You Can't Go Home Again

by Thomas Wolfe

Anyone is happy who confidently awaits the fulfillment of his highest dreams,

You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them—but it has been this way with all men.

He was a business man, so of course he liked to gamble. What is business but a gamble?

You have never run a business.

And women—well, they were women, and there was no help for that.

Yet they said nothing. For it was one of the qualities of this time that men should see and feel the madness all around them and never mention it—never admit it even to themselves.

The lights were out in all the towering office buildings, except for a single window high up in the face of a darkened cliff which betrayed the presence of some faithful slave of business who was working through the night upon a dull report that had to be ready in the morning.

(Baseball’s a dull game, really; that’s the reason that it is so good. We do not love the game so much as we love the sprawl and drowse and shirt-sleeved apathy of it.)

These hideous doubts, despairs, and dark confusions of the soul would come and go, and George knew them as every lonely man must know them.

So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him—this, seeker, is the promise of America.

It armed them with a philosophy, an aesthetic, of escapism. It tended to create in those of us who were later to become artists not only a special but a privileged character: each of us tended to think of himself as a person who was exempt from the human laws that govern other men, who was not subject to the same desires, the same feelings, the same passions—who was, in short, a kind of beautiful disease in nature, like a pearl in an oyster.

Yes, artists are all very special snowflakes.