• English

1Throughout Rob Stephenson’s novel Passes Through the reader comes across various quotations from many such different authors as Henri Bergson, Vladimir Nabokov, Walt Whitman, Marguerite Duras and more. I found this aspect quite interesting and I felt the need to rediscover some of these authors to see how they might have inspired the author or how their writings could be linked to Rob Stephenson’s writings. I chose to focus on Walt Whitman, famous American poet of the 19^th century, the master of free verse and of hypnotic language- mainly achieved through numerous repetitions. He inspired numberless writers after him and his legacy still lives on in American literature. In Passes Through, Rob Stephenson quotes an excerpt from poem 319 entitled “Think of The Soul” from Leaves of Grass: “…in a little while others will find their past in you…”

2Strikingly this quotation introduces the second part of Passes Through-a second part which I find even more poetic than the first. Here is Walt Whitman’s poem in full, “Think of the Soul”.

THINK of the Soul;
I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your Soul somehow to live in other spheres;
I do not know how, but I know it is so.

Think of loving and being loved;
I swear to you, whoever you are, you can interfuse yourself with such things that everybody that sees you shall look longingly upon you. 5

Think of the past;
I warn you that in a little while others will find their past in you and your times.

The race is never separated—nor man nor woman escapes;
All is inextricable—things, spirits, Nature, nations, you too—from precedents you come.

Recall the ever-welcome defiers, (The mothers precede them;) 10
Recall the sages, poets, saviors, inventors, lawgivers, of the earth;
Recall Christ, brother of rejected persons—brother of slaves, felons, idiots, and of insane and diseas’d persons.

Think of the time when you were not yet born;
Think of times you stood at the side of the dying;
Think of the time when your own body will be dying. 15

Think of spiritual results,
Sure as the earth swims through the heavens, does every one of its objects pass into spiritual results.

Think of manhood, and you to be a man;
Do you count manhood, and the sweet of manhood, nothing?

Think of womanhood, and you to be a woman; 20
The creation is womanhood;
Have I not said that womanhood involves all?
Have I not told how the universe has nothing better than the best womanhood?

3In this poem and in Passes Through, notions of creation and transmission stand out. I find this poem revealing as to the author’s relation to the body, to sensations and to the notion of inspiration. It puts forward a sense of connectedness, of both universality and individuality, and the tension between all said notions. To finish with, a short excerpt from Passes Through will further reveal the tension between author/inspiration and individuality/universality: “I began to notice where borders existed between me and other people. And when they were trespassed. The secure self is an illusion. Things get inside. And things get out.” (119)