Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

We examined the shelf of books. They were all novels: Sinning is Man’s Game, The Flame of Burnt-Out Love, First Might, Affairs of the Married.

“You must not be shocked, gentlemen,” said Mr.Adams. “You are in a small American town.”

Many people think that America is a land of skyscrapers, that day and night one hears the clatter of elevated and underground railways, the hellish roar of automobiles and the overwhelming desperate cries of stock exchange dealers who rush among the skyscrapers, constantly waving their constantly falling stocks and bonds.

This conception is firm, ancient, and customary.

Of course, it’s all there – the skyscrapers, the elevated railways, and the falling stocks. But those are the attributes only of New York and Chicago. And even there the stockbrokers don’t rush around sidewalks, throwing American citizens off their feet, but, entirely unnoticed by the population of America, they abide in their stock exchanges, performing all their machinations inside those monumental buildings.

New York has many skyscrapers; Chicago has a few less; but in the other large cities they are few in number – maybe two or three per city. They tower there in a lonely fashion, in the manner of a waterworks or a firehouse tower. In small towns there are no skyscrapers.

America is preponderantly a country of one-story and two-story houses. The majority of the American population lives in small cities where the population is three, five, ten, fifteen thousand.

What traveller has not experienced that first and unrepeatable feeling of excited expectation that possesses the soul upon entering a city where he has never been before? Every street and every lane open new and newer mysteries to the thirsty eyes of the traveller. Toward evening it begins to seem to him that he has fallen in love with that city. The sight of the street mob, the architecture of the buildings, the smell of the market, and finally the colour peculiar only to that city, compose the traveller’s first and truest impressions.

He can live in the city a year, explore its nooks and corners, make friends, then forget the names of all those friends, forget all that he had so conscientiously learned, yet he will never forget his first impressions.

Nothing of the kind can be said about American cities. Of course, even in America there are a few cities that have their inimitable personalities – San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, Santa Fe.