Simeon Strunsky

“ We are cowards. We crawl along from one truth to another. We timidly look back to our premises before jumping at the conclusion. We are horrified by inconsistencies. We are enslaved by facts—facts of nature, facts of human nature, facts of experience. How different it will all be when we can sidestep facts, when we can dip over inconsistencies, [Pg 125] when we can hug boldly an apparent contradiction and make it our own; when thinking, in short, will not be a timid regulated process, but a succession of dips, twists, gallops, slides, bends, hurdles, sprints, and pole vaults. ”

“ The train was at a standstill when he awoke to the extraordinary fact that he was twelve miles away from South Ferry, and going in the wrong direction. The imperative need of getting home as soon as he could overwhelmed him. He dashed for the door, but it slid shut in his face and the train pulled out. His fellow passengers grinned. One of the most amusing things in the world is a tardy passenger who tries to fling himself through a car door and flattens his nose against the glass. It is hard to say why the thing is amusing, but it is. Wesley did not know that he was being laughed at. ”

“ The advertising writer is the most unoriginal creature imaginable. He is more imitative than a theatre manager on Broadway. He is more imitative than the revolutionaries of art, the Impressionist who imitates the Romanticist, the Post-Impressionist who imitates the Impressionist, the Cubist who imitates the Post-Impressionist, the Futurist who imitates the Cubist, and the Parisian dressmaker who imitates the Futurist. ”

“ The world was to be made over by the bicycle. The strap-hanger was to abandon his strap and ride joyfully down the Broadway cable-slot, snapping his fingers at traction magnates and imbibing ozone. The factory-hand was to abandon his city flat and live in the open country, going to and from his work through the green lanes at fifteen miles an hour, with his lunch on the handle bars. The old were to grow young again and the young were to dream close to the heart of Nature. ”

“ I thought what an upright, independent life a milkman's must be, so free from the petty chaffering and meanness that make up the ordinary tradesman's routine. He has no competition to contend with. He is no one's servant. He deposits his wares at your doorstep and you take them or leave them as you please. He can work in the dark because he does not need the light to study your face and overreach you. With no one to watch him, with no one to criticise him, with leisure and silence in which to work out his problems—I envied him. ”

“ To-day the mail-order lists are crammed with commodities that are different. Oh, jaded American appetite that refuses to accept a two-for-a-quarter Troy collar unless it is different!
Now the truth that must be apparent to any man who will only think for a moment—and by all accounts your advertising writer is always engaged in a hellish fury of cerebration—is that there are a great many commodities whose value depends on the very fact that they shall not be different, but the same. ”

“ I am not sure who is the barbarian, the American trust magnate who thinks a million francs is not too much for one of Raphael's Madonnas, or the scion of Europe's ancient nobility who thinks that no Madonna is worth keeping if you can get a million francs for it. According to the European idea, the proper place for a masterpiece is a corner of the lounging-room where the weary guest, after a hard day with the hounds, may be tempted to stare at the canvas for a moment and say, 'Nice little daub, what?' Their masterpieces are made to be seldom seen and never heard of. ”

“ Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of the court is without its little group of social investigators, among whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women, exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.
As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic young women in the audience. ”

“ But he saw I was unconvinced, and he did not go to much pains in exhibiting the dining-room, merely remarking that it did look rather small, but the people who last lived in the apartment were accustomed to go out for their meals.
You will see now why I am so intensely interested in the tenants whose successors we were on the point of being. With life growing more flat and monotonous about us, how refreshing to come across a family which keeps a music-box in the nursery, does its reading in the bath-tub, and never eats in the dining-room. ”

“ Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with better-trained powers of observation than he can [Pg 33] bring to bear in person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of thousands in New York? ”

“ Among the most remarkable people I have never met is the family that had just moved out of the apartment we were going to rent. My knowledge of those strangers is based entirely on odd bits of information casually furnished by the renting-agent in the course of a single interview. Yet they are more actual and alive to me than many people with whom I have lived in intimate communion for years. Is it our fate ever to meet? ”

“ Incidentally I would remark that the opportunities for consulting the Gettysburg Address occur frequently in a newspaper office. Every little while, in the lull between editions, a difference of opinion will arise as to what Lincoln said at Gettysburg. Some maintain that he said, "a government of the people, for the people, by the people"; some declare he said, "a government by the people, of the people, for the people"; some assert that he said, "a government by the people, for the people, of the people." ”

“ In offering your services impartially to the District Attorney or to counsel for the defence you have lived up to that lofty impartiality of service which is the glory of our art. The physician knows neither friend nor foe, neither saint nor sinner. From the rich store of your expert knowledge you can draw that with which to satisfy all men. ”

“ Let me sum up the speaker's concluding sentence as I recall it. As we look around us to-day there is unmistakably one force which works for the elimination of that inequality which is the source of all our troubles; a force which wipes out all distinction of class, of age, and of education, and produces a world in which everybody is engaged in doing the same thing as everybody else. ”

“ He came into the office and fixed me with his glittering eye across the desk. Under ordinary circumstances I should have found his manner of speech rather odd. But it was the last week of the Cubist Exhibition on Lexington Avenue, and a certain lack of coherence seemed natural. He said:
"Is there a soul in things we choose to describe as inanimate? Of course there is. Can we assign moral attributes to what people usually regard as dead nature? Of course we can. Why don't we do something then? Take the abandoned farm. Doesn't the term at once call up a picture of shocking moral degradation? ”

“ Does the soul of man decay? Do the primitive loyalties decay? As long as we have men like Charles Crawl and Samuel Howard, do you think I care whether or not Harvard graduates neglect to reproduce their kind? The soul of man, as embodied in Dillon with his 'So long, Johnny,' is as sound to-day as it was ten thousand years ago, before the human race entered on its decline by putting on clothes. ”

“ He adapts himself to Yum-Yum. He adapts himself to Katisha. No sooner is he released from prison to become Lord High Executioner than he has ready his convenient little list of people who never would be missed. Of his powers of persuasion we need not speak at great length. His wooing of Katisha is a triumph of romantic eloquence. It carries everything before it, as in that superb climax when Katisha inquires whether it is all true about the unfortunate little tom-tit on a tree by the river, and Ko-Ko replies: "I knew the bird intimately." He is modern through and through, our Ko-Ko. ”

“ From Emmeline I learned that I had been doing the fashion designers an injustice. I had always imagined that styles were the creation of Parisian dressmakers who worked with only two ends in view—novelty and discomfort. But Emmeline assured me that styles are a faithful record of the march of civilisation. When the Manchurian War was under way, everything in the shops was Russian. When Herr Strauss produced "Salome," half the world went in for the slim and viperous costume. The revolution in Persia worked a revolution in blouse decoration. Later everything was Bulgarian. ”

“ Forbid a playwright to show the interior of a Tenderloin dive and the public will never know the truth about the Underwood bill. You see, there is nothing about the tariff in the newspapers. There is nothing in the magazines. College professors never mention the subject. Campaign speakers ignore it. There is a conspiracy of silence. Only the theatre offers us enlightenment on the subject. Under such conditions would you keep the playwright from telling us what he knows? ”

“ Mathematics has become an impressionist art, and love, birth, and death are treated arithmetically. Grown men and women clamour for the widest individual freedom, and children, if you will listen to the Princeton professor, should render compulsory service to the State. We are in full revolt; in revolt toward State Socialism, toward Nietzsche, toward Christian idealism, toward the paganism of the Latin Quarter and Montmartre, toward university settlements, toward the cabaret. Are we in a fog? Are we in the clouds striving toward the light? ”

“ Is there any reason why we cannot produce a race as healthy, as beautiful, as graceful in the free play of muscle and limb? An erect, supple, free-stepping race, breathing deeply of life, looking the world full in the face, daring everything, afraid of nothing. Our bodies are divine, as much so as our souls. ”

“ A splendid courage accompanied by a high degree of disorder is what I regard as the American Idea. Hence the perfect propriety of a fifty-story Venetian tower overlooking a Byzantine temple devoted to the Presbyterian form of worship. Too many of my countrymen are tempted to scoff at your skyscrapers. But I maintain that a skyscraper perfectly expresses the spirit of a people which has created Pittsburg, the Panama Canal, and Mr. Hammerstein's chain of opera houses. Take your loftiest structures [Pg 223] in New York and think what they stand for. ”

“ Wesley was pleased and frightened. He had tasted another new sensation. He had broken through the frosty reserve of twenty years and had spoken to a stranger after the free and easy manner of men who make [Pg 95] friends in Pullman cars and at lunch counters. And the stranger, instead of repulsing him, had admitted him, at the very first attempt, into the fraternity of ordinary people. It was pleasant to be one of the great democracy of the crowd, something which Wesley had never had time to be. But on the other hand, he found the strain of conversation telling upon him. ”

“ They have been described by the human-interest reporters, analysed by the statisticians, defended by the social revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter, to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court, anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them? ”

“ The cynical opinion of mankind long ago laid it down that all crimes may be resolved into the single crime of allowing one's self to be found out. If a poor man is caught, it is stupidity or negligence. But obviously, when a wealthy criminal is apprehended, the only possible explanation is that he is insane.
The youthful degenerate who resorts to murder; the financier who steals the savings of the poor; the lobbyist who buys a Senator-ship and sells a State; the Pittsburg millionaire who seeks to rise above the laws of bigamy, may all be explained, and acquitted, in terms of mental aberration. ”

“ When a happy word or phrase or symbol is let loose in the advertising world, it is caught up, and [Pg 151] repeated, and chanted, and echoed, until the sound and sight of it become a torture. How long ago is it since every merchantable product of man's ingenuity from automobiles to xylophones was being dedicated to "his majesty the American citizen"? How long is it since every item in the magazine pages was something ending in ly, "supremely" good, or "potently" attractive, or "permanently" satisfying, or in any other conceivable phrase, adverbially so? ”