World's Fair

I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.

The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.

I struggled to understand Christianity as something that would shove a knife into my belly.

not because I had succeeded but because I had tried.

whiteness of the future as it expanded in my mind perispherically and thrust its needle into the sky.

It was exhausting to use your mind all the time, education was exhausting, particularly when it was administered by one’s parents.

By contrast, my mother lacked any capacity for irreverence. She could be bitter, but never disrespectful

was that I had gotten us into something, in the least likely way I had come up with the tickets.

Shoulder back,” he said to me, “chin up, eyes straight ahead. That’s it. Look the world in the eye.

A large part of the otherwise intelligent public still labor under the delusion that the ventriloquist is endowed by nature with the power of throwing his voice … but what the ventriloquist really does is to imitate as exactly as possible a sound as it is heard by the ears after it has travelled some distance.…

I had worried before, all the time in this enormous effort to catch up to life, to find it, to feel it, comprehend it; but all I had to do was be in it and it would instruct me and give me everything I needed.

And for one moment hung there like pendants from the neck of the night.

In the cities of the future, pedestrian bridges connected the buildings and highways were sunken on tracks below them. No one would get run over in this futuristic world.

real little cars moving on them at different speeds, the center lanes for the higher speeds, the lanes on the edge for the lower.

among great crowds of strolling people. Everywhere people walked in family groups

to my mother. This would take some doing. A rill of disloyalty opened up in me.

The sun and the sky seemed untethered too, I felt the freedom of things at this farm, and

Wherever you were, at whatever far edge of the world’s consciousness, one three-cent postage stamp could vault you into the heart of things.

I experienced a diffuse sense of urgency all through my body, my limbs, my fingers and toes. I found that I was angry. And then all at once I was feeling sorry for myself.

She and I never discussed these things, recognizing the danger of entrusting such delicate matters to words. If either of us had said anything, the other could no longer have sustained the relationship. It could only continue unarticulated, tacit, in the pretense of ignorance.

People wouldn’t talk to them in a way they wouldn’t want to be talked to.

He was becoming like my parents—an adult to be observed and worried about.

Men slept on their sides in the doorways, their hands under their heads, they were grown men but they slept curled up as I did.

that most mysterious night of the day of rest.

I saw in these sportsmen, I derived from them, information of a high life of celebrity, wealth, and the careless accommodation of pleasure.

I liked in my house circles of lamplight surrounded by rings of darkness that grew in depth the farther out they went. I liked the shelter of a desk lamp, feeling toward it Bomba the Jungle Boy’s affection for his campfire in the roars of the dark surrounding night.

What was essential to them was that same dusk of winter, that late afternoon of cold hard air and leaves spinning down from the plane trees of the Bronx streets, produced by the clouds of World War Two.

He had the fervent pride of the assimilationist,