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75 - I, Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane · I, Mary MacLane

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  Speaker 1: Chapter seventy five of I Mary mc lain by Mary
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  Speaker 1: mc lain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Lynn Thompson, Chapter seventy five I swater, corrosive
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  Speaker 1: acid and human breath to morrow. I have love for
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  Speaker 1: two towns. One is this Butte that I tiredly love
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  Speaker 1: inside me, and the other is New York, that I
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  Speaker 1: smoothly love with all my surfaces. It is some years,
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  Speaker 1: a little lump of years since I have seen New York,
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  Speaker 1: and it is two thousand miles away. So I see
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  Speaker 1: and feel its hard, sweet, lurid magnetism, now ten times
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  Speaker 1: sharper than when I lived in it, But I felt
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  Speaker 1: it sudden and sharp at every turn. Then a surface
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  Speaker 1: in motion which hits one's flesh and spreads wide over
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  Speaker 1: one's area is more exciting than a spirit in motion,
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  Speaker 1: which pierces inward at one tiny point. An ice shower
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  Speaker 1: bath on the white skin is more anguishing than an
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  Speaker 1: ice water drink down the red throat. The spirit emotion
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  Speaker 1: lives longer, and works more damage, and buries itself at last.
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  Speaker 1: In proud shaded soul reserves the surface. Emotion stays always
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  Speaker 1: on the surface and lives actively in the front of
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  Speaker 1: one's senses and musings. The feel of New York is
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  Speaker 1: a mixture of ice water, a corrosive acid, and human
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  Speaker 1: breath sweeping some way warmish against one's flesh. It is
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  Speaker 1: immensely ungentle New York, immensely human, immensely intriguing to all
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  Speaker 1: one's selves. It is too big to have prejudices and
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  Speaker 1: traditions of locality, so it leaves its dwellers free by
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  Speaker 1: ones and multitudes to be human beings. In South Bend,
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  Speaker 1: Untiledo and Beloit and Saint Paul and all the tight
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  Speaker 1: built inland towns, they murder you with narrowness and harshness
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  Speaker 1: and rancorous ill will. They are scowlingly annoyed with you
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  Speaker 1: for making them murder you. In New York, they murder
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  Speaker 1: you with a large, soft wave of indifferent insolence, no annoyance,
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  Speaker 1: no friction. New York eats you as it eats its dinner,
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  Speaker 1: rather liking you. And my love for New York is
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  Speaker 1: made of liking, a pleasance of liking, made of liking,
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  Speaker 1: a plasance of liking. I like New York with a
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  Speaker 1: charmed restfulness for varied things, in it subways and Fourth
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  Speaker 1: Avenue and the River and Fifth Avenue on a sunny
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  Speaker 1: October afternoon, and the statue of Nathan Hale and old
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  Speaker 1: cockroachry downtown buildings and the soft, rich, wellming, creamy, boiling
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  Speaker 1: chocolate fragrance from the Highla factory in Irving Place. And
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  Speaker 1: mostly I like it for the people in it. People, persons, people,
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  Speaker 1: They are human beings. In the inland towns, people are
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  Speaker 1: half afraid of thoughts, half afraid of spoken words, half
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  Speaker 1: afraid of each other, half afraid of the fact of
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  Speaker 1: being human. In New York, they are not afraid of
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  Speaker 1: any humanness. Even when they are in themselves craven, cowardly,
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  Speaker 1: cowardly enough to turn their own stomachs, they still turn
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  Speaker 1: their humanness unfearfully, face outward, like upturned faces of a
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  Speaker 1: pack of cards. An Italian organ grinder grinding out his loud,
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  Speaker 1: fierce music in a long, deep New York side street
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  Speaker 1: is a human organ grinder. He bestows his rasped malady
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  Speaker 1: widely on everybody in earshot, not individually, since all around
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  Speaker 1: him is a spreading world of strangers, but jointly so
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  Speaker 1: it feels like a beggar woman at the subway entrance
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  Speaker 1: with a wine and a dirty face and a deadly
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  Speaker 1: black cape and chicken coopish beggar Odor is a human
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  Speaker 1: beggar woman. She throws out an inner savor of herself,
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  Speaker 1: like a soiled aura, on all collectively who pass her.
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  Speaker 1: Each and all of New York by tolerating and owning her,
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  Speaker 1: partakes of her mean human essence. A stout hearted, warm bodied,
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  Speaker 1: dew factory girl working at a hard, greasy little machine
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  Speaker 1: day after day gives all New York her bit of
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  Speaker 1: young virtue, which is hardy and heroic and unaware. The
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  Speaker 1: whole island of looseness and vice has an equal gift
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  Speaker 1: of impregnable, surprising, sordid purity, thriving on sixes and sevens
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  Speaker 1: of poor dollars a week. All of it is because
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  Speaker 1: New York is one large condition made of human bread
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  Speaker 1: breathes and the worn scrapings of tired youth, rather than
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  Speaker 1: one large town made of individuals and stone houses. And
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  Speaker 1: in that is an odd enchantment for me, who are
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  Speaker 1: born and grown in the places of half fear, with
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  Speaker 1: an old, isolated, whole fear always on me. In New York,
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  Speaker 1: I am a partaker of that smooth manner of humanness,
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  Speaker 1: as I am of the air and the sunshine, and
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  Speaker 1: the little black specks of colsort partly from choice, partly
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  Speaker 1: willy nilly, partly in the sweeping and analyzable pellmellness of
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  Speaker 1: mass human nature. And it is in New York I
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  Speaker 1: have those strangest things of all human friendships, not many friendships,
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  Speaker 1: and not of spent familiarities, for I don't like actual
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  Speaker 1: human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made
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  Speaker 1: of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos, and pregnant
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  Speaker 1: to odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.
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  Speaker 1: It is in New York I go to the apartment
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  Speaker 1: of a friend at the end of an afternoon. In
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  Speaker 1: the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women.
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  Speaker 1: The friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe
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  Speaker 1: a dress of thin, dark and light silk, shaped in
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  Speaker 1: the quaint, outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd,
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  Speaker 1: kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New
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  Speaker 1: Yorkish Latinish brain and tart, both of which are made
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  Speaker 1: of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living.
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  Speaker 1: She says hello, Mary mc lane, and clasps my hand,
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  Speaker 1: and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all,
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  Speaker 1: but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet
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  Speaker 1: call of depth to depth, and of friendship, which, by
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  Speaker 1: mere force of preference and of our separate quality and caliber,
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  Speaker 1: is through rather than false. So close and no closer
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  Speaker 1: may friendship be, And friendship withal is closer than any love.
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  Speaker 1: It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting
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  Speaker 1: in a New York doorway. I made in broad loneliness
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  Speaker 1: of self, get suddenly companion warmed at the little, pleasant,
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  Speaker 1: twisted fire of some one else. It might be so
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  Speaker 1: in some other town, even below, but it feels only
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  Speaker 1: like New York to me. I go in the room
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  Speaker 1: where the others are, and they say hello, Mary mac lane,
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  Speaker 1: and I drink some tea and listen and talk in
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  Speaker 1: fragments of half meanings, and I get warmed and half warmed,
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  Speaker 1: and cooled and slightly scorched in the easeful, unevenly heated
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  Speaker 1: humanness of the women and men sitting around in the
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  Speaker 1: inland towns. They throw their thoughts and ideas at you
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  Speaker 1: at tea time Inland, thoughts and ideas which hit you
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  Speaker 1: and then drop off like little pebbles and nuts and
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  Speaker 1: hard green apples. In New York, they throw those things
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  Speaker 1: in the form of long ribbons, heated from being worn
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  Speaker 1: next their skin, which fly out and wrap around your
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  Speaker 1: skin pleasantly or foolishly or fancifully. The point of it
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  Speaker 1: is that nobody is afraid of that. It is nothing fulfilling,
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  Speaker 1: nothing satisfying. It is merely human. It is half lyric.
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  Speaker 1: It reassures me as a person. It makes me feel
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  Speaker 1: human in all my surfaces, which are harder to humanize
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  Speaker 1: in every body than any deepest steeps. And it is therefore,
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  Speaker 1: with all my surfaces, smoothly and restfully, I love New York.
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  Speaker 1: End of chapter seventy five