The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze Read Online Free PDF Page B

a bit out of the picture at the moment. So you don’t know anything about English poetry? Did you ever hear of T. S. Eliot?
    No, said Lambough. What about him?
    Well, said Paul, he is a pretty fine poet.
    Well, what of it? said Lambough. Who cares?
    I mean, said Paul, if you knew something about him, we could talk and kill time. As it is, tell me about Ireland. You’re Irish, aren’t you?
    Sure I’m Irish, said Lambough, but what the hell, I was born in Kansas. I’ve never seen Ireland.
    All right, said Paul. Tell me how you imagine Ireland to be. It’s a long time till midnight. We’ve got to talk about something. Ireland is a good subject.
    He began to listen to Lambough explaining that he knew nothing about Ireland, except maybe what he had gathered from Irish songs, most of them written in America by Jews and others. Once every year, he thought, while Lambough talked, to be among the lost, to know how it feels to be out of things, to have no present, no future, to belong nowhere, to be suspended between day and night, waiting.
    At midnight, he thought, I will go with this boyto that waiting-room and try to sleep in a chair, Smithy shouting, Seat here for a player . . . one more seat, and the petty gamblers coming and going, Lambough talking in the morning about Ireland, the sick Jew in jail, Red stabbed by the crazy Russian, sentimental evasions,
the winter evening settles down with smell of steaks in passageways
, meditations upon a deterministic universe,
the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
, the impulse,
when Mr. Apollinax visited the United States his laughter tinkled among the teacups
, the day dwindling amid talk, the country perishing, all the young men waiting, hunger marches,
as she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter
, Ezra Pound, the American in France,
an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for rain, defunctive music under sea, the smoky candle end of time declines
, democratic progress, the Jew in jail, holding the door and crying,
in the beginning was the Word, for Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro
, the small Jew weeping, a flower peddler among beggars and homo-sexuals, meditations amid the smoke and ruins of a deterministic universe, the crazy Russian running down Opera Alley, and Red bleeding,
wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh
, and laugh, and laugh, the little Jew standing in the filth, holding the door and weeping, everyone waiting everywhere,
there will be time to murder and create, and indeed there will be time
, there will be time, a young man listening to the talk of another young man, waiting for national recovery,
time to murder and create
.

Myself
upon the
Earth

    A beginning is always difficult, for it is no simple matter to choose from language the one bright word which shall live forever; and every articulation of the solitary man is but a single word. Every poem, story, novel and essay, just as every dream is a word from that language we have not yet translated, that vast unspoken wisdom of night, that grammarless, lawless vocabulary of eternity. The earth is vast. And with the earth all things are vast, the skyscraper and the blade of grass. The eye will magnify if the mind and soul will allow. And the mind may destroy time, brother of death, and brother, let us remember, of life as well. Vastest of all is the ego, the germ of humanity, fromwhich is born God and the universe, heaven and hell, the earth, the face of man, my face and your face; our eyes. For myself, I say with piety, rejoice.
    I am a young man in an old city. It is morning and I am in a small room. I am standing over a bundle of yellow writing paper, the only sort of paper I can afford, the kind that sells at the rate of one hundred and seventy sheets for ten cents. All this paper is bare of language, clean and perfect, and I am a young writer about to begin my work. It is Monday . . . September 25, 1933 . . . how glorious it is to be alive, to be still