Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town LifeAnderson, Sherwood
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Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
Anderson, Sherwood
City and town life -- Fiction; Ohio -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Pastoral fiction
That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson trembled to say to the
guests who came into his room when he was a young fellow in New York
City, but he always ended by saying nothing. Then he began to doubt his
own mind. He was afraid the things he felt were not getting expressed
in the pictures he painted. In a half indignant mood he stopped
inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of
locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him,
that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began
to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he
explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people.
His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among
whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch
Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself,
something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy, something
that understood all about such things as the wounded woman behind the
elders in the pictures.
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all
children are egotists. He did not want friends for the quite simple
reason that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of
his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could
harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among
these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to
be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last
and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a
kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing
Washington Square in the city of New York.
Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to get lonely and to want to
touch actual flesh-and-bone people with his hands. Days passed when his
room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and desire grew in his mind.
At night strange fevers, burning within, kept him awake. He married a
girl who sat in a chair next to his own in the art school and went to
live in an apartment house in Brooklyn. Two children were born to the
woman he married, and Enoch got a job in a place where illustrations
are made for advertisements.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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