I
We hear people complain about the subway: its brutal competitive
struggle, its roaring fury and madness. We think they have not
sufficiently considered it.
Any experience shared daily and for a long time by a great many
people comes to have a communal and social importance; it is
desirable to fill it with meaning and see whether there may not be
some beauty in it. The task of civilization is not to be always
looking wistfully back at a Good Time long ago, or always panting
for a doubtful millennium to come; but to see the significance and
secret of that which is around us. And so we say, in full
seriousness, that for one observer at any rate the subway is a great
school of human study. We will not say that it is an easy school: it
is no kindergarten; the curriculum is strenuous and wearying, and
not always conducive to blithe cheer.
But what a tide of humanity, poured to and fro in great tides over
which the units have little control. What a sharp and troubled
awareness of our fellow-beings, drawn from study of those thousands
of faces--the fresh living beauty of the girls, the faces of men
empty of all but suffering and disillusion, a shabby errand boy
asleep, goggling with weariness and adenoids--so they go crashing
through the dark in a patient fellowship of hope and mysterious
endurance. How can one pass through this quotidian immersion in
humanity without being, in some small degree, enriched by that
admiring pity which is the only emotion that can permanently endure
under the eye of a questioning star?
Why, one wonders, should we cry out at the pangs and scuffles of the
subway? Do we expect great things to come to pass without
corresponding suffering? Some day a great poet will be born in the
subway--spiritually speaking; one great enough to show us the
terrific and savage beauty of this multitudinous miracle. As one
watches each of those passengers, riding with some inscrutable
purpose of his own (or an even more inscrutable lack of purpose)
toward duty or liberation, he may be touched with anger and contempt
toward individuals; but he must admit the majesty of the spectacle
in the mass. One who loves his country for a certain candour and
quick vigour of spirit will view the scene again and again in the
hope of spying out some secrets of the national mind and destiny.
Daily he bathes in America. He has that curious sense of mystical
meaning in common things that a traveller feels coming home from
abroad, when he finds even the most casual glimpses strangely
pregnant with national identity. In the advertisements, despite all
their absurdities; in voices humorous or sullen; even in the books
that the girls are reading (for most girls read books in the subway)
he will try to divine some authentic law of life.
He is but a poor and mean-spirited lover--whether of his city, his
country, or anything else--who loves her only because he has known
no other. We are shy of vociferating patriotism because it is callow
and empty, sprung generally from mere ignorance. The true
enthusiast, we would like to think, is he who can travel daily some
dozen or score of miles in the subway, plunged in the warm wedlock
of the rush hours; and can still gather some queer loyalty to that
rough, drastic experience. Other than a sense of pity and affection
toward those strangely sculptured faces, all busy upon the fatal
tasks of men, it is hard to be precise as to just what he has
learned. But as the crowd pours from the cars, and shrugs off the
burden of the journey, you may see them looking upward to console
themselves with perpendicular loveliness leaping into the clear sky.
Ah, they are well trained. All are oppressed and shackled by things
greater than themselves; yet within their own orbits of free
movement they are masters of the event. They are patient and
friendly, and endlessly brave.