"Oh?" said the other, as he turned away, "about two-thirds of them."
CHAPTER XI
A MIDDLE-WESTERN MIRACLE
Imagine a young demigod, product of a union between Rodin's "Thinker" and the Wingèd Victory of Samothrace, and you will have my symbol of Chicago.
Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to judge it. It stands apart from all the cities in the world, isolated by its own individuality, an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon, a prodigious paradox in which youth and maturity, brute strength and soaring spirit, are harmoniously confused.
Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, transcendent—call it what you like—throw the dictionary at it! It is all that you can do, except to shoot it with statistics. And even the statistics of Chicago are not deadly, as most statistics are.
First, you must realize that Chicago stands fourth in population among the cities of the world, and second among those of the Western Hemisphere. Next you must realize that there are people still alive who were alive when Chicago did not exist, even as a fort in a swamp at the mouth of the Chicago River—the river from which, by the way, the city took its name, and which in turn took its own name from an Indian word meaning "skunk."