While he was talking about finger-prints I might be taking stock of a coping or a cornice on a little red brick building just back of his black hat, I would get to thinking of the day the cornice had been installed, who might be the man who had designed it and why had he made it so ugly, so like every other lousy, rotten cornice which we passed from the East Side up to Harlem and beyond Harlem, if we wanted to push on, beyond New York, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Grand Canyon, beyond the Mojave Desert, everywhere in America where there are buildings for man and woman. It seemed absolutely crazy to me that each day of my life I had to sit and listen to other people’s stories, the banal tragedies of poverty and distress, of love and death, of yearning and disillusionment. If, as it happened, there came to me each day at least fifty men, each pouring out his tale of woe, and with each one I had to be silent and “receive”, it was only natural that at some point along the line I had to close my ears, had to harden my heart. The tiniest little morsel was sufficient for me, I could chew on it and digest it for days and weeks. Yet I was obliged to sit there and be inundated, to get out at night again and receive more, to sleep listening, to dream listening.
They streamed in from all over the world, from every strata of society, speaking a thousand different tongues, worshipping different gods, obeying different laws and customs. The tale of the poorest among them with a huge tome, and yet if each and every one were written out at length it might all be compressed to the size of the ten commandments, it might all be recorded on the back of a postage stamp, like the Lord’s Prayer. Each day I was so stretched that my hide seemed to cover the whole world; and when I was alone, when I was no longer obliged to listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint. The greatest delight, and it was a rare one, was to walk the streets alone … to walk the streets at night when no one was abroad and to reflect on the silence that surrounded me. Millions lying on their backs, dead to the world, their mouths wide open and nothing but snores emanating from them. Walking amidst the craziest architecture ever invented, wondering why and to what end, if every day from these wretched hovels or magnificent palaces there had to stream forth an army of men itching to unravel their tale of misery.
In a year, reckoning it modestly, I received twenty-five thousand tales; in two years fifty thousand; in four years it would be a hundred thousand; in ten years I would be stark mad. Already I knew enough people to populate a good-sized town. What a town it would be, if only they could be gathered together! Would they want skyscrapers? Would they want museums? Would they want libraries? Would they too build sewers and bridges and tracks and factories? Would they make the same little cornices of tin, one like another, on, on, ad infinitum, from Battery Park to the Golden Bay? I doubt it. Only the lash of hunger could stir them. The empty belly, the wild look in the eye, the fear, the fear of worse, driving them on. One after the other, all the same, all goaded to desperation, out of the goad and whip of hunger building the loftiest skyscrapers, the most redoubtable dreadnoughts, making the finest steel, the flimsiest lace, the most delicate glassware. Walking with O’Rourke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide was like listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony.
And just as one can whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with, so, listening to O’Rourke, I would be thinking of the moment when he would stop talking and say “what’ll you have to eat?” In the midst of the most gruesome murder I could think of the pork tenderloin which we would be sure to get at a certain place farther up the line and wonder too what sort of vegetables they would have on the side to go with it, and whether I would order pie afterwards or a custard pudding. It was the same when I slept with my wife now and then; while she was moaning and gibbering I might be wondering if she had emptied the grounds in the coffee pot, because she had the bad habit of letting things slide – the important things, I mean. Fresh coffee was important – and fresh bacon with eggs. If she were knocked up again that would be bad, serious in a way, but more important than that was fresh coffee in the morning and the smell of bacon and eggs. I could put up with heartbreaks and abortions and busted romances, but I had to have something under my belt to carry on, and I wanted something nourishing, something appetizing. I felt exactly like Jesus Christ would have felt if he had been taken down from the cross and not permitted to die in the flesh. I am sure that the shock of crucifixion would have been so great that he would have suffered a complete amnesia as regards humanity. I am certain that after his wounds had healed he wouldn’t have given a damn about the tribulations of mankind but would have fallen with the greatest relish upon a fresh cup of coffee and a slice of toast, assuming he could have had it.
Whoever, through too great love, which is monstrous after all, dies of his misery, is born again to know neither love nor hate, but to enjoy. And this joy of living, because it is unnaturally acquired, is a poison which eventually vitiates the whole world. Whatever is created beyond the normal limits of human suffering, acts as a boomerang and brings about destruction. At night the streets of New York reflect the crucifixion and death of Christ. When the snow is on the ground and there is the utmost silence there comes out of the hideous buildings of New York a music of such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel. No stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void.
In this null and void, in this zero whiteness, I learned to enjoy a sandwich, or a collar button. I could study a cornice or a coping with the greatest curiosity while pretending to listen to a tale of human woe. I can remember the dates on certain buildings and the names of the architects who designed them. I can remember the temperature and the velocity of the wind, standing at a certain comer; the tale that accompanied it is gone. I can remember that I was even then remembering something else, and I can tell you what it was that I was then remembering, but of what use? There was one man in me which had died and all that was left were his remembrances;
there was another man who was alive, and that man was supposed to be me, myself, but he was alive only as a tree is alive, or a rock, or a beast of the field. Just as the city itself had become a huge tomb in which men struggled to earn a decent death so my own life came to resemble a tomb which I was constructing out of my own death. I was walking around in a stone forest the centre of which was chaos; sometimes in the dead centre, in the very heart of chaos, I danced or drank myself silly, or I made love, or I befriended some one, or I planned a new life, but it was all chaos, all stone, and all hopeless and bewildering.
Until the time when I would encounter a force strong enough to whirl me out of this mad stone forest no life would be possible for me nor could one page be written which would have meaning. Perhaps in reading this, one has still the impression of chaos
