City

 

 

I am an ephemeral and a not too discontented citizen of a metropolis

considered modern because all known taste has been evaded in the

furnishings and the exterior of the houses as well as in the layout of

the city. Here you will fail to detect the least trace of any monument of

superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest

expression, at last! The way these millions of people, who do not even

need to know each other, manage their education, business, and old age is

so identical that the course of their lives must be several times less

long than that which a mad statistics calculates for the people of the

continent. And from my window I see new specters rolling through the

thich eternal smoke-- our woodland shade, our summer night!-- new

Eumenides in front of my cottage which is my country and all my heart

since everything here resembles it,-- Death without tears, our diligent

daughter and servant, a desperate Love, and a pretty Crime howling in the

mud in the street.