ONCE THE PAST

109. ONCE THE PAST...

Much of the key to knowledge and wisdom's enjoyment is in simple observation - there were still in NYC at this time through the 60's occasionally to be found remnants of items and places dating from the 1920's - old tiled bathrooms rich with porcelain and mosaic and glazed tile exquisite with decoration and filigree large fixtures huge urinals and toilets with open spaces and areas fit for the space of palaces and kings and they brought forth amazing relics of ideas from some recent antiquity that were still hard to come by and imagine too - these things have for the most part now disappeared or have been lessened remodeled modernized scrunched into closet-sizes with the poorest and most utilitarian of fixtures and means - a much paler reflection of the human mind and where once a person could revel in the sumptuous city-sized glories of the great commonweal of mankind now everything is cramped and pressured by comparison but NO MATTER for that is the way of lucre and flesh - man making the most of matter and time - but what is missed is the simple height which this grandeur brought forth the 'elevation' of the human moment and even the Automats - as simple and efficient as they were meant to be - represented something else : a far different sense of space and manhood with wide open ceilings vast spaces of tables and glass and open-areas within which a person could eat muse spend time or nurse coffee for as long as the time allotted went forth - into thought into magic into the relic of other moments and densities of time - small change clinking down the change-chute trays sliding along and the clack-slap of each little glass and chromium window dispensing foods and pastries - minor meals meant to live by but not treasure and the momentary exchange of a few small coins for something to do was immensely satisfying and (for such as me) as broadening and mind-opening as any university's summer food-lounge could be and every wastrel or bum or lost soul - taken to heart - was a professor worth the salt of any other exalted windbag would ever be worth that salt : words and lessons exchanged complaints and all the plaints and woes that diminishing lifetimes could bring.
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