Jukebox and Other Writings Read Online Free PDF Page A

flight from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York. It was a long haul from Cook Inlet, great ice floes rushing in at low tide and galloping back into the ocean at low tide, a stopover amid snow flurries in the gray of dawn in Edmonton, Canada, another in Chicago after much circling around the airfield
and waiting in line on the runway under the harsh morning sun, to the final landing in the sultry afternoon, miles out of New York. Arriving at the hotel, I felt ill, cut off from the world after a night without sleep, air, or exercise, and wanted to go straight to bed. But then I saw the streets along Central Park in the early-autumn sunlight. People seemed to be strolling about, as though on a holiday. I wanted to be with them and felt I’d be missing something if I stayed in my room. Still dazed and alarmingly wobbly from loss of sleep, I found a place on a sunlit café terrace, with clamor and gasoline fumes all around me. But then, I don’t remember how, whether little by little or all at once, came transformation. I once read that depressives can be cured by being kept awake night after night; this “treatment” seemed to stabilize the fearsomely swaying “suspension bridge of the ego.” I had that image before me when the torment of my tiredness began to lift. This tiredness had something of a recovery about it. Hadn’t I heard people talk about “fighting off tiredness”? For me the fight was over. Now tiredness was my friend. I was back in the world again and even—though not because this was Manhattan—in its center. But there were other things, many, in fact, one more enchanting than the last. Until late that night I did nothing but sit and look; it was almost as if I had no need to draw breath. No spectacular breathing exercises or yoga contortions. You just sit and breathe more or less correctly in the light of your tiredness. Lots of beautiful women passed, sometimes an incredible number, from time to time their beauty brought tears to my eyes—and all, as they passed, took
notice of me. I existed. (Strange that my look of tiredness was especially acknowledged by the beautiful women, but also by children and a few old men.) Neither they nor I thought of going any further and trying to strike up an acquaintance. I wanted nothing from them; just being able to look at them was enough for me. My gaze was indeed that of a good spectator at a game that cannot be successful without at least one such onlooker. This tired man’s looking-on was an activity, it did something, it played a part; because of it, the actors in the play became better, more beautiful than ever—for one thing because while being looked at by eyes such as mine they took their time. As by a miracle, the tiredness of such an onlooker nullified his ego, that eternal creator of unrest, and with it all other distortions, quirks, and frowns; nothing remained but his candid eyes, at least as inscrutable as Robert Mitchum’s. The action of this selfless onlooker encompassed far more than the beautiful female passersby and drew everything that lived and moved into its world-center. My tiredness articulated the muddle of crude perception, not by breaking it up, but by making its components recognizable, and with the help of rhythms endowed it with form—form as far as the eye could see—a vast horizon of tiredness.
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    But the scenes of violence, the clashes, the screams—did they become friendly forms on the vast horizon?
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    I have been speaking here of tiredness in peacetime, in the present interim period. In those hours there was peace,
in the Central Park area as elsewhere. And the astonishing part of it was that my tiredness seemed to participate in this momentary peace, for my gaze disarmed every intimation of a violent gesture, a conflict, or even of an unfriendly attitude, before it could get started—this by virtue of a compassion very different from the occasional