Coast to Coast Read Free Page B

tall and pantherlike, but as I shied nervously away from him, “Pardon me, sir,” he said with an unearthly smile. “What a clumsy big ape I am.”
    It is a futuristic world that these creatures inhabit. The aluminium escalators silently progress, the loudspeakers discreetly call for Mr. Komobo or Sir Lindsey Ashley-Willoughby, and at the end of every corridor, like the eye of God, there seems to shine a television set. The U.N. is laced and girdled with television, its own closed-circuit system reducing space to an archaic conception, blending upstairs with downstairs, inside with out. The General Assembly meets in the great auditorium on the north side of the structure, but down all the veins of the place, along its landings and its corridors, into its lounges and bars and press rooms, the postures and platitudes are relentlessly pumped, so that wherever you go Mr. Komobo or Sir Lindsey seems to catch you up, seize you by the scruff of the neck and swamp you with oratory. It is a foretaste of worlds to come. The air-conditioning is absolute. No breath of heat, cold or damp seeps through the windows. There are no draughts and no snug fuggy corners. I have never in my life felt so completely indoors as I do in this building, and when you look out through the plate glass to the grey river outside, with a tug thumping its way to sea and a sliver of smoke from the power-house chimneys— when you look out to a nostalgic glimpse of Manhattan, it is like peering back at the human race from the inside of an aquarium.
    Against this sterilized background, this little world drained of impurities, humanity is etched with a new and awful clarity. Among their delegates at their seats the whole gamut of human type and experience is luxuriantly represented, from the lean fastidious aristocrat to the earthiest of yokels, from the super-civilized to the almost primitive, from the benign to the bullying. Seen in such a setting, all our failings are pitilessly emphasized. If we have a long nose, it looks longer. If we lean towards the pompous, we emerge quite ludicrously inflated. If we are a bore, all mankind sighs for us. If we are a liar, everyone knows it. If we want to embrace a well-wisher, the whole world experiences the cuddle for itself, winces to the prickle of a Caribbean beard, or feels the Order of Lenin digging uncomfortably into its stomach. It is like being stimulated by some heightening drug, to sit on a U.N. sofa and observe la condition humaine. Here all the archetypes of diplomacy prance by oblivious. It may be Sir Lindsey, sliding pomaded towards the Trusteeship Council with a perceptible creaking of costume, his face creased but undaunted by responsibility, his eyes unobtrusively on the watchfor fellers he’d rather not bump into. It may be Mr. Komobo, entering the room in a gorgeous striped liquefaction of robes, his sandals slip-slopping softly across the carpet, on his head a multi-coloured skull-cap, in his hand a very expensive fountain-pen, in his wake a covey of obsequious applicants. Perhaps some dour commissar, in sagging double-breasted grey, is morosely annotating a memorandum in a corner; or an exquisite Frenchwoman, in a cloud of Chanel and a Balmain suit, is charming the ideology out of an infatuated Rumanian; or a long-limbed American has taken an Indian cosily by the arm, and is telling him a funny story under his breath; or a small smiling Chinese tip-toes by, or an Israeli behind you disputes some of the tentative identifications in Painter’s biography of Proust, or a Canadian is expressing his inalienable conviction that this is Canada’s Century. And now and then you look up to encounter one of the universally familiar figures of our day: a Khrushchev or a Kennedy, a Nasser or a Tito, images so well known to all of us that when at last you meet them, face to face and in the flesh, they do not feel real at all, but look as though they are cosmeticized dummies, waxworks or impersonators. Yes, yes,