My dream city, it is silent, cold and still. Perhaps this is because I am practically ignorant of the masses, of poverty, of the storms of deficiency that scrape across the path of life like gray sand. It is a city to be amazed at, so grand, so beautiful, so dead. There are railroad tracks across the heights, streets like narrow valleys, stairways that rise massively up to the magnificent city, passages down to the depths, and all that is there is strangely enough the silence of the lower world. Again there were parks, flowers, rivers. And here it was, after twenty years, almost as generally startling and startling as my dream, except that when I awoke it was shrouded under the tumult of life. It has emotions of chase, dream, passion, joy, terror, disappointment, and so on. Through its roads, ravines, squares, and tunnels is a mass of running, seething, flickering, and gathering presences that my dream city has never known.
The thing that intrigues me about New York-which can be said about any big city, though it's more accurate to say New York, because it was and still is so very different-was, as it is now, the thing that makes me feel interested in it. The thing that interests me is the very sharp and at the same time infinitely wide contrast it shows between the slow and the good, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the clever and the stupid. There are probably more reasons of quantity and chance than of any other, for human beings elsewhere are of course no different. Here, however, there are so many human beings from which to choose that the strong, or that which dominates man at all, is immensely strong, and the weak is so weak.
I once saw a poor sewing woman. Her lost eyes had no semblance of luster, and her rough face was folded with many wrinkles. She lived in a plywood room in the corner of the hall of a sublet house on Cold Street, and cooked her food on a fire-wine stove placed on a cupboard. There was probably only enough room in that room for one person to take three steps.
"I'd rather live in a plywood room like this in New York than in a fifteen-room house like that in the country." She made this discourse once, and when she said it, her lifeless eyes radiated an infinite brilliancy which I never saw in her, and never saw again. She had a way of supplementing her income from sewing by looking for luck in cards, tea leaves, coffee grounds, and the like for those who were as inferior as she was, telling many that love and fortune were coming, when in fact both were things they would never get. It turns out that the colors, sounds and glitter of the city, even if only to call her to see, will be enough to compensate for all her misfortunes.
In fact, I myself have not felt that kind of bragging rights? Don't I still feel it now? Broadway, when forty-two blocks away, the city is crowded on these consistent nights with clouds of touring idlers from the West. All the store doors were open, and the windows of nearly all the hotels were wide open, so that passers-by who had nothing better to do might look on. Here was the great city, and it was drunken and dreamy. A May or a June moon will hang high among the buildings like a polished silver disk. A hundred or even a thousand electric signs will light up the streets as if they were day. Tides of citizens and tourists in their summer coats and pretty hats; streetcars carrying bags of goods on their unimportant mission; cabs and private cars darting in and out like jeweled flies. And the rolled shilling contributes an idiosyncratic aroma. Life was foaming and sparkling; pretty words, loose material. Broadway Road is like that.
And then there's that Five Horse Path, that street of crystal that the song is about, always generally bustling on an afternoon when there's a market, spring, summer, fall or winter. Just when spring comes to welcome you in February and March, the windows of that street are crowded with fine, uncovered silks and ethereal ornaments of all colors, and what else can so plainly report the coming of spring? At the beginning of November it sings of Los Angeles and Newport and the great and small pleasures of the tropics and the warm sea. Until December, the road displays the furs and rugs, the balls and parties, so haughtily that it shouts to you that the blizzard is coming, when you have not been back from your vacation in the mountains or by the sea for ten days. You see such a picture, you see the upper floors of the houses, and you think that all the world is very prosperous and infinitely happy. However, if you know that the vulgar social thicket, that between the success of the tall trees of the futile growth of the chaos and clumps, you feel that these boundless giant building is not a thing is perfect and sublime!
I have often thought of that immense number of the lower classes, those boys and girls who have nothing to recommend them but their own youth and ambition, and who turn their faces toward New York at all times, scouting out what wealth or fame, or else future position and comfort, or else whatever it is they will reap, that that city can give them. Ah, their youthful eyes are intoxicated with its infinite hopes! And so I thought again of all the powerful and half-powerful men and women of the world, industriously engaged in this or that work somewhere outside of New York-a store, a mine, a bank, a profession-with the sole ambition of going on to attain a position, and then to enter and reside in New York on the strength of their wealth, and then to live in the luxury of dominating the masses.
Just think of the hallucinations in this, what a profound and moving hypnotic mile! How the strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish, the glutton of the heart and the glutton of the eye, all look to that vast thing for forgetfulness, for ecstasy. I am always amazed whenever I see how people seem willing to put up any price - to put up that kind of price - to pray for a taste of this poisoned wine. What a heart-wrenching zeal they are displaying. Beauty is willing to sell its flowers, virtue its last vestiges, strength an almost usurious portion of what it has at its disposal, honor and power their dignity and existence, and old age its weary hours, in order to beg for a small portion of all this, in order to touch the real existence of the city and the picture of which it forms a part. Have you not heard them singing its praises?
The city in a dream