Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus
Author:Albert Camus [Camus, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9780307827784
Google: DSuwWW-gSa8C
Goodreads: 16098952
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1968-10-28T05:00:00+00:00
The Rains of New York
New York rain is a rain of exile. Abundant, viscous and dense, it pours down tirelessly between the high cubes of cement into avenues plunged suddenly into the darkness of a well: seeking shelter in a cab that stops at a red light and starts again on a green, you suddenly feel caught in a trap, behind monotonous, fast-moving windshield wipers sweeping aside water that is constantly renewed. You are convinced you could drive like this for hours without escaping these square prisons or the cisterns through which you wade with no hope of a hill or a real tree. The whitened skyscrapers loom in the gray mist like gigantic tombstones for a city of the dead, and seem to sway slightly on their foundations. At this hour they are deserted. Eight million men, the smell of steel and cement, the madness of builders, and yet the very height of solitude. “Even if I were to clasp all the people in the world against me, it would protect me from nothing.”
The reason perhaps is that New York is nothing without its sky. Naked and immense, stretched to the four corners of the horizon, it gives the city its glorious mornings and the grandeur of its evenings, when a flaming sunset sweeps down Eighth Avenue over the immense crowds driving past the shop windows, whose lights are turned on well before nightfall. There are also certain twilights along Riverside Drive, when you watch the parkway that leads uptown, with the Hudson below, its waters reddened by the setting sun; off and on, from the uninterrupted flow of gently, smoothly running cars, from time to time there suddenly rises a song that recalls the sound of breaking waves. Finally I think of other evenings, so gentle and so swift they break your heart, that cast a purple glow over the vast lawns of Central Park, seen from Harlem. Clouds of Negro children are striking balls with wooden bats, shouting with joy; while elderly Americans, in checked shirts, sprawl on park benches, sucking molded ice creams on a stick with what energy remains to them; while squirrels burrow into the earth at their feet in search of unknown tidbits. In the park’s trees, a jazz band of birds heralds the appearance of the first star above the Empire State Building, while long-legged creatures stride along the paths against a backdrop of tall buildings, offering to the temporarily gentle sky their splendid looks and their loveless glance. But when this sky grows dull, or the daylight fades, then once again New York becomes the big city, prison by day and funeral pyre by night. A prodigious funeral pyre at midnight, as its millions of lighted windows amid immense stretches of blackened walls carry these swarming lights halfway up the sky, as if every evening a gigantic fire were burning over Manhattan, the island with three rivers, raising immense, smoldering carcasses still pierced with dots of flame.
I have my ideas about
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Diaries & Journals | Essays |
Letters | Speeches |
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy(4525)
Bluets by Maggie Nelson(4263)
Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose(4096)
Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini(3978)
The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara(3788)
Walking by Henry David Thoreau(3685)
What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky(3199)
Schaum's Quick Guide to Writing Great Short Stories by Margaret Lucke(3189)
The Daily Stoic by Holiday Ryan & Hanselman Stephen(3111)
The Day I Stopped Drinking Milk by Sudha Murty(3106)
Why I Write by George Orwell(2775)
The Social Psychology of Inequality by Unknown(2768)
Letters From a Stoic by Seneca(2673)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson Bill(2510)
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes(2399)
Feel Free by Zadie Smith(2379)
A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde(2349)
Upstream by Mary Oliver(2273)
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky(2175)
