Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Shortly after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe traveled to York Springs, a village in Pennsylvania, 
to visit with his deceased father’s kin. W. O. Gant, the father of the novel’s protagonist, was modeled by Wolfe on his own father, William Oliver Wolfe. In a letter to his mother in North Carolina, Wolfe recounted his look homeward to the litter of hinterland villages and hamlets where his father had farmed. The pastoral prettiness of the region stirred him to extoll the “great fields and mighty stone barns, the richest, fattest farming county you ever looked at.” A second letter, composed in New York City, mused on the character of the English, Scot-Irish, and Germans pioneers who had debarked in Philadelphia in the eighteenth century and hacked their way through the forests. “As I walk through the crowded and noisy streets of this immense city, and look at the dark swarthy faces of Jews, Italians, Greeks,” Wolfe wrote, “I realize more keenly than ever that I come from the old Americans — the people who settled the country, who fought in its wars, who pushed westward.” No writer has repeated Thomas Wolfe’s lyrical infatuation with Adams County, the place that bore and bred me. After I left this borderland along the Mason–Dixon Line for Cambridge, Massachusetts, which might as well be a different country, I searched the national culture for traces of the filtered deposits of the ruddy farmers and rural bourgeoisie who raised me. Of my old Americans, however, contemporary letters evokes only dark political innuendos, such as when Charles Lindbergh circumnavigates the region’s lush valleys and corrugated ridges, surveying his blood-and-soil partisans, in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. But when I separate the years since I left, turning them over one by one, I inhabit the psychic interior of Adams County’s commoners, a guarded, undemonstrative people who go to work, try to honor the Commandments, and return home to their families. In the theater of modern volatilities, the desiccated faith of such mainline Protestants has been shunted off stage, as though nothing poetic or vital ever happens behind the veil.  The story that is about to unfold is a metaphysical high drama. The central event, told to me in the flat intonations of a country teacher’s voice, imbued my spiritual inheritance not long after my father cracked up and left our family, having been “Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.” Revisiting the story of Christmas on Red Hill, I find myself a stranger roaming in a landscape I know intimately, as though seeing the event that shaped me through a picture window whose frame I cannot breach.  Belinda always began her story with a memory of the black-haired sophomore who crowded into a seat beside hers in college. When the class ended, her eye followed him as he stood and strode toward the door. He looked even taller than her. A shade darker, he wore heavy eyebrows that made him look older than twenty. On their first date, Carmen Monterossi said he grew up in Sharpsburg, an hour’s drive south from campus, outside Pittsburgh. Belinda said she grew up in Hanover, four hours southeast across the Alleghenies. His father, like hers, made a living in the construction trades. Carmen’s welded on Pittsburgh’s bridges. Belinda and Carmen held hands at the parties thrown by her sorority and his fraternity. They played tennis on campus and swam in Lake Arthur, and they studied cheek by jowl toward their shared ambition for a career in special education. Classes at Slippery Rock let out for the summer. One weekend, she took a plane to Pittsburgh to see him. She laughed when a giddy teenage girl stole in close and pinched Carmen’s buttocks on a downtown street, squealing as she crept away that she just touched the Steelers’ famous running back. In his beard, Carmen did look like a dead-ringer for Franco Harris. She herself had large hands and feet, long thin legs, a plain, narrow face, and a body built like a licorice stick. She had been a cheerleader in high school, hanging out with the jocks.  She cried hard when she broke up with him. In