My friend, Bruce Calvert, editor of The Open Road, takes a series of shots at New York in his September magazine.
Bruce and I both love the open country, but he is just a “little” prejudiced, I’m thinking, against the city. He sees only confusion, inharmony, greed, and vice in the city.
To me, there is a sort of harmony in action in a great city like New York. It is a matter of vibrating in will and interest with your surroundings. Of taking an interest in the Romans when you are among the Romans.
Bruce goes into New York or Chicago with the picture of green meadows and winding streams and cool woods fixed before his mental vision, and lets the noise and crude force and confusion of the big cities jostle and disgust him. It used to disgust me. But I set my will over on the other side. I did this for the reason that I realized I was lopsided. We should be able to appreciate every section of life. I cannot surround myself with an atmosphere of seclusion, personal prejudice toward one section of life, or intellectual superiority toward another without losing something.
If I cut myself off, so far as sympathy and understanding go, from the life of the big city, if I assume superior virtue because I prefer the country, I am simply dwarfing my own normal growth and development.
So I am learning to enjoy crowds. I am acquiring the knack of looking both ways, forward and back, when I cross the streets in New York. The noise and fierce rush of the street life no longer oppress me. It is like an interesting game in which I become one of the players. Like a knight going forth to battle, I meet and conquer the problems of locomotion along the crowded streets. I find a sort of rhythm in it all, and so will anyone who lets go of himself and becomes interested in each section of life as a part of the whole.
Bruce and I, enjoying ourselves beneath our favorite oaks, are still related, more closely than we realize, to the tense, throbbing life of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Let us acknowledge the relationship and play the game, when circumstances require, instead of standing in the background and feeling superior.
William E. Towne | Nautilus, December, 1912