Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes

Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes

Brooklyn Is Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes “City of homes and churches.” Whitman, writing of Brooklyn. “One of the great waste places of the world.” Doughty, writing of Arabia. “And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.” Blake, writing of London. “Life is fundamentally composed of vegetable matter.” Obsolete textbook of biology. watching them in the trolleys, or along the inexhaustible reduplications of the streets of their small tradings and their sleep, one comes to notice, even in the most urgently poor, a curious quality in the eyes and at the corners of the mouths, relative to what is seen on Manhattan Island: a kind of drugged softness or narcotic relaxation. The same look may be seen in monasteries and in the lawns of sanitariums, and there must have been some similar look among soldiers convalescent of shell shock in institutionalized British gardens where, in a late summer dusk, a young man could mistake heat lightnings and the crumpling of hidden thunder for what he has left in France, and must return to. If there were not Manhattan, there could not be this Brooklyn look; for truly to appreciate what one escapes, it must be not only distant but near at hand. Only: all escapes are relative, and bestow their own peculiar forms of bondage. It is the same of the physique and whole tone and metre of the city itself. You have only to cross a bridge to know it: how behind you the whole of living is drawn up straining into verticals, tightened and badgered in nearly every face of man and child and building; and how where you are entering , even among the riverside throes of mechanisms and of tenements in the iron streets, this whole of living is nevertheless relaxed upon horizontalities, a deep taproot of stasis in each action and each building. Partly, it suggests the qualities of any small American city, the absorption in home, the casualness of the measuredly undistinguished: only this usual provincialism is powerfully enhanced here by the near existence of Manhattan, which has drawn Brooklyn of most of what a city’s vital organs are, and upon which an inestimable swarm of Brooklyn’s population depends for living itself.And 4 again, this small-city quality is confused in the deep underground atomic drone of the intertextured procedures upon blind time of more hundreds on hundreds of thousands of compacted individual human existences than the human imagination can comprehend or bear to comprehend. It differs from most cities in this: that though it has perhaps a “center,” and hands, and eyes, and feet, it is chiefly no whole or recognizable animal but an exorbitant pulsing mass of scarcely discriminable cellular jellies and tissues; a place where people merely “live.” A few American cities, Manhattan chief among them, have some mad magnetic energy which sucks all others into “provincialism”; and Brooklyn of all great cities is nearest the magnet , and is indeed “provincial”: it is provincial as a land of rich earth and of this earth is an enormous farm, whose crop is far less “industrial” or “financial ” or “notable” or in any way “distinguished” or “definable” than it is of human flesh and being. And this fact alone, which of itself makes Brooklyn so featureless, so little known, to many so laughable , or so ripe for patronage, this fact, that two million human beings are alive and living there, invests the city in an extraordinarily high, piteous 5 and inviolable dignity, well beyond touch of laughter , defense, or need of notice. Manhattan is large, yet all its distances seem quick and available.Brooklyn is larger,seventy-one square miles as against twenty-two, but here you enter the paradoxes of the relative. You know, here: only a few miles from wherever I stand, Brooklyn ends; only a few miles away is Manhattan; Brooklyn is walled with world-traveled wetness on west and south and on north and east is the young beaverboard frontier of Queens; Brooklyn comes to an end: but actually, that is, in the conviction of the body, there seems almost no conceivable end to Brooklyn; it seems, on land as flat and huge as Kansas, horizon beyond horizon forever unfolded, an immeasurable proliferation of house on house and street by street; or seems as China does, infinite in time in patience and in population as in space. The collaborated creature of the...