The Far and the Near by Thomas Wolfe

    Thomas Wolfe, 1900-1938, American writer.

    The aura, the scenery and the pattern of description in this essay are most beautiful as far as my sphere of reading English literature is concerned.  I love it so much that I eagerly aspire to learn every sentence of it by heart since it is a little short just occupying three pages.

    I did not read it last night, but this morning, because I enjoyed a excellent dinner in a restaurant at Yuquan Street with a classmate when I was a postgraduate after I kept on jogging for an hour in Lianhuachi Park yesterday afternoon. Being slightly drunk produced bad effect on my capability to read materials in English and my habit of getting up at six o'clock every morning.  Therefore I did not come to where I worked until about half past eight o'clock. Then, more or less ten minutes were spent in reading this essay.

    This essay is filled with a good amount of philosophical meaning.  When it is far it is perfect; when it is near it is so bad.  The principle is so simple that you would be destined to encounter a magnificent variety of barriers in course of  contriving and making it.  Surprisingly, Thomas Wolfe has climbed over the mountain of the difficulties and created such a excellent beauty.

    On the outskirts of a little town upon a rise of land that swept back from the raily there was a tidy little cottage of white boards, trimmed vividly with green blinds.  To one side of the house there was a garden neatly patterned with plots of growing vegetables, and an arbor for the grapes which ripened late in August.  Before the house there were three mighty oaks which sheltered it in their clean and massive shade in summer, and to the other side there was a border of gay flowers.  The whole place had an air of tidiness, thrift, and modest comfort.

    Every day for more than twenty years, as the train had approached this house, the engineer had blown on the whistle, and every day, as soon as she heard this signal, a woman had appeared on the back porch of the little house and waved to him.   At first she had a small child clinging to her skirts, and now this child had grown to full womanhood, and every day she, too, came with her mother to the porch and waved.

    The engineer had grown old and gray in service.  He and driven his great train, loaded with its weight of lives,  across the land ten thousand times.           He had known all the grief, the joy, the peril and the labor such a man could know; he had grown seamed and weathered in his loyal service, and now, schooled by the qualities of faith and courage and humbleness that attended his labor, he had grown old, and had the grandeur and the wisdom these men have.

    But no matter what peril or tragedy he had known, the vision of the little house had the women waving to him with a brave free motion of the arm had become fixed in the mind of the mind of the engineer as somethingbeautiful and enduring, something beyong all change and ruin, and something that would always be the same, no matter what mishap, grief or error might break the iron schedule of his day.

    The sight of the little house and of these tow women gave him hte most extraordinary happiness he had ever known.  He had seen them in thousand lights, a hundred weathers.  He had seen them through the harsh bare light of wintry gray across the brown and frosted stubble of the earth, and he had seen them again in the green luring sorcery April.

    He felt for them and for the little house in which they lived such tenderness as a man might feel for his children, and at length the picture of their lives was carved so sharply in his heart that he felt that he knew their lives completely, to every hour and every moment of the day, and he resolved that one day, when his years of service should be ended, he would go and find these people and speak last with them whose lives had been so wrought into his own.

    That day came.  At last the engineer stepped from a train onto the station platform of the town where these two women lived.   He was a pensioned servant of his company, with no more work to do.       Everything was so strange to him as he had never seen this town befor.  As he walked on, his sense of bewildermeng and confusion grew.  Could this be the town he had passed ten thousand times?  Were these the same houses he had seen so oftenfrom the high windows of his cab?  It was all unfamiliar, as disquieting as a city in a dream, and the perplexity of his spirit increased as he went on.

    Presently the houses thinned into the straggling outposts of the town, and the street faded into a country road--the one which the women lived.