SEIZE THE DAY
407
belts pay him? Was he defrauding his so-calIed patients? So many
questions impossible to answer could not be asked about an honest man.
Nor perhaps about a sane man. Was Tamkin a lunatic then? That
sick Mr. Perls at breakfast had said that there was no easy way to teIl
the sane from the mad, and he was right about that in any big city
and especially in New York- the end of the world, with its complexity
and machinery, bricks and tubes, wires and stones, holes and heights.
And was everybody crazy here? What sort of people did you see? Every
other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured
out by private thinking; he had hi s own ideas and peculiar ways.
If
you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with
God creating the heavens and earth; the Apple; Abraham, Moses and
] esus; Rome ; the middle ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to
Newton; up to Einstein; then War and Lenin and Hitler. After showing
this and getting it alI straight again you could proceed to talk about
a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were
lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over
and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and
translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punish–
ment of HelI itself not to understand or be understood, not to know
the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the
old or the sick from the well. The fathers were no fathers and the
sons no sons. You had to talk with yourself in the daytime and reason
with yourself at night. Who else was there to talk to in a city like
New York?
A queer look came over Wilhelm's face with its eyes turned up and
his silent mouth with its high upper lip. He went several degrees further
-when you are like this, dreaming that everybody is outcast, you realize
that this must be one of the smalI matters. There is a larger body,
and from this you cannot be separated. The glass of water fades out.
You do not go from simple
a
and simple
b
to the great
x
and
y,
nor
does it matter whether you agree about the glass but far beneath such
items, what Tamkin would call the real soul says plain and under–
standable things to everyone. There sons and fathers are themselves, and
a glass of water is only an ornament; it makes a hoop of brightness on
the cloth; it is an angel's mouth. There truth for everybody may be
found, and confusion is only ... only temporary, thought Wilhelm.
The idea of this larger body had been planted in him a few days
ago beneath Times Square, when he had gone downtown to pick up
tickets for the baseball game on Saturday (a double-header at the Polo
Grounds). He was going through an underground corridor, a place he
had always hated and hated more than ever now. On the walIs between
the advertisements were words in chalk:
Sin No More,
and
Do not
Eat the Pig,
he had particularly noticed. And in the dark tunnel, in the
haste, heat and darkness which disfigure and make freaks and fragments
of nose and eyes and teeth, all of a sudden, unsought, a general love
for alI these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm's
breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them. They
