[Ice-water, corrosive acid and human breath]
To-morrow
I HAVE love for two towns. One is this Butte that I tiredly love inside me. And the other is New York that I smoothly love with all my surfaces.
It is some years—a little lump of years—since I have seen New York: and it is two thousand miles away. So I see and feel its hard sweet lurid magnetism now ten times sharper than when I lived in it. But I felt it sudden and sharp at every turn then. A surface emotion which hits one’s flesh and spreads wide over one’s area is more exciting than a spirit emotion which pierces inward at one tiny point: an ice shower-bath on the white skin is more anguishing than an ice-water drink down the red throat. The spirit emotion lives longer and works more damage and buries itself at last in proud shaded soul-reserves. The surface emotion stays always on the surface and lives actively in the front of one’s senses and musings.
The feel of New York is a mixture of ice-water, a corrosive acid and human breath sweeping someway warmish against one’s flesh.
It is immensely ungentle, New York: immensely human: immensely intriguing to all one’s selves. It is too big to have prejudices and traditions of locality: so it leaves its dwellers free, by ones and multitudes, to be human beings.
In South Bend and Toledo and Beloit and St. Paul and all the tight-built inland towns they murder you with narrowness and harshness and rancorous ill-will: they are scowlingly annoyed with you for making them murder you.
In New York they murder you with a large soft wave of indifferent insolence—no annoyance, no friction. New York eats you as it eats its dinner, rather liking you.
And my love for New York is made of liking: a plaisance of liking.
made of liking: a plaisance of liking.