The curious and monotonous mystery of the city les in my thought like forgotten music.
A man walking here. A man walking there. A horse standing at a curbstone with his head hanging. The oval-tinted face of a woman peering out of a taxicab window as it rushes by.
These things multiplied a million times . . .
And the houses. Mile upon mile of houses crowded and flattened, flung about with a certain precision, a geometrical smear.
Mile upon mile of houses shaped like churches, like jails, like cathedrals, like battlements. There are not enough adjectives in my mind to describe them. And yet they are identical as rain.
How many windows are there in the city? Windows through which people sometimes catch cinematographic glimpses of each other.
About these houses there is something which no one has ever said or written.
About these windows there is some weird phrase which has never been born.
Criss-cross of streets flanked with houses, stuffed with houses. And the signs lettered on the store windows. Names which I have never encountered in fiction.
Names which I find myself curiously trying to memorize.
There is something about the city, the inexhaustible wilderness known as a city, that I would say but it never comes to my tongue. Corners of streets, each a world’s end.
I walk through streets, gazing with irritation; people and their perpetual houses.
Noting how men and women appear to be going somewhere.
Ah! these mysterious destinations as simple as my own. A million simplicities tangled into vastness.
What is there mysterious about me and about that which I know? I move. I have the most obvious of motives.
Homes that are filled with faces I shall never see. Things that are done from moment to moment that I shall never know.
All these haunt me more than the thought of angels in heaven.
I am aware of great and invisible agitations. What this woman dreams. What this man thinks.
Multiplied by a million, and the monotony of it becomes too intricate to penetrate.
There is something about the whole shouting, sweeping, interlacing arrangement of eyes and masonry-lettered store windows and moving feet which accompanies me like an unborn dream.
The man walking here. The woman walking there. The crowd. The old horse and the cab which rushes by and carries away the oval-tinted face.
They become a part of my thought.
Multiplied by a million they shift and move within my brain, the simple and insufferable parts of chaos.
Of the Swede and the Dago who are digging in the street as I pass, I can make a picture.
They stand beside a fire they have made out of soap boxes, to thaw the ground. The flames caught by the wind twist like the scarves of a dancer.
The flames loosed by the wind stretch their innumerable little yellow claws upward in a deft and undulant scratching.
I take a notebook from my pocket and write down the line,
The fire is like a little golden fir tree in the night.
If I had time I would also jot down a line about the grave faces of the Dago and the Swede as they look at the soap boxes changing into flame.
Of such things I can make pictures.
In a thousand streets scattered criss-cross about and beyond me, through a thousand buildings people are moving. One this way. One that way.
My blindness overwhelms me.
I can see only a Dago and a Swede and a fire that made me think of a little golden fir tree and a horse standing at a curbstone with his head hanging.
The sorrow of one horse hanging his head is such a little thing.
Beyond my sight I am conscious of a press, a swarm, a jungle of houses, a wilderness of faces, a monstrous number of thoughts and dreams.
They are everywhere but within the peculiar solitude which I inhabit.
If there were but distance to the city. A horizon to solace the thought. To lend leisure and the placidity of illusion to my dreams.
But the solitude of the city is a solitude without horizon. Space and the broken, twisted vista of the city rush upon me.
A vista lacking infinitude and lacking finalities.
A hundred feet away life is lost in the simple and yet insufferable unknown.
An unknown to which architecture has given angles and dimensions.
And yet within them transpire murders and the births of Gods.
Dimensions which do not enclose but conceal further that which is naturally hidden.
Such are houses. And streets.
Within them the great multiple of life is forever active. My solitude is a little basket with which I rush from corner to corner.
Each wall, each stone, each face is a guillotine for my eyes.
As blue water lifted into the hand becomes white, the chaos which falls into my little basket of solitude becomes solitude.
That which I seek is forever a part of me. And yet I rush, rush.
The monotonous lust with which the blood pumps in and pumps out of my heart has its brother lust in my brain, which pumps and pumps its thoughts into the greater and more multiple mechanism of this unknown.
And the neighborhoods that are always strange like strange countries with strange peoples when I enter them.
Here is a glistening, polished stretch of a street. A street carved out of stone.
People with the finish of marble.
There a street made out of rags. And the inevitable pretence of trees, or are they lamp posts?
The lettered windows with some more names I have never seen. Houses in regimental masonry.
Houses embracing like drunkards. A new man. A new woman. A new horse.
Again the immobile and perpetual multitude. Again the fragments of the monstrous multiple.
There is something about them that has never been said.
What is the eternal, unknown with its bogey-men compared to this vaster and more perfect physical oblivion?
The monstrous detachment from myself of each tiny thing about me is greater than the spaces of the stars.
And night. The embrace of unknowns.
I look at lights and down vanishing streets. At shadows which mock the illusion of emptiness.
The man and the horse and the color of day have disappeared. They have left behind a pregnancy.
Night. The Madonna of the spaces. The great adjective of dark. Night. The unknown barbarian.
With the same indefinable and helpless monotony with which the waves hurl themselves onward my thoughts beat from moment to moment against the night.
Washing tirelessly toward the little lights, the big lights, the smear and zigzag of lights that men kindle.
Lights in the windows. Lights on the streets. Round, bald, staring, twinkling lights that are neither signals nor beacons nor the lamps of Aladdin.
Lights like the light that burns over my head in my room.
These lights are the unknown seen through the black windowed night.
What are the mystic fires that dance and flicker on the hill of dreams to these lights?
Those I can see with my eyes lure me and challenge more than the mystery of sun rising or stars shining.
But those others. Of which I do not even think. Lights behind walls. Behind houses. Around corners.
Who can think of a system of philosophy, looking at a light shining from a strange window in the night?
Philosophy —the manners of the soul. The profound and perspiring elimination of adjectives from life.
It yet remains that the little bourgeois family is an infinitesimal fragment through the lighted window.
Ah, the monotonous pantomime of figures seen through lighted windows.
The multiple and monstrous pantomime of figures forever unseen.
It yet remains that the little bourgeois family is an infinitesimal fragment of the unknown. The everlasting unknown.
Thought and beauty. These are things which have been done.
Things of outline and soul.
There is no room in the unknown for things which have outline or soul.
The unknown contains only that which has never been said or thought.
I seek this in the city. It is forever rushing upon and by me.
I am forever questing the indefinable and unimagined illumination which will make all life a part of my solitude.
Thus in the city there are those without curiosity and who therefore know everything.
The solitude in which they move has horizons.
The unknown exists only for seekers.
He whose imagination, like a rat, nibbles day after day upon his brain shall know nothing that he wishes to know. Shall see nothing that he would see. He shall know only the hunger and unrest. The hunger and unrest of forgotten music.