Kauno “Versmės” vidurinės mokyklos referatas: “AMERICAN INTERJECTION”
Darbą atliko:
12B klasės mokinė
Violeta Vasilevičiūtė
1999
Kaunas
1. The New York scene reveals many traces of … unrest. Insecurity reigs. Almost everyone hates his job. Psychiatrists of all schools are as common as monks in the Thebaid. “Who is your analyst?” will disarm any interviewer; books on how to be happy, how to attain peace of mind, how to win friends and influence people, how to breath, how to achiece a cheap sentimental humanism at other people’s expense, how to become a Chinaman like Lin Yutang and make a lot of money, how to be a Baba’i or breed chickens all sell in millions. Religios houses of retreas merge imperceptibly into disintoxication clinics and private mental homes for the victims of traffic light and nervous break-down. ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’ slink like house detectives around the literary cocktail parties. A most interesting phenomenon is the state of mind apparent in Time, Life, The New York, and similar magazines. Thus Life, with its enormous circulation, comes out with excellentry written leading articles on the death of tragedy in American literature or the meaning of suffering, and a closer acquaintance reveals them to be staffed by some of the most interesting and sensitive minds in that insensitivecity.
2. It is easy to make fun of these three papers, but in fact they are not funny. Although they have very large circulations indeed, they only just miss being completely honourable and serious journals, in fact ‘highbrow’. The American organism is not quite healthy. It indicates how very nearly New York has achieved the ideal of a humanist society, where the best of which an artist is capable is desired by the greatest number. Thurber’s drawings, Hersey’s Hiroshima, the essays of Edmund Wilson or Mary McCarthy, Time’s anonymous reviews, show that occasionally the gap is closed; when it is closed permanenty the dreams of Santayana will be near fulfilment.
3. But these anxiety-forming predicaments (Time-stomach is a common trouble) are for those who live in New York and have to earn they living. To the visiting non-competitive European all is unending delight. The shops, the bars, the women, the faces in the street, the excellent and innumerable restaurants, the glitter of Twenty-one, the old-world letharly of the Lafayette, the hazy view of the East River or Central Park over tea in some apartment at the magic hour when the concrete iceberg suddenly flare up; the impressionist pictures in one house, the exotic trees or bamboo furniture in another, the chick of ‘old-fashioneds’ with their little glass pestles. If Paris is the setting for a romance, New York is the perfect city in which to get over one, to get over anything. Here the lost douceur de vivre is forgotten and the intoxication of living takes its place.
4. What is this intoxication? Firtly, health. The American diet is energy- producing. Health is not just the absence of disease, but a positive physical sensation. The European, his voice dropping a tone every day, finds himself growing stouter, balder, more extroverted and aggressive, conscious of a place in what is still, despite lip-service, a noisily masculine society. Then there is the sensation of belonging to a great nation in its present prosperous period of triumph. But, in addition to ‘feeling good,’ the Americans are actively generous and kind and it is this profusion of civilities which ravishes the visitor.