“All that we know is that having everything we yet
hold nothing, that feeling the wild song of this great earth upwelling in us we
have no words to give it utterance. All that we know is that here the
passionate enigma of our lives is so bitterly expressed, the furious hunger
that so haunts and hurts Americans so desperately felt--that being rich, we all
are yet so poor, that having an incalculable wealth we have no way of spending
it, that feeling an illimitable power we yet have found no way of using it.
“Therefore we hurtle onward in the dark across
Virginia, we hurtle onward in the darkness down a million roads, we hurtle
onward driven by our hunger down the blind and brutal tunnel of ten thousand
furious and kaleidoscopic days, the victims of the cruel impulse of a million
chance and fleeting moments, without a wall at which to thrust the shoulder of
our strength, a roof to hide us in our nakedness, a place to build in, or a
door.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), Of Time and The River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth (1935)
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