“On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls,
nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by
footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent
city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which
only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their
blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the
man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded
it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified
the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that
of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively
silenced every voice.”
dated 1947
