The Death of Benjamin Gant
The rattling in the wasted body, which seemed for hours to have given over to death all of life that is worth saving, had now ceased. The body appeared to grow ridid before them. Slowly, after a moment, Eliza withdrew her hands. But suddenly, marvellously, as if his resurrection and rebith had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration; his gray eyes opened. Filled with a terrible vision of all life in the one moment, he seemed to rise forward bodilessly from his pillows without support - a flame, a light, a glory - joined at length in death to the dark spirit who had brooded upon each footstep of his lonely adventure on earth; and, casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain mummers of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornful and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.
We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death - but who can belive in the nothingness of Ben? Life Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world. And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door.
O Artemidorus, farewell!
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I was moved by that passage from Look Homeward, Angel more powerfully than by anything else I've ever read before or since. I don't know why exactly. I never knew what Wolfe meant by "O, Artemidorus, farewell!," just know that I began weeping after reading it. Today, almost twenty years after reading the novel, I decided to google the phrase and see if I could finally find what it meant. I stumbled upon your blog entry and had to wonder what had inspired you to post this passage. I've never gone back to re-read the novel, fearing I'd mess with some magic that took place for me in that reading experience. The phrase, "O, Artemidorus, farewell," though, is burned into my memory forever. Nice to share it again with you.
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