City and Everyday Life

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

The light is buried under chains and noises in impudent challenge of rootless science. Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger, as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood.

A l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes.

A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it.

Like shadows of the plumbing that is all that is left of the great city.

 

[ Quoting an “American joke” :] In Boston theyask, How much does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Whowere his parents?

The official world, the corridors of power.

 

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca what were you doing down by the watermelons?

Shepherdess, O Eiffel Tower, your flock of bridges is bleating this morning. 1

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

The mind is a city like London, Smoky and populous: it is a capital Like Rome, ruined and eternal, Marked by the monument which no one Now remembers.

Big Bessie’s feet hurt like nobody’s business, but she stands—bigly—under the unruly scrutiny, stands in the wild weed. In the wild weed she is a citizen.

We keep coming back and coming back To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns That fall upon it out of the wind.

Maud went to college. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb.

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille Day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me

The New York dawn has four columns of mud and a hurricane of black doves that paddle in putrescent waters.

London, thou art the flower of Cities all.

 

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify.

My steps along this street Resound in another street In which I hear my steps Passing along this street In which Only the mist is real.

To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.

Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.