NEW YORK: The Rock Desert

When short, square-shouldered Jean-Paul Sartre, the latest lion from France’s literary zoo, visited the U.S. last year, he swiftly developed a liking for such American commonplaces as the dry Martini, corned beef hash and chocolate ice cream. He also slowly developed an awed liking for bustling, noisy, overcrowded, squalor-spotted, ill-mannered New York City.

Last week Sartre, the high prophet of existentialism (TIME, Jan. 28), gave New Yorkers who read Town & Country an esoteric’s cloud-high view of their metropolis, packed tight with steel, stone and bricks. Wrote he:

“New York is a city for the farsighted. … My glance encountered only space. . . . Our cities in Europe are built as a protection against space. . . . But space traverses New York, animates it, stretches it. . . . The city very closely resembles the great Andalusian plains: it is monotonous if you pass through on foot, superb and ever-changing if you motor.”

To Philosopher-Playwright Sartre the “city of open sky” was close to nature and its violence—”the storms overflow its streets. . . . Nature’s weight is so heavy on it that this most modern of cities is also the dirtiest. . . . When I go out I walk in blackish snow. . . . Even in . . . my apartment a hostile, deaf, mysterious Nature assails me. I seem to be camping in the heart of a jungle swarming with insects. . . . There are the roaches that run through my kitchen, the elevators that make my heart contract. . . .

“New York is a colonial city, a camping ground. All the hostility, all the cruelty of the world are present in this most prodigious monument man has ever raised to himself . . . this immense, malevolent space . . . this desert of rock.”

History and Ruins. “I like New York. I have learned to like it. . . . Nowhere have I felt more free than in the midst of its crowds. . . . Here you may suffer the anguish of loneliness, but not that of crushing defeat. In Europe we . . . become attached to a cluster of houses, are captivated by a little corner of a street; and we are no longer free. But hardly have you plunged into New York than you are living completely in the dimensions of New York. . . . You will never be held by any of its streets, for none of them is distinguished by a beauty peculiar to itself. . . . Nowhere more than here can you feel the simultaneity of human lives.”

But Novelist Sartre also found decay in the city of skyscrapers. “They are already historical monuments, witnesses of a past epoch. . . . I cannot view them without sadness: they speak of a time when we thought the last war had been fought, when we believed in peace. Already they are slightly neglected; tomorrow, perhaps, they will be demolished. . . . To build them in the first place required a faith we no longer feel. . . .”