Nothing but the Night by John Williams

Author:John Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

When he stumbled out of the hotel lobby, he found that darkness had descended, had crept down stealthily out of the sky to engage the city in ancient battle. The street lights and the electric signs sputtered with pitiful vehemence, but their protestations seemed only to emphasize the vast power of the night.

He breathed deeply, shudderingly of the corrupt air. A summer chill had come with the evening, and the cool breeze whipped through his clothing; and he shivered, hunching his shoulders and ramming his hands deep into his pockets, distinctly uncomfortable in the biting change from the close atmosphere of the dining room.

He stood for a moment indecisively on the sidewalk while the great human stream swirled and eddied about him. Then, as if the monotonous pressure of the current had uprooted him, he moved dully into the rushing torrent, a bit of colorless flotsam tossed and carried along between narrow banks.

The clatter of the metropolitan night assaulted his ears and screamed down the echoing vault of his senses, piling up and reverberating in increasing and diminishing waves until it seemed that all the city was one gigantic pulse of sound. And the ostentatious glare of the store windows along the street, the huge neon signs, the city’s myriad lights, the turgid twist and turn of the crowd, the snail-like convolutions of the shiny traffic upon the reflecting pavement—all these were visual counterpoint to the grating music of uninhibited noise.

Then, as he walked along the overflowing street in this deep summer evening, there came to him that peculiar loneliness which is felt only in the monstrous impersonality of a multitude, that incomparable sensation of pure aloneness never known in another circumstance. The solitary figure upon an unchanging expanse of desert is not so alone as is one lost in the infinity of a crowded city. He who is alone on the desert is always aware of his own significance, however small, and his relation to the space that he can see. But one who is solitary in the midst of a teeming swarm loses awareness of himself as an individual. The hundreds of strange bodies which press against him unknowingly, the hundreds of strange eyes which look upon his face blankly and without recognition, the voices which speak above, around, but never to him—in these lies true aloneness. Of these things he was dimly aware as he tumbled and drifted along.

However, with a sudden and violent wrench, he dislocated himself from that stream and stood with his body flattened and pressed against the plate glass bank of a store window, watching the river from which he had escaped go rushing by. He stood so for some moments, collecting his scattered faculties. A few doors above him, he could see an electric sign which flashed regularly on and off. He could not read the letters from where he stood, and he did not dare step out to look more closely for fear that the hungry maw of the crowd would

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