That year — the first year that he lived there in the city — he was twenty-three years old. After these months of frenzy, drunkenness, and arrest, he was at the last gasp of his resources, and the eighteen hundred dollars a year, which was his salary at the university that had employed him as an instructor, seemed to him a wage of princely munificence — a stroke of incredible good fortune.

And although his position as instructor had been given to him in one of the usual ways, through the recommendation of the teachers’ bureau at Harvard University, and the letters of some of the professors there, he was tortured constantly by the thought of his inadequacy and ignorance, and by the horrible fear that his incompetence would be discovered and that one day he would be suddenly, peremptorily, ruinously, and disgracefully discharged.

At night, when he went to bed in his little cell at the cheap little hotel nearby where he lived, the thought of the class he had to meet the next day fed at his heart and bowels with cold poisonous mouths of fear, and as the hour for a class drew nigh he would begin to shake and tremble as if he had an ague; the successive stages of his journey from his room in the Leopold to the class-room at the university a few hundred yards away — from cell to elevator, from the tiled sterility of the hotel lobby to the dusty beaten light and violence of the street outside, thence to the brawling and ugly corridors of the university, which drowned one, body and soul, with their swarming, shrieking, shouting tides of dark amber Jewish flesh, and thence into the comparative sanctuary of the class-room with its smaller horde of thirty or forty Jews and Jewesses all laughing, shouting, screaming, thick with their hot and swarthy body-smells, their strong female odours of rut and crotch and arm-pit and cheap perfume, and their hard male smells that were rancid, stale, and sour — the successive stages of this journey were filled with such dazed numbness, horror, fear, and nauseous stupefaction as a man might feel in the successive stages of a journey to the gallows, the guillotine, or the electric chair: the world swarmed blindly, nauseously, drunkenly about him. He looked at the faces in the hotel lobby, the brawling, furious, and chaotic street, and the swarming and rancid corridors, with dizzy swimming eyes and a constricted heart; a thousand unutterable and horrible premonitions and imaginings of ruin and shame swarmed through his mind — every day he felt the impending menace of some new and fatal catastrophe, some indefinable and crushing disgrace with which each hour was ominously, murderously pregnant.

What these fears and forebodings were he could not have told, but they occasionally found articulate expression in some scene of frightful insubordination and rebellion, in which he found himself faced with forty brawling, mocking, swarthily jeering faces who, like savage and untamed horses that have sensed the fear and incompetence of their driver, have now broken the last feeble thread of restraint and are running free and wild before him. The terror and menace of such a disgrace were heightened by the intrusion into the scene at the apex of such a moment of riot and rebellion of one of his employers, the Dean, the head of the department, or a creature with a wry lean face, a convulsive Adam’s apple, a habit of writhing his lean belly and loins erotically as he spoke, and a mind of the most obscene Puritanism, who was employed to oversee the work and methods of the instructors: he could visualize the moment of their fatal entrance into the class-room, and hear their words of stern, curt and immediate dismissal as they drove him out and gathered the reins strongly into their own parched and freckled hands.

A thousand such images of disgrace and terror swarmed through his mind, and at the same time there began to smoulder in his heart a dogged resentment and hatred of this nameless fear, this wordless and sourceless shame, impalpable, causeless, maddening, which pressed upon him from the sky, which hovered in the vast unrest and dissonance of the air he breathed, and which at length crept poisonously through all the rivers of life, corrupting the healthy music of the blood, the sweet exultant music of the heart, curdling men’s bowels with fear and withering their loins with sterile impotence. What was this grey lipless shape of fear that stalked their lives incessantly — that was everywhere, legible in the faces, the movements, and the driven frenzied glances of the people who swarmed on the streets? What was this thing that duped men out of joy, tricked them out of all the exultant and triumphant music of the world, drove them at length into the dusty earth, cheated, defrauded, tricked out of life by a nameless phantom, with all their glory wasted?

Already, in the city, he had begun to see how life was duped and menaced by this cheat: a thousand images of cruelty, violence, cowardice and dishonour swarmed about him in the streets. As the sparkling and winy exultancy of October, with its grand and solemn music of death and life, of departure and return, moved on into the harsh, raw, green implacability of winter, one could observe the death of joy and hope, the barometric rise of hate and fear and venom in the city’s life: it got into the faces of the people, it wasted their flesh and corrupted their blood, it glittered in the eyes of the instructors at the university, their flesh got green and yellow with its poisons, the air about them was webbed, cross-webbed, and counter-webbed with the dense fabric of their million spites and hatreds. They wasted and grew sick with hate and poison because another man received promotion, because another man had got his poem printed, because another man had eaten food and swallowed drink and lain with women, and lived and would not die; they sweltered with hate and fear against the professors who employed them — they grew pale and trembled, and spoke obsequiously when their employer passed, but when the man had gone, they whispered with trembling lips: “Has he spoken to you yet? . . . Has he said anything to you yet about next year? . . . Are you coming back next year? . . . Did he say anything to you about ME next year? . . .” They greeted him with sly humility and a servile glance, but they snickered obscenely at him when his back was turned. And they smiled and sneered at one another with eyes that glittered with their hate: they never struck a blow but they spoke lying words of barbed ambiguity, they lied, cheated, and betrayed, and they sweltered in the poisons of their hate and fear, they breathed the weary hatred-laden air about them into their poisoned lungs.

Around him in the streets, again, as winter came, he heard a million words of hate and death: a million words of snarl and sneer and empty threat, of foul mistrust and lying slander: already he had come to see the poisonous images of death and hatred at work in the lives of a million people — he saw with what corrupt and venomous joy they seized on every story of man’s dishonour, defeat, or sorrow, with what vicious jibe and jeer they greeted any evidence of mercy, honesty, or love.

By night, the hard and sterile lights of their glittering, barren and obscene streets fell lividly over the pale and swarthy faces of a million rats of the flesh, and by day, in the weary and hatred-laden air of the university, the harsh and merciless light shone on the venomous faces of the rats of the spirit.

In his heart a dogged and furious resentment was beginning to glow and moulder — a savage hate of hate, a fear of fear, a murderous intensity of desire to strangle the shapes of death and barrenness — a resistance, still passive, but growing in bitterness and pugnacity with every passing day, as he saw how uselessly and horribly men allowed themselves to be duped, cheated, and beaten by the living rat and by the fraud of fear, and that was being strengthened momently now by an implacable conviction, a dogged and incontrovertible memory that, incredibly sharpened by his fury and desire, awoke and netted out of the sea-depths of the past, the shining fish of a million living moments. The sound of forest waters in the night, the rustling of cool corn-blades in the dark, the goat-cries of a boy into the wind, the pounding of great wheels upon a rail, the sound of quiet casual voices at a country station in the night, and the thorn of delight, the tongueless cry of ecstasy that trembles on the lips of the country kid as he lies awake for the first time in the night in the top berth of a Pullman car while the great wheels pound beneath him toward the city, and he hears the good-looking woman in the berth below him stir languorously and move, in a gesture of heavied and sensual appeasement, her milky thighs. — These things had been upon the earth, past all the mockery of the old scornmaker’s pride, and would endure for ever. These facts, together with a thousand more — the incredible magic of the peach bloom in the month of April, the smell of rivers after rain, the wordless glory and first green of a young tree seen in a city street at daybreak in the month of May, the bird-song breaking into light once more, a cry, a leaf, the passing of a cloud — these facts, as bright as herrings in a shining water, as literal as nails to fix the hides of falsehood to the wall, as real as April and all magic whatsoever, returned now under the furious light of his awakened and incontrovertible memory.

A murderous hatred against the haters, the mockers, dupers, cheaters, and all of the walking frauds of death rose up in him. He resolved to kill the phantoms of this fear and shame which pressed upon him namelessly; he swore that he should not starve in the midst of plenty, batter his knuckles bloody on the four walls of a little cell, break the great shoulder of his power and strength against a barren wall, prowl ceaselessly and damnably a million sterile streets, in which there was neither pause nor curve nor stay, nor door, to enter: he knew there was earth for his feet, food for his hunger, liquor for his thirst, the exultant reality of strong golden joy for all the savage passion of his conviction and desire, and he swore that he should come at length to doors and harbours, he knew he would not starve and sicken in the wilderness, and that the venomous rats of the flesh and of the spirit should never gnaw his bones in triumph in the desert.

Yet, the sense of drowning daily in the man-swarm returned to him. Each day there began anew one of the most ancient and fatal struggles that was ever waged — the struggle of man against the multitude: each day, like a man who is going into battle, he would brace himself with savage resolution, and gird his spirit to the sticking point each time he went out in the streets, and each day, beaten, driven, trembling and inchoate, drowned in horror and oblivion, he would at length retreat into the four walls of his cell again, conscious only of having passed through a maelstrom of sound, movement, violence, and living tissue — of living tissue from which all of the radiant and succulent essences of individual character and memory had been extracted — and which flowed constantly back and forth along the beaten pavement in a lava-like tide of tallowy flesh, dark dead eyes, and grey felt hats. The grey felt hats, in particular, those machine-made millions of neat cheap cones of crisp grey felt, all worn in the same way, and tilted at the same angle, and for the most part shading faces of the same tallowy texture — those million points of changeless grey that bobbed and moved incessantly through a thousand streets — drowned him with their tidal flow of weariness and sterility: they seemed to be the badge, the uniform, of a race of mechanical creatures, who were as essential and inhuman a part of the city’s substance as stone and steel and brick, who had been made of one essential substance and charged with one general and basic energy along with the buildings, tunnels, streets, and a million glittering projectiles of machinery, and who flowed by incessantly, were poured into tunnels or driven through streets, were added to here, and thinned out there, were portioned, doled, and celled out in a million destinations, a thousand swarming heaven-daring hives, the mindless and unwitting automatons of a gigantic and incomprehensible patter............