His Great Adventure

Why is Matthew dead? Same answer. But as long as I refused to accept what was the case, I was in terrible shape. One day, about four years after his death, I surrendered. I stopped dwelling on the past. I accepted the present, the after-Matt present. The day I came to terms with the fact that life would never be as it was, that it had changed and transformed-that was the day I began to heal. Because I came to believe in what Wolfe and Whitman had written about. БЂњAll goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed.БЂ«E=mc2. 6 But I had another reason for thinking about WolfeБЂ™s Look Homeward, Angel. Its hero is Eugene Gant, a version of Wolfe. The novel depicts his preadult experiences, including the death of his brother Ben (one of the most famous deaths in American fiction). In the bookБЂ™s climax, Eugene is about to leave his hometown of Altamont, North Carolina (in real life, Asheville), and to embark on the continuing great adventure of his life (WolfeБЂ™s point is that every life, its pain and glory, is an adventure) ...»