Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 47))

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“Toil and trouble! Fire burn and cauldron bubble,” yes, and yammer
and crash and crunch and crowd and rush, and puff and wheeze and
yell and curse and sob—that’s New York, Metropolis of the New World,
Greatest Little Spot on the Globe—so they say.
I don’t believe it.
I don’t believe it because I have found a little place where none of the
above effervescences come to soil the soul with their fetid neurasthenias or
fuss the mind with their cacophonous trepidations. This spot I’ve found is
as shut from that whirling outer turmoil as though it were not. It has none
of the noise, none of the trouble, none of the glare and glitter. This little
spot is quietude exquisite, sober-colored unto chastity, modest as the haunt
of a garden wren, yet withal, cheery as a desert’s oasis ending a day’s jour-
ney. Indeed, it is most like an oasis. And the master of the oasis is always
there to let down little silver buckets into the deep well of his soul and bring
up good cheer, and, with the soothing salaam only Prophets and True Be-
lievers ever possess, proffer drink more precious than wine, counsel more
endearing than the sages of dead saints, and love more gentle than the caress
of twilight.
Is there one to say that amidst this travail of souls gone awry in the riot
of mechanism, such a spot is not needed? Show me such a one, and I will
point you a man whose soul is so blasted and shriveled and withered that a
dead, dry leaf would gleam like a jewel beside it.
Out there, the street boils and hurries and scrambles past in an utter
fury of haste. Within this spot I know, nothing boils nor hurries nor scram-
bles. Out there people and things and events make a great fuss and stir as
if they were going somewhere, and that when they got to this somewhere,
something awaited them. So great is their fuss and stir, so thick the froth
of their comings and goings, and yellings and talkings, that one wonders
over-much what it is that could await them. Wondering long and long, one
comes to deny the importance of their haste, and denies too the value of their
goal.
Time is fleeting, ’tis said.
But all things come, and all things go, only a thing of beauty remains
forever.
There are many kinds of people; people who haggle in market places;
people who look wise as they ponder over their books of law, delivering their
wisdoms at so much per annum; people who gather and moil over petty
accounts of petty happenings amidst a petty folk, and when, each day, they
have gathered and moiled over enough of this pettiness, they pour it into a
mould and call it “news”; and people there are who labor hard over the
making of things in quantity, and when they have the total figures on all
they have made, are filled with a great pride in their figures, translating the
whole wide world into figures—and even, oh sorrow of sorrows, even in-
vading the Kingdom of the Spirit with their figures.
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