2025-08-21
18 分钟This is The Memory Palace.
I'm Nate DiMeo, and it's the end of the summer,
and sometimes at the end of the summer when I take a little time off,
I like to leave you with something to listen to, and I read something from American literature.
And today I have two poems,
each transcendent stories of a particular kind of American transcendence that both take place on public transportation.
This is Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by Walt Whitman.
Flood tide below me, I see you face to face.
Clouds of the west, sun there a half an hour high.
I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes.
How curious you are to me.
On the ferry boats,
the hundreds and hundreds that cross returning home are more curious to me than you suppose.
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me and more in my meditations than you might suppose.
The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, the simple,
compact, well-jointed scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme,
the similitudes of the past and those of the future,
the glory strung like beads on my smallest sides and hearings,
on the walk in the street and the passage over the river.