Does this explain, perhaps, the desolate emptiness of city youth—those straggling bands of boys of sixteen or eighteen that one can always see at night or on a holiday, going along a street, filling the air with raucous jargon and senseless cries, each trying to outdo the others with joyless catcalls and mirthless quips and jokes which are so feeble, so stupidly inane, that one hears them with strong mixed feelings of pity and of shame? Where here, among these lads, is all the merriment, high spirits, and spontaneous gaiety of youth? These creatures, millions of them, seem to have been born but half-made up, without innocence, born old and stale and dull and empty.
Who can wonder at it? For what a world it is that most of them were born into! They were suckled on darkness, and weaned on violence and noise. They had to try to draw out moisture from the cobble-stones, their true parent was a city street, and in that barren universe no urgent sails swelled out and leaned against the wind, they rarely knew the feel of earth beneath their feet and no birds sang, t heir youthful eyes grew hard, unseeing, from being stopped for ever by a wall of masonry.
In other times, when painters tried to paint a scene of awful desolation, they chose the desert or a heath of barren rocks, and there would try to picture man in his great loneliness—the prophet in the desert, Elijah being fed by ravens on the rocks. But for a modern painter, the most desolate scene would be a street in almost any one of our great cities on a Sunday afternoon.
Suppose a rather drab and shabby street in Brooklyn, not quite tenement perhaps, and lacking therefore even the gaunt savagery of I overty, but a street of cheap brick buildings, warehouses, and garages, with a cigar store or a fruit stand or a barber shop on the corner. Suppose a Sunday afternoon in March—bleak, empty, slaty grey. And suppose a group of men, Americans of the working class, dressed in t heir “good” Sunday clothes—the cheap machine-made suits, the new cheap shoes, the cheap felt hats stamped out of universal grey. Just suppose this, and nothing more. The men hang round the corner before the cigar store or the closed barber shop, and now and then, through the bleak and empty street, a motor-car goes flashing past, and in the distance they hear the cold rumble of an elevated train. For hours they hang round the corner, waiting—waiting—waiting----
For what?
Nothing. Nothing at all. And that is what gives the scene its special quality of tragic loneliness, awful emptiness, and utter desolation. Every modern city man is familiar with it. And yet—and yet----
It is also true—and this is a curious paradox about America—that these same men who stand upon the corner and wait around on Sunday afternoons for nothing are filled at the same time with an almost quenchless hope, an almost boundless optimism, an almost indestructible belief that something is bound to turn up, something is sure to happen. This is a peculiar quality of the American soul, and it contributes largely to the strange enigma of our life, which is so incredibly mixed of harshness and of tenderness, of innocence and of crime, of loneliness and of good fellowship, of desolation and of exultant hope, of terror and of courage, of nameless fear and of soaring conviction, of brutal, empty, naked, bleak, corrosive ugliness, and of beauty so lovely and so overwhelming that the tongue is stopped by it, and the language for it has not yet been uttered.
How explain this nameless hope that seems to lack all reasonable foundation? I cannot. But if you were to go up to this fairly intelligent-looking truck-driver who stands and waits there with his crowd, and if you put to him your question, and if he understood what you were talking about (he wouldn’t), and if he were articulate enough to frame in words the feelings that are in him (he isn’t)—he might answer you with something such as this:
“Now is duh mont’ of March, duh mont’ of March—now it is Sunday afternoon in Brooklyn in duh mont’ of March, an’ we stand upon cold corners of duh day. It’s funny dat dere are so many corners in duh mont’ of March, here in Brooklyn where no corners are. Jesus! On Sunday in duh mont’ of March we sleep late in duh mornin’ den we get up an’ read duh papers—dub funnies an’ duh sportin’ news. We eat some chow. An’ den we dress up in duh afternoon, we leave our wives, we leave dub funnies littered on duh floor, an’ go outside in Brooklyn in duh mont’ of March an’ stand around upon ten t’ousand corners of duh day. We need a corner in, duh mont’ of March, a wall to stand to, a shelter an’ a door. Dere must be some place inside in duh mont’ of March, but we never found it. So we stand around on corners where duh sky is cold an’ ragged still wit’ winter, in our good clothes we stand around wit’ a lot of udder guys we know, before dub, barber shop, just lookin’ for a door.”