It was about the time of the invasion that the authorities decided to change the name of North Second Street to Metropolitan Avenue. This highway, which to the Gentiles had been the road to the cemeteries, now became what is called an artery of traffic, a link between two ghettoes. On the New York side the riverfront was rapidly being transformed owing to the erection of the skyscrapers. On our side, the Brooklyn side, the warehouses were piling up and the approaches to the various new bridges created plazas, comfort stations, pool rooms, stationery shops, ice cream parlours, restaurants, clothing stores, hock shops, etc. In short everything was becoming metropolitan, in the odious sense of the word.
As long as we lived in the old neighbourhood we never referred to Metropolitan Avenue: it was always North Second Street, despite the official change of name. Perhaps it was eight or ten years later, when I stood one winter’s day at the corner of the street facing the river and noticed for the first time the great tower of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, that I realized that North Second Street was no more. The imaginary boundary of my world had changed. My lance travelled now far beyond the cemeteries, far beyond the rivers, far beyond the city of New York or the State of New York, beyond the whole United States indeed. At Point Loma, California, I had looked out upon the broad Pacific and I had felt something there which kept my face permanently screwed in another direction. I came back to the old neighbourhood, I remember, one night with my old friend Stanley who had just come out of the army, and we walked the streets sadly and wistfully. A European can scarcely know what this feeling is like. Even when a town becomes modernized, in Europe, there are still vestiges of the old. In America, though there are vestiges, they are effaced, wiped out of the consciousness, trampled upon, obliterated, nullified by the new. The new is, from day to day, a moth which eats into the fabric of life, leaving nothing finally but a great hole. Stanley and I, we were walking through this terrifying hole. Even a war does not bring this kind of desolation and destruction. Through war a town may be reduced to ashes and the entire population wiped out, but what springs up again resembles the old. Death is fecundating, for the soil as well as for the spirit. In America the destruction is completely annihilating. There is no rebirth only a cancerous growth, layer upon layer of new, poisonous tissue, each one uglier than the previous one.
We were walking through this enormous hole, as I say, and it was a winter’s night, dear, frosty, sparkling, and as we came through the south side towards the boundary line we saluted all the old relics or the spots where things had once stood and where there had been once something of ourselves. And as we approached North Second Street, between Fillmore Place and North Second Street – a distance of only a few yards and yet such a rich, full area of the globe – before Mrs. O’Melio’s shanty I stopped and looked up at the house where I had known what it was to really have a being. Everything had shrunk now to diminutive proportions, including the world which lay beyond the boundary line, the world which had been so mysterious to me and so terrifyingly grand, so delimited. Standing there in a trance I suddenly recalled a dream which I have had over and over, which I still dream now and then, and which I hope to dream as long as I live. It was the dream of passing the boundary line.
As in all dreams the remarkable thing is the vividness of the reality, the fad that one is in reality and not dreaming. Across the line I am unknown and absolutely alone. Even the language has changed. In fact, I am always regarded as a stranger, a foreigner. I have unlimited time on my hands and I am absolutely content in sauntering through the streets. There is only one street, I must say – the continuation of the street on which I lived. I come finally to an iron bridge over the railroad yards. It is always nightfall when I reach the bridge, though it is only a short distance from the boundary line. Here I look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight stations, the tenders, the storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this duster of strange moving substances a process of metamorphosis takes place, just as in a dream. With the transformation and deformation I become aware that this is the old dream which I have dreamed so often. I have a wild fear that I shall wake up, and indeed I know that I will wake up shortly, just at the moment when in the midst of a great open space I am about to walk into the house which contains something of the greatest importance for me. Just as I go towards this house the lot on which I am standing begins to grow vague at the edges, to dissolve, to vanish. Space rolls in on me like a carpet and swallows me up, and with it of course the house which I never succeed in entering.
There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream I know to the heart of a book called Creative Evolution.
In this book by Henri Bergson, which I came to as naturally as to the dream of the land beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone, again a foreigner, again a man of indeterminate age standing on an iron bridge observing a peculiar metamorphosis without and within. If this book had not fallen into my hands at the precise moment it did, perhaps I would have gone mad. It came at a moment when another huge world was crumbling on my hands. If I had never understood a thing which was written in this book, if I had preserved only the memory of one word, creative, it is quite sufficient. This word was my talisman. With it I was able to defy the whole world, and especially my friends.
There are times when one must break with one’s friends in order to understand the meaning of friendship. It may seem strange to say so, but the discovery of this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an implement, wherewith I might lop off all the friends who surrounded me and who no longer meant anything to me. This book became my friend because it taught me that I had no need of friends. It gave me the courage to stand alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness. I have never understood the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I never really did understand. It was more important for me not to understand. With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding. Everything which before I thought I had understood crumbled, and I was left with a dean slate. My friends, on the other hand, entrenched themselves more solidly in the little ditch of understanding which they had dug for themselves. They died comfortably in their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. I pitied them, and in short order.
I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret.
What was there then in this book which could mean so much to me and yet remain obscure? I come back to the word creative. 1 am sure that the whole mystery lies in the realization of the meaning of this word. When I think of the book now, and the way I approached it, I think of a man going through the rites of initiation. The disorientation and reorientation which comes with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience which it is possible to have. Everything which the brain has laboured for a lifetime to assimilate, categorize and synthesize has to be taken apart and reordered. Moving day for the soul! And of course it’s not for a day, but for weeks and months that this goes on. You meet a friend on the street by chance, one whom you haven’t seen for several weeks, and he has become an absolute stranger to you. You give him a few signals from your new perch and if he doesn’t cotton you pass him up – for good. It’s exactly like mopping up a battlefield: all those who are hopelessly disabled and agonizing you dispatch with one swift blow of your dub. You move on, to new fields of battle, to new triumphs or defeats. But you move! And as yon move the world moves with you, with terrifying exactitude. You seek out new fields of operation, new specimens of the human race whom you patiently instruct and equip with the new symbols. You choose sometimes those you would never have looked at
