5
"IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES"
Delmore Schwartz
I
THINK
it is the year 1909. I feel as if I were in a moving-picture
theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my
eyes fixed upon the screen. It is a silent picture, as if an old Biograph
one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned
clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps, and the
actors, too, seem to jump about, walking too fast. The shots are full
of rays and dots, as if it had been raining when the picture was photo-
graphed. The light is bad.
It is Sunday afternoon, June 12th, 1909, and my father is walking
down the quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother.
His clothes are newly pressed, and his tie is too tight in his high collar.
He jingles the coins in his pocket, thinking of the witty things he will
say. I feel as if I had by now rela.xed entirely in the soft darkness of
the theatre; the organist peals out the obvious approximate emotions
on which the audience rocks unknowingly. I am anonymous. I have
forgotten myself: it is always so when one goes to a movie, it is, as
they say, a drug.
My father walks from street to street of trees, lawns and houses,
once in a while coming to an avenue on which a streetcar skates and
gnaws, progressing slowly. The motorman, who has a handle-bar
mustache, helps a young lady wearing a hat like a feathered bowl
onto the car. He leisurely makes change and rings his bell as the pas-
sengers mount the car. It is obviously Sunday, for everyone is wearing
Sunday clothes and the streetcar's noises emphasize the quiet of the
holiday (for Brooklyn is said to be the city of churches). The shops
are closed and their shades drawn but for an occasional stationery
store or drugstore with great green balls in the window.
My father has chosen to take this long walk because he likes to
walk and think. He thinks about himself in the future and so arrives
at the place he is to visit in a mild state of exaltation. He pays no
attention to the houses he is passing, in which the Sunday dinner is
being eaten, nor to the many trees which line each street, now coming
to their full green and the time when they will enclose the whole
street in leafy shadow. An occasional carriage passes,the horses' hooves
falling like stones in the quiet afternoon, and once in a while an
automobile, looking like an enormous upholstered sofa, puffs and
passes.
