Read Online City of God by E.L. Doctorow - Free Book Online

but, whatever the game, trying undeniably to kill each other. In their recklessness, with their uniform jackets laid aside in neat piles so as not to suffer damage, was the rage of their smoldering beings dispersed helplessly among their comrades. So I saw this and kept myself apart, doing my work, which was undemanding enough, and not testing the ambiguities of possible friendship with any of them, for it was all ruination, in my view, and all from this clearly flawed Germanic principle of education through tyranny. I sat in the classroom and my mind wandered. I had been given a book by my mother’s brother Casar on the subject of Euclidean geometry. I had read it as people read novels. To me it was an exciting, newsworthy book. And now on this one morning I was smiling to myself remembering the marvelous theorem of Pythagoras and the teacher was all at once standing in front of me and he slapped his map pointer across my desk to regain my attention. When the class was over, as I was on my way out with the others, he called me to the front of the room. He looked down at me from his lectern. He had a round red shiny face, this teacher, that reminded me of a caramel apple. Onecould bite into a face like this and expect to crack through the hard glaze to the pulp. You are a bad influence in my class, Albert, he said. I am going to have you transferred. I didn’t understand. I asked what I had done wrong. You sit back there smiling and dreaming away, he said. If I don’t have the attention of each and every student, how can I maintain my self-respect? With that remark I learned in a flash the secret of all despotism.
    This same teacher, or perhaps it was another, it could as easily have been any of them, but no matter: He one day in class held up a rusty nail between his thumb and forefinger. A spike like this was driven through Christ’s hands and feet, he said, looking directly at me.
    I will say here of poor Jesus, that Jew, and the system in his name, what a monstrous trick history has played on him.

    â€”Walt Whitman assures us of the transcendence of the bustle and din of New York, the sublimity, the exuberant arrogance, of the living moment. But do pictures lie? Those old silver gelatin prints. . . The drays and carriages, streetcars, els, and sailing vessels at their docks. . . A busy city, great construction pits framed out in wood, streets laid out with string. Men on their knees setting paving stones, great dimly lit lofts of women at sewing machines, men in derbies and shirtsleeves posing in the doorways of their dry-goods stores, endless ranks of clerks at their high desks, women in long skirts and shirtwaists instructing classrooms of children, couples greeting couples on Fifth Avenue, muffled-up ice skaters on the lake in Central Park. . . This is our constructed city, without question the geography of our souls, but these people are not us, they inhabit our city as if they belonged here, the presumption of their right to it is in every gesture, every glance, but they are not us, they’re strangers inhabiting our city, though vaguely familiar, like the strangers in our dreams.
    I feel such stillness, the stillness of listening to a story whose end I know. I am looking at times when people had a story to enact and the streets they walked upon were narrative passages. What kind of wordis
infrastructure
? It is a word that proves we have lost our city. Our streets are for transit. Our stories are disassembled, the skyscrapers crowding us scoff at the idea of a credible culture.
    Christ, how wrong to point out the Brooklyn Bridge or Soho or the row houses of Harlem as examples of our continuity. Something dire has happened. As if these photographs are not silent instances of the past but admonitory, like ghosts, to be of then and of now simultaneously, so as to prophesy hauntingly our forfeiture of their world, given such time only for our illusions to flourish before we’re chastened into