The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [228]
XXII
A disturbing sense of loneliness caused Danny O’Neill to close the copy of The Theory of Business Enterprise which he was studying for one of his courses at the University. The elation of intellectual discovery and stimulation, the keenness of feeling mental growth within himself, the satisfaction of having covered additional proofs to buttress his conviction that the world was all wrong, which he had derived from his reading, suddenly eased.
He looked out of the window of the Upton Service Station on a corner of Wabash Avenue in the black belt where he worked. He felt as if he were in a darkened corner of the world that had been trapped in a moment of static equilibrium. The light on the corner seemed only to emphasize the dreariness of the scene. Across from him was the box-like carburetor factory that stood now darkened like a menace of gloom.
He had gone to services one night during the mission last week, and afterward, he had waited for Father Shannon. He had asked the priest if he could talk with him about the faith, because he was a University student who had lost his religion. Father Shannon had curtly replied that he was, for the present, very busy. The incident had crystallized many things in Danny’s mind. It had made him feel that it was not merely ignorance and superstition. It was perhaps not merely a vested interest. It was a downright hatred of truth and honesty. He conceived the world, the environment he had known all his life, as lies. He realized that all his education in Catholic schools, all he had heard and absorbed, had been lies.
An exultant feeling of freedom swept him. God was a lie. God was dead. God was a mouldering corpse within his mind. And God had been the center of everything in his life. All his past was now like so many maggots on the mouldering conception of God dead within his mind. He jumped up, and went outside to stand on the gravel service-station driveway, and shook his fist at the serene and brilliant March sky.
He opened his book, but after a few more pages, closed it a second time. He was too lonely, too aware of almost complete rootlessness to study. Everything of value, all his ambitions, had turned, churned on him, curdled. He remembered himself as a boy, one of the neighborhood goofs. Around the corner he was now more of a goof than ever. His nostalgias for past experiences in the neighborhood seemed to have died too. He hated it all. It was all part of a dead world; it was filthy; it was rotten; it was stupefying. It, all of the world he had known, was mirrored ins it. He had been told things, told that the world was good and just, and that the good and just were rewarded, lies completely irrelevant to what he had really experienced; lies covering a world of misery, neuroticism, frustration, impecuniousness, hypocrisy, disease, clap, syphilis, poverty, injustice.
He tried again to study. He envisioned a better world, a cleaner world, a world of ideals such as that the Russians were attempting to achieve. He had to study to prepare himself to create that world. A few more pages, and he again closed the book.
His sense of loneliness seemed to grow upon him. The air compressor behind him suddenly whirred, and he jumped with that fear that is caused by unexpected distraction in a moment of over-sensibility. He sat down again. He opened a book of readings in English literature, and read The Garden of Proserpine. His realization that death was the end terrified him. Then he was lulled, and he imagined a world when the last human had died, a world of tall grass over the gravestones of humanity, with winds sweeping the grass, through which the sunlight spread to reflect colors perceivable by no eye. Death seemed like a sensuous falling into sleep. But it was not so. It was the last slap in one’s face, a final defeat, disgusting, disintegrating, insensate. His courage ebbed. Who was he to dream of doing things? What did he know? What had he accomplished?
He wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know how. He wanted to purge himself completely of the world he knew, the world of Fifty-eighth Street, with its God, its life, its lies, the frustrations he had known in it, the hates it had welled up in him. The mere desire gave him a sense of power. Without his having seen the man enter, an old Negro, hunched, the weary price of work in his creased face, stood before him holding a gasoline can. He bought four cents worth of kerosene. They talked.