A Life Without Principle
1
What did I feel the first time I saw New York? I felt, no doubt, what every person feels the first time they behold that gaudy thicket of skyscrapers: namely, that I was sailing toward a continent of happiness, where I would be free to rove, enfranchised and at large; I felt that until then I had seen only grey whereas now I was finally seeing green; I felt both very big and very small; I felt that my life was going to change. The first few days passed in a kind of barely repressed ecstasy of observation; I became a connoisseur of new sensations. Everything made me happy. From the colorful chaos of Midtown to the quiet solemn stone of Columbia, from the incubated heat of the subway to the green tip of Battery Park where the Hudson sloshed languidly against the banks, I walked around with my head humming. I pretended I was Walt Whitman and seemed incapable of thinking in anything but the most incandescent Biblical cadences. Ah, what can be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemmed Manhattan? River and sunset and scallop-edged waves of flood-tide? The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter? So enamored was I of every slightest inflection of scenery, I scarce had time to remember I was dying.
Page(s) 34-35
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