I was fascinated by the extraordinary things that people built, and how they sounded and thought and moved and made themselves look, how they pushed themselves forward, and the kind and hideous things the did, and I saw perhaps too readily the longing they invested in it all... You might wander through the cities, I thought, and find fear and disappointment and desire, the elation trivial and transcendent everywhere; you might see on every face the contest between hope and decay, as large a load of it as anyone could carry; you might, if you were properly minded, find the way one gold speck of the declining sun crossed the surface of one luminous eye, or the distrust with which a cigarette lingered before a particular mouth, sufficiently beautiful by itself, without referring to other, better worlds.
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