TH THE TINMAN

Yesterday I was on the roof with the tinman. He did not resemble the
tinman of the "Wizard of Oz" or the flaming tinman of "Lavengro," for he
wore a derby hat, had a shiny seat, and smoked a ragged cigar. It was a
flue he was fixing, a thing of metal for the gastronomic whiffs journeying
from the kitchen to the upper airs. There was a vent through the roof with
a cone on top to shed the rain. I watched him from the level cover of a
second-story porch as he scrambled up the shingles. I admire men who can
climb high places and stand upright and unmoved at the gutter's edge. But
their bravado forces on me unpleasantly how closely I am tied because of
dizziness to Mother Earth's apron strings. These fellows who perch on
scaffolds and flaunt themselves on steeple tops are frontiersmen. They
stand as the outposts of this flying globe. Often when I observe a workman
descend from his eagle's nest in the open steel frame of a lofty building,
I look into his face for some trace of exaltation, some message from his
wider horizon. You may remember how they gazed into Alcestis' face when
she returned from the House of Hades, that they might find there a token
of her shadowed journey. It is lucky that I am no taller than six feet; if
ten, giddiness would set in and reversion to type on all fours. An
undizzied man is to me as much of a marvel as one who in his heart of
hearts is not afraid of a horse.

Maybe after all, it is just because I am so cowardly and dizzy that I have
a liking for high places and especially for roofs. Although here my people
have lived for thousands of years on the very rim of things, with the
unimagined miles above them and the glitter of Orion on their windows, so
little have I learned of these verities that I am frightened on my shed
top and the grasses below make me crouch in terror. And yet to my fearful
perceptions there may be pleasures that cannot exist for the accustomed
and jaded senses of the tinman. Could he feel stimulus in Hugo's
description of Paris from the towers of Notre Dame? He is too much the
gargoyle himself for the delights of dizziness.

Quite a little could be said about the creative power of gooseflesh. If
Shakespeare had been a tinman he could not have felt the giddy height and
grandeur of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought the climbing of
the steeple into the crisis and calamity of "The Master Builder";
Teufelsdroeckh could not have uttered his extraord