Nonconformity Read Online Free Page B

know the caves of their own country better than you or me or Fulton Sheen. 46 Or Fulton Lewis or Fulton Oursler or any of the other purveyors of prefabricated miracles.
    The caves of a country where there are no longer universal truths, though you seek them in all the caves. All those who would have us live morally out of fear, rather than from a sense of inner freedom.
    From the penthouse suspended silently forty straight-down stories into the long, low night-blue bars, they’ve put the line about God and Country on the same shelf as the one about “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.” Or “be loyal to the company, son, and you’ll be managing a branch office before you’re forty.”They aren’t having heart-to-heart talks with the minister anymore. Look at the minister and you’ll see why.
    If you want to go for that dead-end about the branch office yourself, goodbye, good luck and God bless you—but don’t try dragging this cat along.
    “There is no more universal idea,” Dostoevsky complained, being a plaintive sort anyhow. “Everything is flabby, vapid! We all, we all are empty!”
    That, of course, was in another country. And besides, God is dead.
    Part-time bartender; part-time philosopher; part-time recording artist. Self-styled record mimic, self-styled song-stylist. Part-time madam, full-time madman.
    In the full light of the taverns or the half-light of the lounges.

… S
itting with N. A. [Nelson Algren] in a quiet little bar I missed half what he was saying, and I felt that his difficulties were not less than mine. He hesitated about what to show me in Chicago. There were no worthwhile bands to listen to, the middle-class nightclubs were no more interesting than those of New York, and the idea of a musical show did not appeal to me. If I liked, he could take me to places where probably I should not have the occasion to venture; he could give me a glimpse of the lowest districts in Chicago, for he knew them well. I accepted
.
    He took me to West Madison Avenue, which is also called the Bowery of Chicago; here are the lodging-houses for men only, flophouses, squalid bars. It was very cold, the street was almost deserted; and yet there were a few men with shipwrecked faces who hid themselves in the shadows of the doorways or wandered up and down the frozen sidewalks. We entered a bar that reminded me of Sammy’s Follies: but there was neither show nor spectators, and no tourist other than myself. N. A. was not a tourist, for he often came here and knew all the people, hoboes, drunks and faded beauties: no one would turn round even if the Mad Woman of Chaillot came in. At the end of the room there was a little negro band; one read on a placard: “It is forbidden
to dance”; but people were dancing. There was a lame man who waddled about like a duck: suddenly he started to dance and his legs obeyed him: he spun round, jumped and capered about with a maniacal smile; it seemed he spent his time here and danced all night. Sitting at the bar was a woman with long, fine hair adorned with a red ribbon; sometimes her hair was blond, and her doll’s face was that of a little girl; sometimes her head seemed covered with white tow; she was a siren well over sixty; she drank one beer after another out of the bottle while talking to herself and shouting defiantly; sometimes she got up and danced, lifting her skirts very high. A drunk asleep at a table woke up and seized a fat floozy in his arms; they capered around and danced deliriously. There was something of madness and ecstasy; so old, so ugly, so miserable, they were lost for a moment and they were happy. I felt bewildered, stared and said: “It’s beautiful.” N. A. was astounded; it seemed to him very French. “With us,” he said, “ugliness and beauty, the grotesque and the tragic, and even good and evil, go their separate ways: Americans do not like to think that such extremes can mingle.”
    —Simone de