Look Homeward, Angel
This is the angel sculpted by Thomas Wolfe’s father, to mark a grave, and then brooded upon by the protagonist in Wolfe’s autobiographical first novel, Look Homeward, Angel.
All that took place in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe’s hometown.
Today however the statue sits in the first town south along the interstate, Hendersonville, in a historic graveyard atop a knoll.
A little road runs up the knoll, terminating in a little loop at one of the graveyard’s entrances. The road seems to have been part of the cemetery once, — an elegant driveway — but at some point was privatized and populated with small houses.
I bought one such house this past spring. (At the very height of the housing boom, it seems.) It sits on the loop, about forty yards from the graveyard.
Homeward would seem to be heavenward.
As you were.
