to hurry (a thing unnecessary
in Hingham) for everybody else is hurrying; then I must get somewhere;
everybody else is getting somewhere, getting everywhere. For see them
in front of me and behind me, getting there ahead of me and coming
after me to leave no room for me when I shall arrive! But when shall I
and where shall I arrive? And what shall I arrive for? And who am I
that I would arrive? I look around for the encircling horizon, and up
for the overarching sky, and in for the guiding purpose; but instead of
a purpose I am hustled forward by a crowd, and at the bottom of a
street far down beneath such overhanging walls as leave me but a slit
of smoky sky. I am in the hands of a force mightier than I, in the
hands of the police force at the street corners, and am carried across
to the opposite curb through a breaker that rolls in front of me again
at the next crossing. So I move on, by external compulsion, knowing,
as I move, by a kind of mental contagion, feeling by a sort of proxy,
and putting my trust everywhere in advertising and the police.

Thus I come, it may be, into the Public Library, "where is all the
recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording,"--where
Shakespeare and Old Sleuth and Pansy look all alike and as readable as
the card catalogues, or the boy attendants, or the signs of the Zodiac
in the vestibule floor.

Who can read all these books? Who wishes to read any of these books?
They are too many--more books in here than men on the street outside!
And how dead they are in here, wedged side by side in this vast
sepulcher of human thought!

I move among them dully, the stir of the streets coming to me as the
soughing of wind on the desert or the wash of waves on a distant shore.
Here I find a book of my own among the dead. I read its inscription
curiously. I must have written it--when I was alive aeons ago, and far
from here. But why did I? For see the unread, the shelved, the
numbered, the buried books!

Let me out to the street! Dust we are, not books, and unto dust, good
fertile soil, not paper and ink, we shall return. No more writing for
me--but breathing and eating and jostling with the good earthy people
outside, laughing and loving and dying with them!

The sweet wind in Copley Square! The sweet smell of gasoline! The
sweet scream of electric horns!

And how sweet--how fat and alive and friendly the old colored hack
driver, standing there by the stone post! He