The Sickness of Modern Man
One
In New York, at night, the sky is filled with tenebrous rumblings. Plane after plane coming into land at JFK. Car-horns, sirens, closer by. Drunks, too, outraged at the state of affairs, their voices charged with a rancour ten lifetimes of shouting would not exhaust. And in the day, beneath your feet, rising up from the grids, those clattering torrents of sound. People, rammed together down there, being shuttled to and fro. All that loud furious energy tamed. For our convenience. On an uptown express train the white tiles of 18th Street, 23rd Street, 28th Street, scroll by, before the brakes take hold, a stuttering metallic skirl, and you ease into Penn where the doors hiss open onto another fresh accretion of commuters. Up the escalator, above ground once again, looking North on Broadway, a river of trembling aqueous lights extends all the way up to 59th Street, the incongruous green of Central Park. Again sirens, car-horns, the rich purr of a passing helicopter. It is the people, of course, that make the most noise. In bars and diners, on street corners, broadcast over loudspeakers, hailing, soliciting, insisting. The hoarse incessant chorus of human demand and frustration. We are here and we mean business. What do you do, as an individual, with all this ugly vitality? This superabundance of wild, perspiring, inexorable, long-suffering life? Or is the question rather, what is done to you? Such thoughts, such impressions, came to him each morning on the journey he made from his Village apartment to the Corporate Head Quarters of The D.E. Shaw Group in Midtown. The Belly of the Beast, as he called it. The Belly of the Fucking Beast.
Page(s) 32-33
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