The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [75]
I face back I can recognize myself as of this time in intimate tress, with my own and family traits of hands and feet, greenness ^sgrayness of the eyes and up-springing hair; but at myself fully feed and at my new social passes I have to look twice. I don't know tit all at once came to me to talk a lot, tell jokes, kick up, and sudf have views. When it was time to have them, there was no telling I picked them from the air. ie city college Simon and I attended wasn't a seminary in charge of Is who taught Aristotle and casuistry and prepared you for Euro61 games and vices and all the things, true or not true, actual or not it, nevertheless insisted on as true and actual. Considering how I'world there was to catch up with--Asurbanipal, Euclid, Alaric, tinich, Madison, Blackhawk--if you didn't devote your whole 0 it, how were you ever going to do it? And the students were fcen of immigrants from all parts, coming up from Hell's Kitchen, ISicily, the Black Belt, the mass of Polonia, the Jewish streets of oldt Park, put through the coarse sitters of curriculum, and also ag wisdom of their own. They filled the factory-length corridors ant classrooms with every human character and germ, to undergo Bdation and become, the idea was, American. In the mixture |tras beauty--a good proportion--and pimple-insolence, and par- tiaces, gum-chew innocence, labor fodder and secretarial forces, | stability. Dago inspiration, catarrh-hampered mathematical l|flere were waxed-eared shovelers' children, sex-promising busi JSfa daughters--an immense sampling of a tremendous host, the gfcs of holy writ, begotten by West-moving, factor-shoved parj S^me, the by-blow of a traveling man. Normally Simon and I would have gone to work after high school, but jobs weren't to be had anyway, and the public college was full of students in our condition, because of the unemployment, getting a citysponsored introduction to higher notions and an accidental break into Shakespeare and other great masters along with the science and math leveled at the Civil-Service exams. In the nature of the case it couldn't be avoided; and if you were going to prepare impoverished young folks for difficult functions, or if merely you were going to keep them out of trouble by having them read books, there were going to be some remarkable results begotten out of the mass. I knew a skinny, sickly Mexican too poor for socks and spotted and stained all over, body and clothes, who could crack any equation on the board; and also Bohunk wizards at the Greeks, demon-brained physicists, historians bred under pushcarts, and many hard-grain poor boys who were going to starve and work themselves bitterly eight years or so to become doctors, engineers, scholars, and experts. I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn't feel moved to take it seriously. Nevertheless I turned in a fairly good performance in French and History. In things like Botany, my drawings were cockeyed and smudgy and I was behind the class. Though I had been Einhorn's office clerk I hadn't learned much of neatness. And besides I was working five afternoons a week and all day on Saturday. This was not at Einhom's any longer, but in women's shoes, in the basement of the downtown clothing shop where Simon was upstairs in men's suits. His situation had gotten better, and he was excited by the change. It was a fashionable store where the management wanted you to be well dressed. But he went beyond anything demanded of a salesman and was not just natty but hot stuff, in a double-breasted striped suit, with a tape measure around his neck. I hardly knew him there, among mirrors, rugs, racks of clothes, eight stories above the Loop; he was big, fast and busy, heavy in his body, and his blood evident in him, in his face. Below, I was in a bargain department under the sidewalk, seeing and hearing the shoppers pass over the green circles of glass set in concrete, skirts of heavy coats flying as shadows through these lenses,