_I wonder what's doing in Buffalo!_
XIV
PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER
If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the top
of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, and
despise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on
summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically without
aim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable intelligence
of ants, for ants always know when they are going home. The ant is of
a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his slippers on
while you are left at your elevated station.
Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a creeping,
contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties,
hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging bigger
black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.
From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an
unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives;
the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball. All
the minutiae of life are gone. The philosopher gazes into the infinite
heavens above him, and allows his soul to expand to the influence of
his new view.
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