May 17, 2018 Tom Wolfe

May 17, 2018

Tom Wolfe

“It is the duty of the man of letters to supervise the

culture of the language, to which the rest of culture 

is subordinate, and to warn us when our language is

ceasing to forward the ends proper to man. The

 end of social man is communion in time through love, 

which is beyond time.”

Allen Tate

“There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and 

found and lost again and again: And now under conditions that 

seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss for us.

There is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

T.S. Eliot

I shan’t try to paint those lilies.

 Wolfe was the watchman on the tower who sounded the tocsin and protected us from the “Trousered Apes” whose only goal was to debase and demean the “permanent things” still to be found. I suggest you start at the end with “The Kingdome of Speech”.

150 years from now when a stranger asks what happened then, Wolfe, “through skill and cunning” will tell us oh so beautifully who is behind the curtain. Like Cromwell commanding the artist to include his warts, Wolfe’s “nose eating weevils” will command the reader to dig deeper, to find the “Right Stuff”.

I just saw “Sully”. It is a movie about Flight 1549 with 155 people in the plane landing in the Hudson River. Any landing where everyone walks away is a “good” landing. 1549 had a “good” landing. But it is a story of a pilot doing what he was trained to do. Pilots get paid to take off and land. Nobody is ever drafted to be a pilot. Pilots are on the edge because they choose to be. They are Ulysses; they are Captain Horatius. Wolfe told us this.

Wolfe moves onto a ledge where Johnson and Twain stand.

And, to make it worse for the “men without chests” that he pilloried, poleaxed, and pissed on he was a man’s man – because of him we can still say that – and a jolly companion as well.

Perhaps the sword had worn out, not from rust, but from use, when he did not put one of his well shod feet squarely up the ass of Secretary Jay Forbes Kerry, the Godalmighty Secretary of State, for bringing James Taylor, who looked like he just got tossed out of rehab yet again, to Paris to celebrate with some perpetually outraged and offended enraged Muslim WOG terrorists who had just killed a bunch of Jews.

Wolfe defines, will define, “unique” 

RIP

Kevin Smith  

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET