the view of the city
from a cable car, the wonder of great trucks bearing down upon us like
fiery-eyed dragons, a bunch of poppies growing close to the roots of a
billboard in the heart of the city, and the silhouette of a young girl,
wind-blown, so that her straight slender figure shows more beautiful
than the statue that tops Union Square. Up Kearny street the glimpse of
eucalyptus trees on the top of Telegraph Hill standing out against the
pink sunset sky, the postman with his pack of human messages on his
back, the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson in Portsmouth Square, and a
row of old, old men sitting in the sun on Union Square discussing the
Universe.

Did you ever stand listening to the seals just at nightfall, and did
their weird, low call stir you to a feeling of kinship with all the
creatures of the great deep, and did you lose yourself there out under
the cold, dark water in that mysterious untamed world of the sea that is
older than the land?

I don't know what it's all about. I only know we need more poets. Still
every man who reacts to life and feels it to be a miracle, he is himself
a poet. Even Whitman could only articulate in terms of wonder.

Impulses and Prohibitions

One day last week a man--a regular man, neither a decided proletarian
nor a typical bourgeois--but just a man was walking along. He was
dressed in average clothes, he was shaved and carried a suit case and
didn't look out of work and was evidently going somewhere.

He was walking along with this suit case--it was on Larkin near
McAllister about two o'clock on one of those superb days of last
week--and he came to a place where there was a stretch of grass near
the sidewalk. I think he was hot and the suit case was getting heavy....

At any rate when he saw that grass, tall, dark green and fragrant, he
immediately lay down on it, pulled his hat over his eyes and, I expect,
went to sleep. It sounds so free and easy written down. Which makes it
no less significant.

First, it was significantly Western. An Easterner or a Middle Westerner
would have thought it over first. Then the fact that the man was so
average made it significant. If he had looked like a vagabond it would
have been not even an incident. It is we who are respectable who are
fettered by Grundy. It was a logical thing to do and natural and
terribly human, but most of us can't do the logical thing and natural
even if inside we do feel terribly human. Especially