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THREE DAYS TO SEE (page 9)
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IV
The following morning, I should again greet the dawn, anxious to discover new
delights, for I am sure that, for those who have eyes which really see, the
dawn of each day must be a perpetually new revelation of beauty.
This, according to the terms of my imagined miracle, is to be my third and last
day of sight. I shall have no time to waste in regrets or longings; there is
too much to see. The first day I devoted to my friends, animate and inanimate.
The second revealed to me the history of man and Nature. Today I shall spend in
the workaday world of the present, amid the haunts of men going about the
business of life. And where can one find so many activities and conditions of
men as in New York? So the city becomes my destination.
I start from my home in the quiet little suburb of Forest Hills, Long Island.
Here, surrounded by green lawns, trees, and flowers, are neat little houses,
happy with the voices and movements of wives and children, havens of peaceful
rest for men who toil in the city. I drive across the lacy structure of steel
which spans the East River, and I get a new and startling vision of the power
and ingenuity of the mind of man. Busy boats chug and scurry about the river --
racy speed boats, stolid, snorting tugs. If I had long days of sight ahead, I
should spend many of them watching the delightful activity upon the river.
I look ahead, and before me rise the fantastic towers of New York, a city that
seems to have stepped from the pages of a fairy story. What an awe-inspiring
sight, these glittering spires, these vast banks of stone and steel --
structures such as the gods might build for themselves! This animated picture
is a part of the lives of millions of people every day. How many, I wonder,
give it so much as a second glance? Very few, I fear. Their eyes are blind to
this magnificent sight because it is so familiar to them.
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