I wonder, old dear, why my mind has lately been going out towards you?
I wonder if you will ever read this? They say that wood-pulp paper
doesn’t last long nowadays. But perhaps some of my grandchildren (with
any luck, there should be some born, say twenty-five years hence)
may, in their years of tottering caducity, come across this scrap of
greeting, yellowed with age. With tenderly cynical waggings of their
faded polls, perhaps they will think back to the tradition of the
quaint vanished creatures who lived and strove in this city in the year
of disgrace, 1921. Poor old granfer (I can hear them say it, with that
pleasing note of pity), I can just remember how he used to prate about
the heyday of his youth. He wrote pieces for some paper, didn’t he?
Comically old-fashioned stuff my governor said; some day I must go to
the library and see if they have any record of it.
You seem a long way off, this soft September morning, as I sit here
and sneeze (will hay fever still exist in 2021, I wonder?) and listen
to the chime of St. Paul’s ring eleven. Just south of St. Paul’s brown
spire the girders of a great building are going up. Will that building
be there when you read this? What will be the Olympian skyline of
your city? Will poor old Columbia University be so far downtown that
you will be raising money to move it out of the congested slums of
Morningside? Will you look up, as I do now, to the great pale shaft
of Woolworth; to the golden boy with wings above Fulton Street? What
ships with new names will come slowly and grandly up your harbour? What
new green spaces will your street children enjoy? But something of
the city we now love will still abide, I hope, to link our days with
yours. There is little true glory in a city that is always changing.
New stones, new steeples are comely things; but the human heart clings
to places that hold association and reminiscence. That, I suppose, is
the obscure cause of this queer feeling that impels me to send you so
perishable a message. It is the precious unity of mankind in all ages,
the compassion and love felt by the understanding spirit for those, its
resting kinsmen, who once were glad and miserable in these same scenes.
It keeps one aware of that marvellous dark river of human life that
runs, down and down uncountably, to the unexplored seas of Time.
You seem a long way off, I say--and yet it is but an instant, and you
will be here. Do you know that feeling, I wonder (so characteristic
of our city) that a man has in an elevator bound (let us say) for the
eighteenth floor? He sees 5 and 6 and 7 flit by, and he wonders how he
can ever live through the interminable time that must elapse before he
will get to his stopping place and be about the task of the moment. It
is only a few seconds, but his mind can evolve a whole honeycomb of
mysteries in that flash of dragging time. Then the door slides open
before him and that instantaneous eternity is gone; he is in a new
era. So it is with the race. Even while we try to analyze our present
curiosities, they whiff away and disperse. Before we have time to turn
three times in our chairs, we shall be the grandparents and you will be
smiling at our old-fashioned sentiments.
But we ask you to look kindly on this our city of wonder, the city of
amazing beauties which is also (to any man of quick imagination) an
actual hell of haste, din, and dishevelment. Perhaps you by this time
will have brought back something of that serenity, that reverence for
thoughtful things, which our generation lost--and hardly knew it had
lost. But even Hell, you must admit, has always had its patriots. There
is nothing that hasn’t--which is one of the most charming oddities of
the race.
And how we loved this strange, mad city of ours, which we knew in our
hearts was, to the clear eye of reason and the pure, sane vision of
poetry, a bedlam of magical impertinence, a blind byway of monstrous
wretchedness. And yet the blacker it seemed to the lamp of the spirit,
the more we loved it with the troubled eye of flesh. For humanity,
immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it
has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign
of its being. So you will fail, as we have; and you will laugh, as we
have--but not so heartily, we insist; no one has ever laughed the way
your tremulous granfers did, old chap! And you will go on about your
business, as we did, and be just as certain that you and your concerns
are the very climax of human gravity and worth. And will it be any
pleasure to you to know that on a soft September morning a hundred
years ago your affectionate great-grandsire looked cheerfully out of
his lofty kennel window, blew a whiff of smoke, smiled a trifle gravely
upon the familiar panorama, knew (with that antique shrewdness of his)
a hawk from a handsaw, and then went out to lunch?
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