All my life I’ve liked the Back of a magazine.
Some black-browed Wednesday I purchase a magazine, a fifteen-cent
one, and read it through. I read the stories and they deeply
engage or lightly interest me. I read the ‘special articles’ and
if they tell about flying machines or wild birds or hospitals or
woman-prisoners in penitentiaries they charm or absorb my thoughts.
I look at the illustrations and try to decide whether they are art
or science or mechanism. I read the verse and if it’s poetry it
exhilarates me as if closed shutters were opened to let Day into a
gloomy Room.
Then I read the advertisements in the Back and they do all of those
things to me in comforting life-giving oxygen-furnishing ways. Each
advertisement is a short story with an eerie little ‘plot’ in it:
each is a special article full of purpose: each is fruitful poetry:
and in my two hands I all-but have and hold those wonderful Things
they exploit.
They make me feel it’s my birthday and I’m presented a wealth of
lavish gifts.
They make me feel it’s all a world of playthings.
They make me feel like a baby with a rattle, a ball and a hoop of
bells.