Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the sky-girt, of whom the
mountains were his masters, the fabulous South. The picture of
flashing field, of wood, and hill, stayed in his heart forever:
lost in the dark land, he lay the night-long through within his
berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at
length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn,
standing quietly as if they had waited from eternity for this
meeting; or hearing, as the train in the dark hours of morning slid
into Savannah, the strange quiet voices of the men upon the
platform, the boding faint echoes of the station, or seeing, in
pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a cow, a boy, a drab,
dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed, at this moment of
rushing time, for which all life had been a plot, to flash upon the
window and be gone.
His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined
filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to
these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment,
the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of
accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him.
...
And it was this that awed him--the weird combination of fixity and
change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in
which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the
observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless
suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the
slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move.
It was as
if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration
of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the
timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-
pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or
a horse taking a hedge--movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air,
the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing
its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only,
these images that burnt in him existed without beginning or ending,
without the essential structure of time. Fixed in no-time, the
slattern vanished, fixed, without a moment of transition.
His sense of unreality came from time and movement, from imagining
the woman, when the train had passed, as walking back into the
house, lifting a kettle from the hearth embers. Thus life turned
shadow, the living lights went ghost again. The boy among the
calves. Where later? Where now?
Thomas Wolfe, from: Look Homeward, Angel
