By wink of water

My blog was originally named for the last passage in A Movable Feast (Hemingway) about Paris in the early days. I’m no longer in Paris, but in Boston, and I found a nice passage from Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and a River:

The train rushed on across the brown autumnal land, by wink of water and the rocky coasts, the small white towns and flaming colors and the lonely, tragic and elemental beauty of New England. It was the country of his heart’s desire, the dark Helen in his blood forever burning — and now the fast approach across October land, the engine smoke that streaked back on the sharp gray air that day!

The coming on of the great earth, the new lands, the enchanted city, the approach, so smoky, blind and stifled, to the ancient web, the old grimed thrilling barricades of Boston. The streets and buildings that slid past that day with such a haunting strange familiarity, the mighty engine steaming to its halt, and the great train-shed dense with smoke and acrid with its smell and full of the slow pantings of a dozen engines, now passive as great cats, the mighty station with the ceaseless throngings of its illimitable life, and all of the numerous, remote and mighty sounds of time forever held there in the station, together with a tart and nasal voice, a hand’s breadth off that said: “There’s hardly time, but try it if you want.”

He saw the narrow, twisted age-browned streets of Boston, then, with their sultry fragrance of fresh-roasted coffee, the sight of the man-swarm passing in its million-footed weft, the distant drone and murmur of the great mysterious city all about him, the shining water of the Basin, and the murmur of the harbor and its ships, the promise of glory and of a thousand secret, lovely and mysterious women that were waiting somewhere in the city’s web.

To me it’s about longing and familiarity and restlessness and finding what you want. I read a few pages more and I suppose I have to read the whole thing now.