#thomaswolfe — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

We should read Thomas Wolfe every now and then...

"Proud Death, proud Death, whom I have seen by darkness, at so many times, and always when you came to nameless men, what have you ever touched that you have not touched with love and pity, Death?

Proud Death, wherever we have seen your face, you came with mercy, love, and pity, Death, and brought to all of us your compassionate sentences of pardon and release. For have you not retrieved from exile the desperate lives of men who never found their home?

Have you not opened your dark door for us who never yet found doors to enter and given us a room who, roomless, doorless, unassuaged, were driven on forever through the streets of life?

Have you not offered us your stern provender, Death, with which to stay the hunger that grew to madness from the food it fed upon, and given all of us the goal for which we sought but never found, the certitude, the peace, for which our overladen hearts contended, and made for us, in your dark house, an end of all the tortured wandering and unrest that lashed us on forever?

Proud Death, proud Death, not for the glory that you added to the glory of the king, proud Death, nor for the honor that you imposed upon the dignities of famous men, proud Death, nor for the final magic that you have given to the lips of genius, Death, but because you come so gloriously to us who never yet knew glory, so proudly and sublimely to us whose lives were nameless and obscure, because you give to all of us—the nameless, faceless, voiceless atoms of the earth—the awful chrism of your grandeur, Death, because I have seen and known you so well, and have lived alone so long with Loneliness, your brother, I do not fear you any longer, friend, and have made this praise for you."

(By: Thomas Wolfe, "DEATH THE PROUD BROTHER")

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