QOTD: Which historical figure would you want to meet and have a conversation with?

As fun & useful as having that tricked out DeLorean would be, going back to the future for chats (or hanging chads) doesn’t interest me.

But if I could tweak the Q just a just as likely smidge, bringing any number of people I was personally acquainted with, whose preceding reputations & actualities I actually knew to the extent such are knowable (& assuming that traction still bit post-thaw like it did pre) back out of retirement to talk here & now would be interesting to me. Then I’d rewrite just a bit, if necessary, The Wind Cries Mary – well, I’d sing it a bit differently.

Some Thomas Wolfe:

As It had Always Been

Grey twilight
Filtered through the windows once again.

The train had reached the tunnel’s mouth.
On both sides now
Were ancient walls of masonry,
Old storied buildings,
Dark as time
And ancient as man’s memory.

The boy peered through the window,
Up as far as eyes could reach,
At all those tiers of life,
Those countless cells of life,
The windows, rooms, & faces
Of the everlasting & eternal city.

They leaned above him
In their ancient silence.
They returned his look.
He looked into their faces
And said nothing,
No word was spoken.
The people of the city
Leaned upon the sills of evening
And they looked at him.

They looked at him
Through the silent yet attentive curtains
Of all their ancient & historic laundries.
They looked at him through pendant sheets,
Through hanging underwear,
Through fabrics of a priceless & unknown tapestry.
And he knew
That all was now as it has always been,
As it would be tomorrow & forever.

Full with the Pulse of Time

The river is a tide of moving waters:
By night it floods the pockets of the earth.
By night it drinks strange time, dark time.
By night the river drinks proud potent tides
Of strange dark time.
By night the river drains the tides,
Proud potent tides of time’s dark waters
That, with champ & lift of teeth,
With lapse & reluctation of their breath,
Fill with a kissing glut the pockets of the earth.
Sired by the horses of the sea,
Maned with the dark,
They come.

They come! Ships call!
The hooves of night, the horses of the sea,
Come on below their manes of darkness.
And forever the river runs.
Deep as the tides of time & memory,
Deep as the tides of sleep,
The river runs.

And there are ships there!
Have we not heard the ships there?
(Have we not heard the great ships going down the river?
Have we not heard the great ships putting out to sea?)

Great whistles blow there.
(Have we not heard strange time, dark time,
Strange tragic time there?
Have we not heard dark time, strange time,
The dark, the moving tide of time
As it flows down the river?)

And in the night-time, in the dark there,
In all the sleeping silence of the earth,
Have we not heard the river, the rich immortal river,
Full of its strange dark time?

Full with the pulse of time it flows there,
Full with the pulse of all men living, sleeping,
Dying, waking,
It will flow there,
Full with the billion dark & secret moments of our
lives
It flows there.
Filled with all the hope, the madness
And the passion of our youth
It flows there,
In the daytime, in the dark,
Drinking with ceaseless glut the land,
Mining into its tides the earth
As it mines the moments & hours of our life into its
tides,
Moving against the sides of ships,
Foaming about piled crusting of old wharves,
Sliding like time & silence by the vast cliff of the city,
Girdling the stony isle of life with moving waters –
Thick with the wastes of earth,
Dark with our stains, & heavied with our dumpings,
Rich, rank, beautiful, & unending
As all life, all living,
As it flows by us, by us, by us,
To the sea!

The Ghosts of Time

Proud, cruel, everchanging & ephemeral city,
To whom we came once when our hearts were high,
Our blood passionate & hot,
Our brain a particle of fire:
Infinite & mutable city, mercurial city,
Strange citadel of million-visaged time –
O endless river & eternal rock,
In which the forms of life
Came, passed, & changed intolerably before us!
And to which we came, as every youth has come,
With such enormous madness,
And with so mad a hope –
For what?

To eat you, branch & root & tree;
To devour you,
Golden fruit of power & love & happiness;
To consume you to your sources,
River & spire & rock,
Down to your iron roots;
To entomb within our flesh forever
The huge substance of your billion-footed pavements,
The intolerable web & memory of dark million-
visaged time.

And what is left now
Of all your madness, hunger, & desire?
What have you given,
Incredible mirage of all our million shining hopes,
To those who wanted to possess you wholly
To your ultimate designs, your final sources,
From whom you took the strength, the passion.
And the innocence of youth?

What have we taken from you,
Protean & phantasmal shape of time?
What have we remembered of your million images,
Of your billion weavings out of accident & number,
Of the midless fury of your dateless days,
The brutal stupefaction of your thousand streets &
pavements?
What have we seen & known that is ours forever?

Gigantic city, we have taken nothing –
Not even a handful of your trampled dust –
We have made no image on your iron breast
And left not even the print of a heel
Upon your stony-hearted pavements.
The possession of all things,
Even the air we breathed,
Was withheld from us,
And the river of life & time
Flowed through the grasp of our hands forever,
And we held nothing for our hunger & desire
Except the proud & trembling moments,
One by one.

Over the trodden & forgotten words,
The rust & dusty burials of yesterday,
We were born again into a thousand lives & deaths,
And we were left forever
With only the substance of our waning flesh
And the haunting of an accidental memory,
With all its various freight of great & little things
We passed & vanished instantly
And could never be forgotten,
And of those unbidden & unfathomed wisps &
fumes of memory
That share the mind with all the proud dark images
Of love & death.

The tugging of a leaf upon a bough in late October,
A skirl of blown papers in the street,
A cloud that came & went
And made its shadow in the lights of April,
And the forgotten laughter of lost people in dark streets,
A face that passed us in another train,
The house our mistress lived in as a child,
A whipping of flame at a slum’s cold corner,
The corded veins on an old man’s hand,
The feathery green of a tree,
A daybreak in a city street in the month of May,
A voice that cried out sharply & was silent in the
night,
And a song that a woman sang,
A word that she spoke at dusk before she went away –
The memory of a ruined wall,
The ancient empty visage of a half-demolished house
In which love lay,
The mark of a young man’s fist in crumbling plaster,
A lost relic, brief & temporal,
In all the everlasting variousness of your life,
As the madness, pain & anguish
In the heart that caused it –
These are all that we have taken from you,
Iron-breasted city.
And they are ours & gone forever from us,
Even as things are lost & broken in the wind,
As the ghosts of time are lost,
As the everlasting river
That flowed past us in darkness to the sea.

I see what you did there.