Sexus by Henry Miller — Read

Some minutes later, when we sauntered out into the violet light of early evening, I saw the ghetto with new eyes. There are Summer nights in New York when the sky is pure azure, when the buildings are immediate and palpable, not only in their substance but in their essence. That dirty streaked light which reveals only the ugliness of factories and sordid tenements disappears very often with sunset, the dust settles down, the contours of the buildings become more sharply denned, like the lineaments of an ogre in a calcium spotlight. Pigeons appear in the sky, wheeling above the roof-tops. A cupola bobs up, sometimes out of a Turkish Bath.

There is always the stately simplicity of St. Marks-on-the-Bouwerie, the great foreign square abutting Avenue A., the low Dutch buildings above which the ruddy gas tanks loom, the intimate side streets with their incongruous American names, the triangles which bear the stamp of old landmarks, the waterfront with the Brooklyn shore so close that one can almost recognize the people walking on the other side. All the glamour of New York is squeezed into this pullulating area which is marked oil by formaldehyde and sweat and tears. Nothing is so familiar, so intimate, so nostalgic to the New Yorker as this district which he spurns and rejects. The whole of New York should have been one vast ghetto: the poison should have been drained off, the misery apportioned; the joy should have been communicated through every vein and artery.