I, having no skill for making money and intensely hungry for the things that money would buy, stared at Wall Street, a kind of cloudy Olympus in which foregathered all the gods of finance, with the eyes of one who hopes to extract something by mere1 observation. Physically2 it was not then, as it is today, the center of a sky-crowded world. There were few if any high buildings below City Hall, few higher than ten stories. Wall Street was curved, low-fronted, like Oxford3 Street in London. It began, as some one had already pointed4 out, at a graveyard5 and ended at a river. The house of J. P. Morgan was just then being assailed6 for its connection with a government gold bond issue. The offices of Russell Sage7 and George Gould (the son), as well as those of the Standard Oil Company below Wall in Broadway, and those of a whole company of now forgotten magnates, could have been pointed out by any messenger boy, postman or policeman. What impressed me was that the street was vibrant8 with something which, though far from pleasing, craft, greed, cunning, niggardliness9, ruthlessness, a smart swaggering ease on the part of some, and hopeless, bedraggled or beaten aspect on the part of others, held my interest as might a tiger or a snake. I had never seen such a world. It was so busy and paper-bestrewn, messenger and broker10 bestridden, as to make one who had nothing to do there feel dull and commonplace. One thought only of millions made in stocks over night, of yachts, orgies, travels, fames and what not else. Since that time Wall Street has become much tamer, less significant, but then one had a feeling that if only one had a tip or a little skill one might become rich; or that, on the other hand, one might be torn to bits and that here was no mercy.
I arrived a little before noon, and the ways were alive with messenger boys and young clerks and assistants. On the ground was a mess of papers, torn telegrams and letters. Near Broad and Wall streets the air was filled with a hum of voices and typewriter clicks issuing from open windows. Just then, as with the theatrical11 business later, and still later with the motion picture industry, it had come to be important to be in the street, however thin one’s connection. To say “I am in Wall Street” suggested a world of prospects12 and possibilities. The fact that at this time, and for twenty years after, the news columns were all but closed to suicides and failures in Wall Street, so common were they, illustrates14 how vagrant15 and unfounded were the dreams of many.
But the end of Wall Street as the seat of American money domination might even then have been foretold16. The cities of the nation were growing. New and by degrees more or less independent centers of finance were being developed. In the course of fifteen years it had become the boast of some cities that they could do without New York in the matter of loans, and it was true. They could; and today many enterprises go west, not east, for their cash. In the main, Wall Street has degenerated17 into a second-rate gamblers’ paradise. What significant Wall Street figures are there today?
On one of my morning walks in New York I had wandered up Broadway to the Herald18 Building and looked into its windows, where were visible a number of great presses in full operation, much larger than any I had seen in the West, and my brother had recalled to me the fact that James Gordon Bennett, owner and editor of the Herald, had once commissioned Henry M. Stanley, at that time a reporter on the paper, to go to Africa to find Livingstone. And my good brother, who romanticized all things, my supposed abilities and possibilities included, was inclined to think that if I came to New York some such great thing might happen to me.
On another day I went to Printing House Square, where I stared at the Sun and World and Times and Tribune buildings, all facing City Hall Park, sighing for the opportunities that they represented. But I did not act. Something about them overawed me, especially the World, the editor of which had begun his career in St. Louis years before. Compared with the Western papers with which I had been connected, all New York papers seemed huge, the tasks they represented editorially and reportorially much more difficult. True, a brother of a famous playwright20 with whom I had worked in St. Louis had come East and connected himself with the World, and I might have called upon him and spied out the land. He had fortified21 himself with a most favorable record in the West, as had I, only I did not look upon mine as so favorable somehow. Again, a city editor once of St. Louis was now here, city editor of one of the city’s great papers, the Recorder, and another man, a Sunday editor of Pittsburgh, had become the Sunday editor of the Press here. But these appeared to me to be exceptional cases. I reconnoitered these large and in the main rather dull institutions with the eye of one who seeks to take a fortress22. The editorial pages of all of these papers, as I had noticed in the West, bristled23 with cynical24 and condescending25 remarks about that region, and their voices representing great circulation and wealth gave them amazing weight in my eyes. Although I knew what I knew about the subservience26 of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful27 betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed yet still having the power, by weight of lies and pretense28 and make-believe, to stir him up to his own detriment29 and destruction, I was frightened by this very power, which in subsequent years I have come to look upon as the most deadly anD forceful of all in nature: the power to masquerade and by.
There was about these papers an air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority which overawed and frightened me. To work on the Sun, the Herald, the World! How many cubs30, from how many angles of our national life, were constantly and hopefully eyeing them from the very same sidewalks or benches in City Hall Park, as the ultimate solution of all their literary, commercial, social, political problems and ambitions. The thousands of pipe-smoking collegians who have essayed the Sun alone, the scullion Danas, embryo31 Greeleys and Bennetts!
I decided32 that it would be best for me to return to Pittsburgh and save a little money before I took one of these frowning editorial offices by storm, and I did return, but in what a reduced mood! Pittsburgh, after New York and all I had seen there! And in this darkly brooding and indifferent spirit I now resumed my work. A sum of money sufficient to sustain me for a period in New York was all that I wished now.
And in the course of the next four months I did save two hundred and forty dollars, enduring deprivations33 which I marvel34 at even now—breakfast consisting of a cruller and a cup of coffee; dinners that cost no more than a quarter, sometimes no more than fifteen cents. In the meantime I worked as before only to greater advantage, because I was now more sure of myself. My study of Balzac and these recent adventures in the great city had so fired my ambition that nothing could have kept me in Pittsburgh. I lived on so little that I think I must have done myself some physical harm which told against me later in the struggle for existence in New York.
At this time I had the fortune to discover Huxley and Tyndall and Herbert Spencer, whose introductory volume to his Synthetic35 Philosophy (First Principles) quite blew me, intellectually, to bits. Hitherto, until I had read Huxley, I had some lingering filaments36 of Catholicism trailing about me, faith in the existence of Christ, the soundness of his moral and sociologic deductions37, the brotherhood38 of man. But on reading Science and Hebrew Tradition and Science and Christian39 Tradition, and finding both the Old and New Testaments40 to be not compendiums41 of revealed truth but mere records of religious experiences, and very erroneous ones at that, and then taking up First Principles and discovering that all I deemed substantial—man’s place in nature, his importance in the universe, this too, too solid earth, man’s very identity save as an infinitesimal speck42 of energy or a “suspended equation” drawn43 or blown here and there by larger forces in which he moved quite unconsciously as an atom—all questioned and dissolved into other and less understandable things, I was completely thrown down in my conceptions or non-conceptions of life.
Up to this time there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to get on and the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one had to, and that it was of no importance. Of one’s ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic compulsions, something which for some inexplicable44 but unimportant reason responded to and resulted from the hope of pleasure and the fear of pain. Man was a mechanism45, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly driven one at that.
I fear that I cannot make you feel how these things came upon me in the course of a few weeks’ reading and left me numb19, my gravest fears as to the unsolvable disorder46 and brutality47 of life eternally verified. I felt as low and hopeless at times as a beggar of the streets. There was of course this other matter of necessity, internal chemical compulsion, to which I had to respond whether I would or no. I was daily facing a round of duties which now more than ever verified all that I had suspected and that these books proved. With a gloomy eye I began to watch how the chemical—and their children, the mechanical—forces operated through man and outside him, and this under my very eyes. Suicides seemed sadder since there was no care for them; failures the same. One of those periodic scandals breaking out in connection with the care of prisoners in some local or state jail, I saw how self-interest, the hope of pleasure or the fear of pain caused jailers or wardens48 or a sheriff to graft49 on prisoners, feed them rotten meat, torture them into silence and submission50, and then, politics interfering51 (the hope of pleasure again and the fear of pain on the part of some), the whole thing hushed up, no least measure of the sickening truth breaking out in the subservient52 papers. Life could or would do nothing for those whom it so shamefully53 abused.
Again, there was a poor section, one street in the East Pittsburgh district, shut off by a railroad at one end (the latter erecting54 a high fence to protect itself from trespass) and by an arrogant55 property owner at the other end; those within were actually left without means of ingress and egress56. Yet instead of denouncing either or both, the railroads being so powerful and the citizen prosperous and within his “rights,” I was told to write a humorous article but not to “hurt anybody’s feelings.” Also before my eyes were always those regions of indescribable poverty and indescribable wealth previously57 mentioned, which were always carefully kept separate by the local papers, all the favors and compliments and commercial and social aids going to those who had, all the sniffs58 and indifferences and slights going to those who had not; and when I read Spencer I could only sigh. All I could think of was that since nature would not or could not do anything for man, he must, if he could, do something for himself; and of this I saw no prospect13, he being a product of these selfsame accidental, indifferent and bitterly cruel forces.
And so I went on from day to day, reading, thinking, doing fairly acceptable work, but always withdrawing more and more into myself. As I saw it then, the world could not understand me, nor I it, nor men each other very well. Then a little later I turned and said that since the whole thing was hopeless I might as well forget it and join the narrow, heartless, indifferent scramble59, but I could not do that either, lacking the temperament60 and the skill. All I could do was think, and since no paper such as I knew was interested in any of the things about which I was thinking, I was hopeless indeed. Finally, in late November, having two hundred and forty dollars saved, I decided to leave this dismal61 scene and seek the charm of the great city beyond, hoping that there I might succeed at something, be eased and rested by some important work of some kind.
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1
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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graveyard
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| n.坟场 | |
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assailed
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| v.攻击( assail的过去式和过去分词 )；困扰；质问；毅然应对 | |
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sage
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| n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的 | |
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vibrant
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| adj.震颤的，响亮的，充满活力的，精力充沛的，(色彩)鲜明的 | |
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niggardliness
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broker
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| n.中间人，经纪人；v.作为中间人来安排 | |
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theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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prospects
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| n.希望，前途(恒为复数) | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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illustrates
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| 给…加插图( illustrate的第三人称单数 )； 说明； 表明； （用示例、图画等）说明 | |
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vagrant
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| n.流浪者，游民；adj.流浪的，漂泊不定的 | |
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foretold
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| v.预言，预示( foretell的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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degenerated
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| 衰退，堕落，退化( degenerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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herald
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| vt.预示...的来临，预告，宣布，欢迎 | |
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numb
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| adj.麻木的，失去感觉的；v.使麻木 | |
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playwright
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| n.剧作家，编写剧本的人 | |
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fortified
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| adj. 加强的 | |
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fortress
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| n.堡垒，防御工事 | |
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bristled
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| adj. 直立的，多刺毛的 动词bristle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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condescending
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| adj.谦逊的,故意屈尊的 | |
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subservience
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| n.有利，有益；从属（地位），附属性；屈从，恭顺；媚态 | |
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shameful
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| adj.可耻的，不道德的 | |
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pretense
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| n.矫饰，做作，借口 | |
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detriment
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| n.损害；损害物，造成损害的根源 | |
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cubs
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| n.幼小的兽，不懂规矩的年轻人( cub的名词复数 ) | |
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embryo
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| n.胚胎，萌芽的事物 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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deprivations
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| 剥夺( deprivation的名词复数 )； 被夺去； 缺乏； 匮乏 | |
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marvel
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| vi.(at)惊叹vt.感到惊异；n.令人惊异的事 | |
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synthetic
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| adj.合成的，人工的；综合的；n.人工制品 | |
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filaments
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| n.（电灯泡的）灯丝( filament的名词复数 )；丝极；细丝；丝状物 | |
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deductions
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| 扣除( deduction的名词复数 )； 结论； 扣除的量； 推演 | |
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brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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testaments
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| n.遗嘱( testament的名词复数 )；实际的证明 | |
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compendiums
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| n.摘要，纲要( compendium的名词复数 ) | |
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speck
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| n.微粒，小污点，小斑点 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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disorder
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| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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brutality
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| n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮 | |
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wardens
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| n.看守人( warden的名词复数 )；管理员；监察员；监察官 | |
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graft
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| n.移植，嫁接，艰苦工作，贪污；v.移植，嫁接 | |
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50
submission
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| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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51
interfering
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| adj. 妨碍的 动词interfere的现在分词 | |
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subservient
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| adj.卑屈的，阿谀的 | |
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53
shamefully
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| 可耻地； 丢脸地； 不体面地； 羞耻地 | |
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erecting
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| v.使直立，竖起( erect的现在分词 )；建立 | |
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arrogant
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| adj.傲慢的，自大的 | |
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egress
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| n.出去；出口 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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sniffs
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| v.以鼻吸气，嗅，闻( sniff的第三人称单数 )；抽鼻子（尤指哭泣、患感冒等时出声地用鼻子吸气）；抱怨，不以为然地说 | |
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scramble
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| v.爬行，攀爬，杂乱蔓延，碎片，片段，废料 | |
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temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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