urs, _No._ 11, 175."

CHAPTER III

THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN

I shall never forget one day I spent in New York some years ago--more
years than I thought at first. It was a wrong-headed day, but I cannot
help remembering it as a symbol of a dread I still feel at times in New
York--a feeling of being suddenly lifted, of being swept out under (it
is like the undertow of the sea) into a kind of vast deep of
impersonality--swept out of myself into a wide, imperious waste or
emptiness of people. I had come fresh from my still country meadow and
mountain, my own trees and my own bobolinks and my own little island of
sky up over me, and in the vast and desolate solitude of men and women I
wandered about up and down the streets. Every block I saw, every window,
skyline, engine, street-car, every human face, made me feel as if I
belonged to another world. Here was a great conspiracy in stone and iron
against my own life with myself. Was there a soul in all this huge roar
and spectacle of glass and stone and passion that cared for the things
that I cared for, or the things that I loved, or that would care one
shuffle of all the feet upon the stones for any thought or word or
desire of mine? The rain swept in my face, and I spent the day walking
up and down the streets looking at stones and glass and people. _"Here
we are!"_ say the great buildings crowding on the sky. _"Who are
you?"_....all the stone and the glass and the walls, the mighty
syndicate of matter everywhere, surrounded me--one little, shivering,
foolish mote of being fighting foolishly for its own little foolish mote
of identity!

And I do not believe that I was all wrong. New York, like some vast,
implacable cone of ether, some merciless anaesthetic, was thrust down
over me and my breathing, and I still had a kind of left-over prejudice
that I wanted to be myself, with my own private self-respect, with my
own private, temporarily finished-off, provisionally complete
personality. I felt then, and I still feel to-day, that every man, as he
fights for his breath, must stand out at least part of his time for the
right of being self-contained. It is, and always will be, one of the
appalling sights of New York to me--the spectacle of the helplessness,
the wistfulness, of all those poor New York people without one another.
Sometimes the city seems to be a kind of huge monument or idol or shrine
of crowds. It seems to be a part of the ceaseless crowd acti