You Can't Go Home Again

by Thomas Wolfe

  He lies! And now we know he lies! He is not gloriously, or in any other way, ourselves. He is not our friend, our son, our brother. And he is not American! For, although he has a thousand familiar and convenient faces, his own true face is old as Hell.

  Look about you and see what he has done.

  Dear Fox, old friend, thus we have come to the end of the road that we were to go together. My tale is finished--and so farewell.

  But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you:

  Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:

  "To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth----

  "--Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, towards which the conscience of the world is tending--a wind is rising, and the rivers flow."

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  THE END

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