The hammering monotony of huge buildings that were neither beautiful to look upon nor useful to be dwelt in—monuments of vanity and folly, hideous with stolen decoration no one understood, or lavished with detail, intricate, costly, stupid that no one ever saw, sheathed in insincerities whose one successful purpose was to hide the structures,—and these, twice as tall as conditions warranted, built with money that was needed—sorely needed—elsewhere; the fetid subways, packed with humanity as no humane company would pack a poultry car, cesspools that stunk in summer and were a stain upon the community that used them, always; the crass, nasty, lying theaters of Broadway, expressive of a mudworm’s aspirations; the spiritless cafés that interspersed them, ruled and erected to glorify the souls of lackeys, serving bad food no one would eat elsewhere at the expense of entertainments no one would sit through elsewhere: the unending blight of magazines and journals—made from the crushing of fair forests into wood-pulp!—one built upon the sweaty, fatuous dimensions of a traveling salesman, one leveled at the rouged, frilled creature that lazes in a cheap flat, mothers a puppy and dreams of motors, a third aimed to titillate the woman with less sex, more children, a wider hallway but no more brains—littered all and innumerably, with false optimism, false advice, false pictures and false plots: the blatancy of the ensemble—its utter uselessness—journals screaming above the houses, traffic screaming above the public halls, clubs glittering above the shops, theaters and restaurants exhibiting above the brothels—all of it shutting out the blue of heaven, the glance of the sun on the Hudson, the murmur of the few surviving trees, the spirit of the few surviving souls. And the mad misery of the dwellers!—proud to be smothered in the biggest subway, proud to be cheated in the biggest stores, proud to be lied to by the biggest journals, proud to be sheep in the biggest pen!...
But all this was behind Quincy. All this was behind him, as is the surface when a man has burrowed deep. All this was. But it was unimportant. And none of it would be, if each man so burrowed beneath it to the poisoned ego of which all of it, in cumulation, was a putrescent outer deposit. It interested Quincy no longer. He had no time to dwell on it, or to inveigh against it. He was engaged upon himself.
Here was a new sort of serenity—the sort that accepts a certain thing as an economy of strength for fighting elsewhere; the economy, not of blinking the truth, but of indifference to superficial falsehood. This is the economy of the artist toward what is evil, and of the priest toward what is contradictory to his faith. Quincy applied it to what had so far engrossed and maddened him.
Dwelling upon the City’s faults—by feeling them, combatting them—he had no time or muscle for himself. Now, he plowed deeper.
But all of this was, after all, no wondrous vision or wondrous might coming to Quincy. So it did not seem even to him, although in contrast to the darkness and debility of his former states, he might well have been pardoned if it had. Quincy was not, of a sudden, over his stammering and his stumbling.
He had exhausted two extremes of error. He was bound—he was sure—to be, this time, less wrong than he had been. As the wise East has said: All progress is through a series of disgusts.
Here he was, then, twenty-two, earning his living, living alone—unhampered by too great devotion either for any man or for any woman. He had the feeling, now that the City no longer troubled him, that family was gone, and business ran smooth, of being able to swing his arms and legs without obstruction. This was his start. Here was his race. During it, his sense of progress was in the things he passed. Until the end, he would not know in his weariness how fast and hard he had gone; in his position how far and whither he had come. The rest of the consciousness of Quincy was to be the consciousness of motion.
He had himself now, to traverse, to judge, to reckon with. His freedom of external bars did not give him freedom, did not make him light. But it loosed him upon the realler things. It gave him a movement wherein, for the first time, really to know. And a dark thing known is a dark thing made light. A heavy thing in motion is a heavy thing to stop.
Here, then, was Quincy’s start within himself. At last, he was flowing forward—all of him, from depth to surface. He had bent back reality to fit childish loves of mother or of dream; he had warped the natural offshoot of these loves to make them fit reality; he had denied one or the other, twisted them, dammed up his life’s current in order to have a smooth lake for lolling or a dry place for forgetting. This was over. He was flowing forward. Stormily, muddily, cramped. But yet, a passage....