Edmund Wilson was puzzled that people who interested themselves in his work rarely took his fiction seriously. I am imagining, though, that there lives in Greenwich Village today (not the one carrying the geographic name, but the Village of the Fifties and Twenties) a monk, a stroller, steeped in literature, practicing a form of meditation requiring a more relevant mantra than Bo Peep, or Rin Tin; who enjoys very deeply the tears of the martini on his lips, and declaims over and over:
"The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour, of the harp and the violin - some old musical comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to suggest; and as I glanced at Daisy, now gazing out like a charming good-natured child at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with a sentimental reverie."
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