faint and incessant

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways


I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's a hard, and it' a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall






... Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty


Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten


Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it


Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall


{Bob Dylan - 1963}




------------------------------------
The 1968 presidential election was similar to the 2016 one, in that there was no incumbent in the race. 


President Johnson had decided to not run again; he would retire to his Texas ranch. 


So the contest was between three non-occupants of the White House:  George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Hubert Humphrey.


--------------------------- [excerpt, The Education of a Public Man, by Hubert H. Humphrey] ------------------------- Though mother was born in Norway, and my father in Oregon, it was father who used to speak about our country with the reverence of the immigrant.


"Just think of it, boys," he said once, "here we are in the middle of this great big continent, here in South Dakota, with the land stretching out for hundreds of miles, with people who can vote and govern their own lives, with riches enough for all if we will take care to do justice."




...In Doland, Dad was a Democrat among friends and neighbors who took their Republicanism -- along with their religion -- very seriously. ...


My political training began in Doland. ...


Republicanism was synonymous with respectability and Protestantism.  As a boy, I felt that to be a Democrat was to be, if not pagan, at least less than holy.




The "good folks" logic was rigid:  Democrats were Irish; Irish were Catholic; and if you were Democratic, Irish, and Catholic, it was a prima facie case that you could not be respectable, upstanding, or in touch with the True God. 


Even if you were neither Irish nor Catholic but still Democratic, their logic leapt over reason and heaped you in with that suspicious lot.




...When Dad discovered a field of art or learning, he plunged into it as though he were the original discoverer.  During the 1920s...he became interested in classical music. ...


After we moved to Huron, he encountered poetry.  ...He read everything from Edgar Guest to Longfellow to Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth.






...He subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Herald Tribune, the Minneapolis Journal, the St. Paul Dispatch, and the Watertown (S.D.) Public Opinion. 


Time after time, when he read about some political development in Washington or London or Berlin, he'd say, "You should know this, Hubert.  It might affect your life someday."


_______________________________________





[1968, as the Democrats' candidate for the presidency] -- I...said to my staff:  "I'm probably going to lose this election.  Not much we do seems to come out right.  But win or lose, I'm going to speak my mind, and I'm going to fight.  I'm not going to be denied the right to be heard and I'm going to say what I feel."





...I have had time to think about three topics that Richard Nixon and I handled much differently from each other.





I went to the South and refused to play the cheap politics of saying we would slow down desegregation. 


I had no "secret plan" to get us out of Vietnam. 


I refused to play games with the oil industry on the oil depletion allowance. 




(A small group of oil men came to see me at Waverly one day. 


I assumed they had come to talk about contributing. 


I did not understand that they had come to bargain. 


We were broke and needed their money, but I said that no tax reform bill ought to pass without substantially reducing the oil depletion allowance. 


I kept my honor. 


They kept their money.)




{Doubleday, 1976}


______________________________
___________________________





----------------------------- [excerpt, The Great Gatsby] ---------------- Gatsby's house was still empty when I left -- the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. ...





I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. 


One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps.  But I didn't investigate.  Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.




On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more.  On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. 


Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand. 




Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. 


And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes -- a fresh, green breast of the new world. 


Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.




And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. 


He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. 


He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.





{The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1925 - Charles Scribner's Sons}


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