I have love for two towns. One is this Butte that I tiredly love
inside me. And the other is New York that I smoothly love with all my
surfaces.
It is some years--a little lump of years--since I have seen New York:
and it is two thousand miles away. So I see and feel its hard sweet
lurid magnetism now ten times sharper than when I lived in it. But I
felt it sudden and sharp at every turn then. A surface emotion which
hits one’s flesh and spreads wide over one’s area is more exciting
than a spirit emotion which pierces inward at one tiny point: an ice
shower-bath on the white skin is more anguishing than an ice-water
drink down the red throat. The spirit emotion lives longer and works
more damage and buries itself at last in proud shaded soul-reserves.
The surface emotion stays always on the surface and lives actively in
the front of one’s senses and musings.
The feel of New York is a mixture of ice-water, a corrosive acid and
human breath sweeping someway warmish against one’s flesh.
It is immensely ungentle, New York: immensely human: immensely
intriguing to all one’s selves. It is too big to have prejudices and
traditions of locality: so it leaves its dwellers free, by ones and
multitudes, to be human beings.
In South Bend and Toledo and Beloit and St. Paul and all the
tight-built inland towns they murder you with narrowness and
harshness and rancorous ill-will: they are scowlingly annoyed with
you for making them murder you.
In New York they murder you with a large soft wave of indifferent
insolence--no annoyance, no friction. New York eats you as it eats
its dinner, rather liking you.
And my love for New York is made of liking: a plaisance of liking.
made of liking: a plaisance of liking.
I like New York with a charmed restfulness for varied things in
it: subways, and Fourth Avenue, and the River, and Fifth Avenue on
a sunny October afternoon, and the statue of Nathan Hale, and old
cockroachy downtown buildings, and the soft rich whelming creamy
boiling-chocolate fragrance from the Huyler factory in Irving Place.
And mostly I like it for the people in it--People--Persons--People:
they are human beings.
In the inland towns people are half-afraid of thoughts, half-afraid
of spoken words, half-afraid of each other, half-afraid of the fact
of being human.
In New York they are not afraid of any humanness. Even when they
are in themselves craven-cowardly, cowardly enough to turn their own
stomachs, they still turn their humanness unfearfully face-outward
like upturned faces of a pack of cards.
An Italian organ-grinder grinding out his loud fierce music
in a long deep New York side-street is a human organ-grinder:
he bestows his rasped melody widely on everybody in ear-shot,
not individually--since all around him is a spreading world of
strangers--but jointly. So it feels-like.
A beggar-woman at a subway-entrance with a whine and a dirty face
and the deadly black cape and chicken-coopish beggar-odor is a human
beggar-woman. She throws out an inner savor of herself like a soiled
aura on all collectively who pass her. Each-and-all of New York by
tolerating and owning her partakes of her mean human essence.
A stout-hearted worn-bodied Jew factory girl working at a hard greasy
little machine day after day gives all New York her bit of young
virtue which is hardy and heroic and unaware: the whole Island of
looseness and vice has an equal gift of impregnable surprising sordid
purity thriving on sixes and sevens of poor dollars-a-week.
All of it is because New York is one Large Condition made of human
breaths and the worn scrapings of tired Youth rather than one large
town made of individuals and stone houses.
And in that is an odd enchantment for me who am born and grown in the
places of Half-fear with an old isolated whole fear always on me.
In New York I am a partaker of that smooth manna of humanness as I am
of the air and the sunshine and the little black specks of coal-soot:
partly from choice, partly willy-nilly, partly in the sweeping
unanalyzable pell-mell-ness of massed human nature.
And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human
friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities:
for I don’t like actual human beings too much around me. But yet
friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and
pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.
It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of
an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and
women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of
thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of
the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait,
and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are
made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She
says, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’ and clasps my hand, and we exchange
a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed
challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to
depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our
separate quality and _calibre_ is true rather than false. So close
and no closer may friendship be. And friendship, with-all, is closer
than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.
In a New York doorway I, made in broad loneliness of self, get
suddenly companion-warmed at the little pleasant twisted fire of
someone else.
It might be so in some other town, even Beloit, but it feels only
like New York to me.
I go in the room where the others are and they say, ‘Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,’
and I drink some tea and listen and talk in fragments of half-meanings.
And I get warmed and half-warmed and cooled and slightly scorched in
the easeful unevenly-heated humanness of the women and men sitting
around.
In the inland towns they throw their thoughts and ideas at you at
tea-time, inland thoughts and ideas, which hit you and then drop off
like little pebbles and nuts and hard green apples.
In New York they throw those things in the form of long ribbons,
heated from being worn next their skin, which fly out and wrap around
your skin: pleasantly or foolishly or fancifully.
The point of it is that nobody is afraid of that.
It is nothing fulfilling, nothing satisfying. It is merely human. It
is half-lyric.
It reassures me as a person: it makes me feel human in all my
surfaces.
Which are harder to humanize, in everybody, than any deepest deeps.
And it is therefore with all my surfaces, smoothly and restfully, I
love New York.
_Rhythm_