FLIGHT INTO REALTY
63
triumph of successful escape from the fetters of reality. He
succeeds in losing himself completely in the strivings of his ·soul
and the utterances of symbol. Sometimes, when he repeats a
phrase in order to extract the deepest meaning from it, he seems
to peer into and beyond the fabric of the music like a man who
sees above the ugliness of a wooden fence and up into the sky,
worshipping the " clouds, the marvelous clouds!"
One day a tragic thing occurred. I was frantically scrib–
bling shorthand and he was playing lackadaisically a f antastic
little passage. He stopped suddenly and began a rapi d Irish
jig. At first it was insolently lilting and gay; charmingly vulgar.
But then it seized hold of him and he attacked that simple Irish
tune with a feverish, almost fiendish intensity all out of propor–
tion to the character of it. It was savage and depraved, and, to
me, almost unbearable. Soon it ended, and he lapsed pitifully
back into his forest of "symbols watching him with friendly
eyes," only now he crept sadly among them, caressing them,
pleading with them.
I think we are all shams, I and the violinist and the Negro
woman, and the children in the night. I think the ice men are
the only real and true human beings. And the children in the
park were victims of a crazy world, a world which doesn't pro–
mote sanity ... do you think it does? I am wandering, now, but
I am feeling things I want to know. Right across the room from
me is a chair. In my head it's always been a chair. It might
have gone on being a chair in my head forever. But now I think
of it as a chair outside me; a chair, in relation to me, a human
being. I want to put it outside my mind. I think this is self–
realization, self-identification. I think the violinist was afraid
to recognize it as a chair outside himself. Everything was in
him, and therefore, was not, really, at all. But I, now, have
walked to the chair, and I have touched it, and touched myself,
and oh, Betty, the pleasure of it l To know we are two differ–
ent things, and yet of the same substance!
But don't you see, the adolescence of striving to interpret
the universe in terms of metaphysics. Was it Emerson who said
the universe was mirrored in a drop of dew?
If
this is true, and
no one understands the miracle of a dew drop, what folly to
thi~k
"justification of humanity." Man is a form of matter, and
I, as one instance of this form, am becoming strangely aware of
myself by breaking through the shell of self.
And so it was when I sat on the stone wall warm in the
