The Land of Paradox

Hawera Star, Volume L, 21 February 1931, Page 16

The Land of Paradox

tj? T is all over now, the. tumult of the elevated I railway on Sixth Avenue, the blinding brilJL liance of the Broadway lights. Here, in this quiet English street, in this demure suburban room, a man can sit back a moment and think of what remains with him after this sublime and infernal adventure— for a first visit, to America is precisely that. What remains. asks a writer in an exchange. For after all the terrific blasting of youi first impressions when the dust has cleared away of that explosive encounter it is necessary to get down to the bedrock upon which sneli Titans stand, both men and buildings, r there is profound meaning m that land,- though not yet refined into epigrams, a profound meaning beyond all the bewilderments of paradox. It. is the paradox you must beware of, which forces your standards of measurement into a circle in which the extremes of highest and lowest meet, of vastest and smallest, of ugliest and most beautiful. “But above all beware, requested my American friend, who is the most complete European I know. Do not mak America meaningless by putting on medieval armour to visit, that dynamo ! ” My landscape was populous with perverse unaccountable creatures—financiers who could not do simple addition, but smoked and wrote a dozen languages; pugilists whose wives beat them; page boys who bullied me and timid millionaires who worried if my boots squeaked; dishonest bootleggers and honest teetotallers. T found that a grim-jowled captain of mdustp translated the poetry of Mallarme, while the highest-browed of American intellectuals went pale with passion over the novels of Femmore CooPj 6 f oun a that 1 CQuld buy better coffee at five cents than for two dollars, and that while certain policemen did crochet work, certain delicate men in musical comedy choruses spent their time sand-bagging and thugging when they were out of a. job. I learned that there were so many motors and taxis that it was far quickei to walk; that everyone was always late. It was brought home to me that the milk was so pure that everyone had to have typhoid inoculations.

I met. shorthand-typists who drove up to their offices in cars and princes who ran away with my umbrella. One of the partners of a great oil concern is a true fakir who can stop his heart beating at. will. The leader of a low

Financiers Who Cannot Add

Pugilists beaten by Wives

orchestra in that part of New York called “Hells’ Kitchen” is the son of a very superior millionaire. In a mushroom city in Oklahoma I met a little girl who wrote more pallid and decolletee poetry than any swooning undergraduate in his first year at Magdalen. So it will be seen how easily the fantasy of this paradox becomes the dominant impression of America. And yet, with a little humility, with a little patience, you will penetrate further. Above all, you will learn to put aside your prejudice at the discovery that the leaders in all fields are business men primarily, and only then artists, philanthropists, statesmen. You may recall the fact that some of the loveliest churches in Flanders and our own '.West Country were built by the keen wool'merchants of the fourteenth century. The oil-diggers of a later age will leave other memorials, in their own way not less notable, though they be so much less shy and intimate ; nearer to the scale, perhaps, of the great, stern palaces of Venice and Florence, which were built by merchants and bankers, not less than are those smooth vast apartment houses of Park Avenue and the lakeside boulevards of Chicago. The enormous embryo world of Texas ancl Oklahoma is in such a chrysalis stage, it might be said, as that close-fisted State of Florence was before the money-grubbing Medieis blossomed out into Lorenzo the Magnificent. And perhaps to say as little as this is to be guilty of an injustice. For I recall a skyscraper in Houston (that, woolly cowboy city which the Democratic Convention has made world famous) which seemed to me already beyond all necessity of improvement or development, to be a thing of stern, strict and absolute beauty, .as congruous to its own world as Notre Dame is to Paris or the Hofburg to Vienna. It must be an enviable experience to be an American and to visit Europe for the first time. It is no less enviable to be a European and to visit America for the first time. .But my most burning envy is in the days when interplanetary communication will be established, when the tourist will visit both Europe and America, each for the first time. What tales he will have to tell when he gets Lack to his villas on the borders of some quiet Martian canal. They will doubtless call him. a liar and drown him. But he. will not have lived in vain!