Man Alone

".. Johnson was trying to work something out. He was trying to work out a restlessness that would not leave him in peace. He was thinking of Tom White and his machines, and Bill Jessup who would live and die there with his wife and two daughters, maids at the house, growing up and marrying and living and dying there, with Lincoln still a far journey to them, untouched by the cars going by and the aeroplanes overhead. He himself could never live anywhere again. He had tried to live and settle and things had happened to him. Now he could not do that again. He lived now to earn his living, and lying there he was thinking, trying to work out in himself what it was beyond that he could not want. There were thoughts within him that had not been there before. There were memories of men he had known and liked, men, black and clay-stained on New Zealand roads, sweating on steamer decks, paint-blistered, dirty and lice-ridden in the seamen's camp at Panama, tough, sceptical on New York docks. There was a desire in him now for a life that would give warmth and a meaning to these memories before he grew too old, for a life active, but with good food and good drink, and men moving, making something together." -John Mulgan. Man Alone. Selwyn and Blount, 1939.