Broken Necks/My Last Park Bench

There is always one drama in people’s heads. They are older than they were and this fact is like a cello accompaniment to the inner and outer noises of the day.

On a leisurly spring afternoon I find it difficult to avoid turning into the boulevard. And once in this wide avenue a species of perfunctory gayety overtakes me. As I walk I notice my body and mind imitating memories of themselves.

In short, I grow younger. And this is a phenomenon I find full of pathos. For to "grow younger" means to mimic for a few moments the always enviable past, to taunt one’s self with the illusion of immortality, to jingle imaginary coins in one’s pockets.

Walking in the avenue, I look up at the buildings which no longer interest me, I invent similies for the window rows and the high rooftops. I notice once more the perspective trick which causes the buildings to seem wider at the crest than they do at the base, and that as I walk away looking back over my shoulder the skyscrapers in the distance expand slowly in size instead of decrease.

And finally I cross the street and enter Grant Park. The gesture strikes me as a bit of plagiarism. This was once part of a romantic routine—to sit on one of the green benches above the I. C. tracks and confront the city and think: "The buildings look like the backdrop in a melodrama," and then to enjoy the two-dimensional vista of Michigan avenue by transplanting it into an imagistic world.

All this I recall musingly. And as if to recapture the flavor of those days, I begin once more. . . . The People’s Gas building looks like a massive aquarium. One almost waits for fish to swim past the windows. The Wrigley tower looks like a Polish wedding cake. At night the Blackstone looks like a lantern hanging out of the dark sky. The automobiles moving down the avenue look like a procession of silk hats. The difference between man and Nature is that fifty feet away even a bank president becomes a shapeless, meaningless piece of fabric and a tree becomes more significantly a tree the farther one leaves it behind.

In the midst of such aimless thinking I stop and wonder what has become of all the metaphors with which I have entertained myself on this bench in the park. A few of them have gone into books and a few more into conversation. But most of them have gone nowhere. I cannot even now remember them. I recall thinking how clever they were and even important, and I stare intensely again at the scene which engendered them.

New thoughts arise almost automatically in my mind. Like two well-trained animals, the phrases in one's head continue the performance with the curtain down and the footlights out.

"It is no more than a foolish waste of time to sit here," I think. "The cinders are filling my shirt. My eyes are getting full of dust. My linen will be ruined and I will need a new shine on my shoes. It would be much more intelligent to put an end to this game of pretending the city panorama fascinates me as it once did."

This confession is painful, for as I make it I recall the glow and excitement with which I once stared at this scene. I forget the many new and perhaps more important preoccupations of the present.

"Don't be a sentimental ass," I think; "you are no longer writing imagistic sketches for the Little Review. You have quite outgrown that. You are now a belligerent philosopher, not to say a scientist. Very remarkable and far-reaching human phenomena now engage your attention."

Futile reassurance. What was there more charming than the casual, pointless and limited enthusiams of youth? How much better off one is when one's mind, beginning to emerge from the darkness into which all minds are born, indulges in its first bombastic caracolings; when the phrases it invents seem vastly more important than the life which inspires them. All one's fancies at this time seem mysteriously vital and pregnant. And, like Narcissus, one kneels and stares fascinatedly into the unfolding wonders of one's mind.

These things I do not entirely figure out sitting on the bench. For several minutes' walking across the park and sitting down in the familiar place made me feel younger. Now I am paying the penalty for this dishonestly purchased youth. But, being entirely human, I manage to feel depressed over quite the wrong thing—the lesser qualities of the new 'younger generation,' for instance, or the comparative dullness of the recent literary revolts.

"You will be able to write this tenuous incident in a pleasant and satisfactory manner," I smile to myself. "And on the whole your work is improving. For as you grow older you acquire something in common with the humanities—a quality you have always rather lacked. You share a vast and human nostalgia for outlived selves. Behind the excitement of your critical intolerance the orchestra is beginning to play Auld Lang Syne and the effect is rather charming. You are, as a matter of fact, still younger than all but two of the 'newest' novelists and this pensiveness is, therefore, a pose which becomes you rather than betrays you."

With this in mind, I prepare to depart. A voice interrupts me. A young man who has sat down next to me is talking. He is a bit embarrassed and the eagerness of his manner is slightly confusing.

"Excuse me," he says. "I would like to ask you a question."

Feeling mistakenly flattered at being recognized, I nod. Whereat this young man continues:

"I was wondering why people come to sit alone on benches like this. You see, I’m a writer and I sometimes get curious about what people really have in their heads when they sit like you’ve been sitting, looking at the city. I’ve been looking at you for some time and wondering what sort of a man you were. Do you mind telling me what sort of work you do and—"

The young man pauses, an ingratiating smile on his face. For the moment I feel an impulse to talk, to match epigrams with him and smiles. But, I think it will be a better plan for him if I merely get up and walk away with an enigmatic expression on my face. And this I do.

I catch a glimpse of him following me with his eyes, excited, damn him, over the mystery and romance which lurk in every corner of the city, even on a cinder-covered bench in Grant Park. Let him sit till doom’s day on this bench; he will never see me again. I have more important things to do than to collect cinders under my collar.