I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.  I like to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.  Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for the solitary restaurant dinner-- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart.  Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

I stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue where it runs past Greenwich Avenue one night, and as I stood there a fur-trimmed woman, heavily laden with jewels, and two lanky daughters hailed me. In her eyes was a restlessness that was strange to me who have been used to looking into the quiet, often lazy, faces of those about me.  Her eyes roved; so did the eyes of her daughters. There was a definite air of the loser looking for the lost.

"Where is Greenwich village?" she asked, and she caught her breath.

"This is it," I answered, and I thought she was going to collapse.

"But," she stammered, "I have heard of old houses and odd women and men who sit on the curb quoting poetry to the policemen or angling for buns as they floated down into the Battery with the rain.   I have heard of little inns where women smoke and men make love and there is dancing and laughter and not too much light.  I have heard of houses striped as are the zebras with gold and with silver, and of gowns that ----quick, quick!" she cried, suddenly breaking off in the middle of the sentence and grabbing a hand of either child exactly like the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass as she hurried forward.   "There’s one now!"

And so she left me in pursuit of a mere woman in a gingham gown with a portfolio under her arm.

Suddenly I found myself on Times Square.  I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.  The high towers of the land--the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born.  I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, and every time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from my sight, and finally it was crushed.  I had no money to go home in a bus. Paterson is quite a few miles from Times Square.  Can you picture me walking those last miles though the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington Bridge and into New Jersey?  It was dusk. Where was Hassel?  I dug the square for Hassel; he wasn’t there, he was in Riker’s Island, behind bars.  Where Dean?   Where everybody?  Where life?  I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too.  I had to panhandle two bits for the bus.  I finally hit a Greek minister who was standing around the corner.  He gave me a quarter with a nervous look away.   I rushed immediately to the bus.

I’m crazy about this City.

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half.  In the top half I see distracted looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are the people, which the work of stonemasons.  Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things.  Hep.   It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it.  When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong.  Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible--like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one.  The people down there in the shadows are happy about that.  At last, at last, everything’s ahead.  The smart ones say so and people listening to them and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new.   Look out.  There goes the sad stuff.  The bad stuff.  The things-nobody-could-help stuff.  The way everybody was then and there.  Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.