From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [72]
. . . It happened on one of those warm February nights before the rainy season started when the stars seemed near enough to finger. He had come out of the smoky drunkenness of Choy’s feeling the beer all through him lightly and stopped in the lighted tunnel of the sallyport that funneled the large sounds of the night. Across the quad the lights in the 2nd Battalion were still on and shadowy figures moved across the porches in front of them. The dark quadrangle was sprinkled with the lightning bugs of cigaret butts, clustered around pitchers of beer, glowing as some one dragged and then fading out again.
From over in the far corner near the bugler’s megaphone came the ringing chords of a guitar and voices raised in four-part harmony. It was rule of thumb harmony, but it was closely knit and it carried clear and sharp across the quad, sounding good. And in the slowly moving harmony he recognized Sal’s twanging nasal, standing out, more hillbilly than any mountain man, although he was a long nosed Wop from Scranton. They were singing Truckdriver’s Blues.
“Feelin mighty weary, from my head down to my shoes . . . Got to keep a rollin . . . truckdriver’s blues . . . Never did have nothin, got nothin much to lose . . . Got a lowdown feelin . . . truckdriver’s blues.”
And the utter simplicity of the plaintive lament in Sal Clark’s voice reached out and touched him. He felt his anger and indignation at Warden and this setup dwindling away into a kind of deep perceptive melancholy for which there were no words. It was all in the words of the song, but the words actually said nothing at all; except that a truckdriver was weary and had the blues.
The music came to him across the now bright, now dull, slowly burning cigaret of each man’s life, telling him its ancient secret of all men, intangible, unfathomable, defying long-winded descriptions, belying intricate cataloguings, simple, complete, asking no more, giving no less, words that said nothing yet said all there was to say. The song of the one-eyed man who had driven the ox sled through the summer hills in the Kentucky mountains, the song of the Choctaw on his reservation, the song of the man who had laid the rollers for the stones heavy as death to build the glorious monument to the king. In the simple meaningless words he saw himself, and Chief Choate, and Pop Karelsen, and Clark, and Anderson, and Warden, each struggling with a different medium, each man’s path running by its own secret route from the same source to the same inevitable end. And each man knowing as the long line moved as skirmishers through the night woodsey jungle down the hill that all the others were there with him, each hearing the faint rustlings and straining to communicate, each wanting to reach out and share, each wanting to be known, but each unable, as Clark’s whining nasal was unable, to make it known that he was there, and so each forced to face alone whatever it was up ahead, in the unmapped alien enemy’s land, in the darkness.
Mazzioli and the other clerks who congregated mornings at Choy’s to discuss Art and Life were blind. He knew them, so involved in intricate conversation, so secure in pointless argument, they could not see the thing they sought to grasp lay right before them, all around them, and could be touched only momentarily, but never grasped and held by any sharp dissection. It spoke now from the bottomless shallows of a hillbilly song that in its artless simplicity said everything their four-dollar words could never say, went back to a basic simplicity that gave a sudden flashing picture of all life that could never be explained and an understanding of it that could never be expressed.
The clerks, the kings, the t