My room was on the eighteenth floor of a great hotel flung above the electric city. Below me swam the theatric night, the fluid effulgence of Broadway, the piping thrum of automobiles, the revelry ascending from flaring restaurants, carried upward into hanging gardens floating on the night,—nervous, shifting sheets of electric transparencies, fantastic, ingenious, unescapable, a million splendors to exalt a corset or a soap! What a vast, illuminated billboard! Everything oppressed me, the staggering scale of things, the importance of unimportant things, this capture of the night by the materialism of the day. I watched it, as one stands before the unleashed torrents of the sea and sky, overwhelmed with my own shrunk significance.
In the morning my first movement was to my window. The city of the night was fled. Below me lay a shanty civilization. The fairy splendor, the figment of the night had dissolved with the dawn. Broadway was but a huddled group of puny shanties, with skeleton trickeries exposed in the pitiless light of the day; ugly, visible, naked,—an adventuress stealing home at dawn, rouged, powdered and wan, and the pretentious jewels of the night showing themselves to be paste. The whole was stale as a ballroom when the laughter is fled. The crowded stars were empty sockets; the flaming palaces, scaffolding.
Homesickness? Yes, even in Picardy, even in the wet weariness of the trenches, in the gray rain that soaked into my soul, I had never felt such utter loneliness as here, in the nausea of the revealing dawn.
I came out of the city and set my face sternly to the task of readjustment. I would not be true to my determination to set down without disguise or sentimentalization the history of my shifting moods, actions and reactions, emotions and resolves, if I didn’t write this down. No sooner had I entered the train, pulled my cap over my eyes and sunk back in my corner, than I fell into a mood of extreme weakness. As the instinct to live is stronger in the body, no matter what the will to die, so I believe that in the thinking man the will to continue as a free agent is an instinct deeper than our perceptions. Everything in me rebelled at the sudden subjection which a blind destiny had forced upon me. Something in me cried out imperiously:
“Forget! You must forget!”
And this is the hideous thing: the words of the other woman, the words of Letty, were the ones that sounded in my ears:
“Life is a succession of doors to be closed and never reopened.”
To close the door and never to return! If it were possible!
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