"I hope you have a nice trip on the way over, John," your old pal said to you at the station. "And be sure to study hard, now, and get some good marks at College. And write to me!"
"Sure, Fouch," you told your old chum. "I'll write some tremendous documents and tell you all about College in detail."
And than you remember with poignant inklings of a new regret the mist in your mother's eyes as she fluttered her kindly hands all over your coat, brushing off specks of dust and infinitesimal strands of hair with a meticulous nervousness and a taut hopelessness that kindled a hot fire within your inner entrails. You don't know just what to call this hot fire which had burned your very eyes and caused them to unleash molten love in searing rivulets. Probably, you think, it is because you are leaving your Mother for the first time!
As a matter of fact, when you left your loved ones at the station, you didn't know much--all you knew was one thing: that you were leaving home, and going to College, and that a new and glittering existence awaited you, far-off and shimmering and towering into clear, lucid skies, shrieking out into space with an exultant triumph!
"Ah!" you say now, seated in the roaring train, the last remnants of your old home-town suburbs scattering by in sparse bits, as if completely blown to non-existence by the fact that you are leaving it. "Ah!" you repeat to yourself, "Now I am heading toward my goal--and I am hurtling through the land to my destination. I am no longer immovable. I am now alive!" You dream of those fond sayings with a puerile, knowing smile.
Ah, my poor little madman, still a child, why don't you open your eyes and look about you in the train. Look carefully at your fellow passengers. See those seamy, lined expressions; those tallow grimaces of mobile resignation, weariness, and impassiveness. These fellow-passengers of yours, little madman, why don't you study them carefully. Why don't you remove the mist of youth form your unassailed, unpummeled young eyes! Why don't you do this! Why must you wait for Life to beat it into you with its blunt hammer, its vulpine leer glutting above you with fresh new triumph!!!! But wait....
Now, it is four months later, and there is a blinding blanket of snow covering the earth. A train is wailing its mournful whistle across the alabaster wastes and our little madman is seated in the train, going back home for Christmas, four months of College under his belt.
He is thinking of the City Hall clock, as it has winked in the night for eighteen years. He is thinking of the smell of his cellar at home; of the murmurous hush of the river at night; of the wail of the winds through the backyard trees....and then he jumps with a delighted start! For the train has begun to slow down, and he sees the familiar old Mills, stolid and bowed in the blanked enoby of the night sky, silhouetted against the whiteness of the now. To him, they look as though they have been patiently waiting his arrival. He feasts his yesys upon them, but leaves his thirst only partially satiated. Now the train is really slowing down, and our little madman takes up his grips and rushed down the aisle. There is more to come, more miracles to be beheld, and more wonders to stun him!
"Homeville!" croaks the conductor in his wooden weariness, going to the door of the train and spitting out in the night air. Our little madman stands behind the conductor, eyes riveted upon the broad blueness of his back, the maddening bulk of this man thrust between himself and the glorious happiness which awaits him at the station.
Now! The train is easing to a crawling stop, and you wait while the torturous engineer blasts all the atoms of your existence with his damned preciseness! Slow, slowly---please get out of my way, Mr. Conductor, I want to see my old Home Town, I want to consume the sight of it, to masticate it, to slurp up its blood....
At last, the blue-uniformed conductor swings down to the platform, and everything is unfolded to your clouded gaze. You see a group of old familiar faces, and you think of God as you watch the radiance and warmth sing up to your very soul. You seel all that God-like essence come up to you from the dark night, and your Faith is redeemed. You see God before you, emblazoned in all those loved faces like a starry tarpaulin. The all-encompassing, all-loving God!
With all the nonchalance that you can muster, in an effort to betray your College experience, you step down from the train, your hands trembling wildly. You kiss the lovely cheek of your mother and sister, and you shake hands warmly with your father, a stout stone of integrity; and you clasp the wiry hand of your best pal.
You realize that a man can take a train and never reach his destination, that a man has no destination at the end of the road, but that he merely has a starting point on the road--which is Home. You see it all, this epic of mankind, before your eyes; it is a limpid and awful truth, it has a naked and beautiful reality. You are now a man, little madman. When you left, four months ago, you were but a child--you with your high ideals and mad dreams. Now, I hope that you see everything, that you will from now on read it in the faces of the passengers of the world, the faces that comet across the surfaces of the Earth, forever searching for the destination. I hope, little madman, that you realize that the destination is really not a tape at the end of a straight-away racing course, but that it is a tape on an oval that you must break over and over again as you race madly around. And whether you give up the race after circumventing the swarming oval once, or whether you continue through the marathon alleys of life?whichever you do, little madman, you shall always return to the place where the road began.
For the place where the road began is composted of infantine hallucinations and youthful ambition, and thses are deathless elements that remain within you forever.
This Home that I speak of, madmen, may be anywhere on earth. It is the soul of Man, I think, and it is a component, a mixture, a swarming vat-like concoction of all the ideals of Man, embodied upon one portion of the Earth's crusty integument, and thrust upwards in a gesture of terrible finality and beauty that shall forever beckon.
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