make a testament unto myself.
I am at my house in the country and it is late October.
It rains. Back of my house is a forest and in
front there is a road and beyond that open fields.
The country is one of low hills, flattening suddenly
into plains. Some twenty miles away, across the
flat country, lies the huge city Chicago.
On this rainy day the leaves of the trees that line
the road before my window are falling like rain, the
yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down heavily.
The rain beats them brutally down. They are denied
a last golden flash across the sky. In October
leaves should be carried away, out over the plains,
in a wind. They should go dancing away.
Yesterday morning I arose at daybreak and went for
a walk. There was a heavy fog and I lost myself
in it. I went down into the plains and returned
to the hills, and everywhere the fog was as a wall
before me. Out of it trees sprang suddenly, grotesquely,
as in a city street late at night people come suddenly
out of the darkness into the circle of light under
a street lamp. Above there was the light of day
forcing itself slowly into the fog. The fog moved
slowly. The tops of trees moved slowly.
Under the trees the fog was dense, purple. It
was like smoke lying in the streets of a factory town.
