O warm packed common of the life of man! the pleasant word with the waiter taking my order; the humid confidence of the charwoman who cleans my rooms; the nod to the policeman at the corner; the gossip with the newsman, a dark fellow with eyes great in dark glasses; the community with crowds that I won of my daily paper ... thrilling with clerk and laborer at the latest scandal, shouting at the portentous choice in the election of Tweedledee over his rival Tweedledum; the massed brotherhood at the Polo Grounds, cheering the Giants, booing the Pirates ... the intricate unsung sacrament of moving in a family of men! All of us eat, all of us know what hunger is and love, and sleep, and sleeplessness. All of us have mouths that give forth words, have ears that receive them. Do we not walk in ecstasy so vast none can give thought to it? None, save me, who am barred. Not you, prisoner at Sing Sing. You have comrades. Though they thrust you in solitary, a whole world knows of you, either to pity or to blame ... and both are ways of human intercourse. Not you, dead body rotting in the earth, for you rot with your brothers, you rot with all mankind. I am alone. And there is no fellow to myself in all the anguished and warm spaces of men! Oh, I could sing a pæan to the life of the slave-galleys, since there are fellow-oarsmen, since there is a master. I envy the soldier driven to his death. What warmth in the fellow fate of his brothers, in the intense caress of the enemy who slays him. Yes, the victim falling from a blow knows the passionate caress of his assailant. And the babe unborn presses its blind hands against a womb that loves it....
Common street of the hospitable city. If it be cold, what one of you who walk cannot say “It is cold” and have response? If you hunger, cannot you take your place in the immemorial army of famine and despair, side by side with all the others who know you, who accept you, who salute your right to share in the common want? Oh, if I could undo any tragic search for the Truth that has slain me, that has made me lone as no star in the crowded heavens ... how I would sing your riches, manifold Life: Life, in whom men and women move, signaling one another, touching bodies, sharing pain and laughter! Oh, fool to seek the solitary Truth, when Ignorance is crowded and is warm.
I am alone. Has hope, the latest straggler, that remains even when anguish has departed, whispering: “Peace ... you will die.” ... has hope gone, too?
The faces of mankind are stranger to me. And the city where I live is a cold memory that has forgotten how to greet me. And my work that loved me is a lie too small to hold me. Has hope gone, too?
—You are a sufferer who can say to no one: “I suffer.” You are a sinner and there is no name for your sin. You are too lone to confess: too lone even to be despised.... But the word hope must still be there, since you recall it?
God stands so far away: the truth, that God is All and that no life can die, is not a neighbor. Truth sweeps away the nearness of good things. For the things good unto the life of man are they on the bright surface where man crawls: it is the brightness of his need that makes them shine. Blesséd, blesséd man! Fool, when you seek the truth that lies in darkness. Sage when you stone your sages, when you crucify your Christs.
God is too far, and too vast.
But the word hope is there!
Hope ... Mildred ... there?