NEW YORK.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5467, 28 August 1929, Page 4

NEW YORK.

AN IMPRESSION. (By C. F. Andrews in Manchester Guardian). The repeated and emphatic warning given me by many American friends on board the R.M.S. Majestic, that I must avoid the fallacy of regarding New York as typical of America remained with me continually during my first impression of that city. Without any question, it is only fair to judge New York by itself, as a phenomenon unique in the world, for there is nothing like it on earth.

The architecture is amazing. It at once absorbs all attention. Often it fascinates and teases one out of thought by the magnificence of its soaring lines. The sky above New York, unlike London, is comparatively clean from smoke ; and the air is nearly unpolluted. In consequence, there is a sense of closeness even of distant buildings ; and the outlines of the tallest sky-scrapers stand out vividly distinct right up to their Himalayan peaks. One seems to have dreamt, in some child fantasy, of these strangely dream-like buildings, towering majestically into the clouds. There is also a dim remembrance of cubist art and of pictures that seem to stand on end as if taken from the air. Yet here they are, in solid steel and brick and stone, incredibly erect and built upon granite foundations, which may easily withstand the ravages of age. One American poet has ventured to portray them as

Beyond this crowded hour, beyond all time, Eternal as the rock in which they root, Vast as the skies, and even if we, who come from another hemisphere and a less gigantic world, cannot attain at once that exalted point of vision, we can supremely admire their beauty, in the early morning light, or at sunset, when they are tipped with gold. We can also appreciate through them the daring imagination of mankind. They seem to harmonise ’in their upward flight with the aeroplanes that can often be detected (like small trailing comets) in the sky above them. They have in their compositions something of the same spirit that has driven men to the Arctic and Antarctic icefields, and also to that last adventure of climbing to the peak of Mount Everest amid the ultimate snows. Man still continually defies his own limitations and seeks the infinite with unquenchable ardour. Yet every day that I have remained in New York, endeavouring to struggle with its never-ending traffic, it has seemed to me almost incredibly impossible that little children should be born and reared and educated in such surroundings. I saw, for instance, a tiny mite of a child who had been brought by her coloured nurse in a perambulator into the one patch of sunlight between two sky-scrapers—-the only remnant of God”s pure sunshine that whs left in that cavernous street. It was a sight of desolation and dismay. The noise of the elevated trains, running down the middle of the avenue, was deafening. The swift procession of motor-cars and motorlorries was apparently quite interminable. The fearful intricacies of the street traffic were so engrossing that it seemed almost impracticable to negotiate the thoroughfare at all during the busy hours of the day. The wild, human rush in the subways, leading to the electric trains, was very nearly as difficult "to circumvent as the traffic overhead. What were little innocent children doing Jn such a maelstrom of noise and speed?

The ancient scriptures of India have a famous and oft-repeated story called “What Then ?” The wife of an Indian sage is offered by her husband every treasure before he leaves her to seek the Infinite. But after each fresh offer to her of wealth and comfort she asks him the pointed question, “What then ?” At last, when the whole list of material things has been exhausted, she inquires of him, “What can I do with all these things, that cannot bring me immortality ?” New York has gone much farther than either London or Paris or Berlin. Its buildings are more lofty ; its road traffic is more crowded and congested; its speed of human activity is ever becoming more rapid. Arriving, as I have done, in the very midst of this new experience from the East, where Tagore sits in contemplation sunrise after’ sunrise, and Ghandi spins daily at his spinning wheel, the sense of bewilderment becomes at last oppressive. And the perpetual question, like some annoying mosquito, keeps buzzing in my mind. “What then ?”

For there seems to be no adequate human mode of arresting the growth either of the vertical buildling or the horizontal traffic. Already I have received the news that still loftier skyscrapers are in process of being designed, mounting up to a century of floors, with express elevators like nonstop trains. One block is to hold upright in its perpendicular height 100,000 human beings ! After that is built the traffic in this quarter will become even more congested, until one railway will run down the middle of the street over the top of another, and one subway electric train will burrow under the earth belov/ its predecessor. And as the prospect of such perpetuity comes into the mind's vision, with all its intensified and ‘accelerated noise and haste, the ancient riddle of humanity comes back., “What then ?” “What can I do with these things, that cannot bring immortality ?” It seems as if there were arising between the Western and Eastern hemispheres of human thought a weird, uncanny expression of the latest Law of Relativity. Human beings are likely, in the near future, to be separated most of all by their space and time relations. It seems quite possible that as the history of the planet advances the differences that will most divide mankind will tie those of a new time-space dimension rather than the ancient cleavages of colour and race. In chose futurist days the most radical division, which rnay lead even to different moral valines, will'

arise from these new accelerations wheiein certain peoples are inclined to move and have the.ir being. There will be one temperamental development of precocious alertness among those who live daily in the realm of the aeroplane, the radio, and the skyscraper ; while a totally different disposition will abide among those who still observe the contemplative calm of the East, where the brooding silence gives rise to slow thinking that endures and Christ’s word still sounds not unstrangely or remotely when He declares “The kingdom of God is within you.” |