“But I thought,” said Felix, “that what the artist was supposed to need was experience!”
“What an artist needs,” said Don, “is _background_.”
And _background_, Felix gathered from their further explanations, was something one got by being in many different places without ever settling down and belonging to any one place—by merely being there and, as Roger put it, “looking on disinterestedly while other people passionately and ridiculously did things.”
The idea rather appealed to Felix.... He secretly wished he had stood by and looked on while the others got drunk that night. He regretted his participation in that scene—regretted it in spite of the absence of any of the traditional unpleasant after-effects. He wished he had remained austerely aloof from the human activities of that occasion. What, after all, was the use of passionately hitting somebody in the face if you couldn’t remember afterward what it was all about?... He was inclined to think that Roger and Don were right; it was not the meaningless raw material of experience that one needed, but some calm, fixed point of view from which to look on and understand it.
Did they have such a point of view? He began to respect and envy them.
It was strange—he said to himself—that he should continue to be so upset by Rose-Ann’s absence! He realized grudgingly and unwillingly how much the centre of his Chicago she had been. Without her companionship, his life seemed to have lost its significance.
His class at Community House had come to seem a nuisance, his newspaper work mere empty trickery. And there was nothing in the outside world to turn to, no cause that seemed worth serving. Socialism—it was too Utopian. Social reform—perhaps that was not Utopian enough. The art of writing—no, he must not think of that.... He found in his life nothing to give it meaning.
Rose-Ann’s letters increased his sense of futility. They were friendly letters, telling of her mother’s illness, which it seemed was sufficiently real this time, and of her encounters with a family of aggressively brotherly brothers; and to these letters he had responded in equally friendly terms.
That was the trouble. He did not want to write friendly letters.... He wanted to write angry letters. He wanted to tell her to stop writing to him—to let him alone, and let him forget her, as she would soon forget him. He wanted to say: “You know, and I know, that your moment of freedom, and all it promised, is over for good now. Springfield has got you, you belong to your family again, you will never come back except as the wife of some fat Springfield manufacturer, to see the sights, or go to the theater with him and show off your new gowns, and—yes, you will come to Community House, and visit your old class, and as you go away you will say to your husband, ‘I used to know such a quaint and interesting boy here—I wonder what has become of him!’ And your fat husband will put his fat cigar into the other corner of his fat mouth, and say, ‘Yes, I suppose it’s a good thing your folks got you back to Springfield when they did!’ But he will be wrong, at that; Springfield is your natural habitat, you would have gone back there anyway....”