7
Once, I laughed.
Not at the slapstick landslide of dirty dishes on the dowagers.
Not at the weird vanishing of Mrs. Doffin.
But at the matter of a baked apple.
O England--culture uncultivated!
Brave boors.
8
Toward half past five I got my nose bloodied.
It happened this way:
I went down to the newsstand for a typewriter ribbon; the energy of my
sentiments had worn holes in the incumbent tape.
While I was waiting for a red light on Madison Avenue I heard band
music and saw people scurrying toward Fifth. I went over to see the
parade.
It was a listless marching--veterans on gummy asphalt all along the
limp trees by the Park. The older men from the older war rode in mimic
locomotives that bucked their front wheels, hooted sirens, clanked
bells. Some current soldiers marched--carrying rifles with hot metal
parts, and behind them came a show of mechanized equipment, with bands
interspersed. I listened to the bands and thought of Shakespeare's
reference to men who couldn't contain their urine when they heard
the bagpipes play. Brass bands, as much as anything, had undone the
loose hold of the Germans on sense. Songs about rolling caissons and
lifting anchors were flaring the eyes and dropping the chins of the
street-lining crowds here, too. I studied these people, remembering
all philosophers and the scientists and their faith in reason. Man's
monumental Thought--his pride--was silly in these surroundings.
Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes,
Hume, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, and a hundred
more--compartments of order in a chaos of shining orbs and panting
tongues. Pretty compositions, real in themselves, and true enough--but
floating in a flood their owners did not observe or--if they saw
it--ruled irrelevant, nor realized they rode it, too. What old classic
premise could stand the test of a brass band? None.