Leaving Brooklyn Read Online Free

containment, like the gardens at Versailles, and very unlike my kind of love. The largest category was the roman numeral. Below the roman numeral came the capital letters. Below the capital letters came the Arabic numerals, and below them, the lowercase letters. In case you had to subdivide further, there were the lowercase roman numerals, little i ’s: i , ii , iii , iv . The headings marched down the page, each one indented farther to the right till the design on the page was an upside-down staircase. Any thought could be fit somewhere in the outline, once you figured out its
degree of significance in the pattern. Above all, every single thing in the world could be outlined.
    There was one major rule to remember, Mrs. Amerman warned. “You can’t have a I without a II. You can’t have an A without a B. It’s only logical. Because nothing can be divided into one part. Do you see, children?”
    I was accurate, logical, speedy. No fact escaped the net of my outlines, like wayward hairs tucked into a bun. Through high school, I took notes of the teachers’ casual remarks in outline form, corralling the syllables that bounced haphazardly on the air into right-angled shapes on the pages of my notebook.
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    NOW WHAT I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow. And inaccuracy. Things just slightly off, falling nonchalantly from perfection. Things beautiful in spite of.
    And it is possible, on occasion, to subdivide into one part. The one part becomes refined and polished and narrowed, the shavings fall away, out of sight, till the kernel is exposed like a gem absorbing and reflecting the multiplicity of the world.
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    TO TELL HOW my eye led me down the road it did, I must say a word or two of the climatic conditions of postwar Brooklyn. The air was suspended on a discrepancy, something like the discrepancy between my mother’s use of the words “To thine own self be true” and their true meaning. It was a presumption of state-of-nature innocence, an imaginative amnesia, and a disregard of evidence such as photographs of skeletal figures in striped pyjamas clawing at barbed wire, of mushroom clouds and skinned bodies groping in ashes. News of distant atmospheric pollution. The evidence was not only in newspaper photographs. The most zealous Brooklynites had themselves fled the armbands and the midnight blazes. They knew, they knew. Yet with all that furor in the air, the slogans they sent forth on placid streams of breath were simple and pure, extolling righteous
endeavor, progress, and conformity, as if the pollution were illusory, only a haze veiling the reality, which was human decency. The slogans were enforced through a tacit system of mutual surveillance and with a magnificently unwarranted faith in will power, education, and the forming of proper habits. As everywhere, perhaps, children were designed and packaged to embody an “image” of human nature. What was special about Brooklyn was how ingenuously it admitted no gulf between image and reality. Now that corruption is publicly taken for granted and “image” has detached from reality to acquire independent life, every child over ten knows what Brooklyn pretended not to know.
    I knew some things apart from the slogans, though, things that gnawed and nibbled away at the smug sound of them. Late at night, in bed, I read the old books my parents stored in my room, somber black Harvard Classics with gilt lettering on the bindings and green Little Leather Library books, the corners of the faded pages crumbling in my fingers and littering the blanket. I read stealthily as though the books were forbidden, just for the glamour of it—they were not forbidden, only I sensed it was the better part of valor to keep my passion secret.
    After the orgies of reading, I played games with my eye. There was a way, if I closed my “good” eye, as my