You are safe if you believe all the quaint
and romantic and inconsistent and impossible things that come to your
knowledge concerning the Village. That is its special and sacred
privilege: to be unexpected and always--yes, always without
exception--in the spirit of its irrational and sympathetic role. It
needs Kipling's ambiguous "And when the thing that couldn't has
occurred" for a motto. And yet--and yet--like all true nonsense, this
nonsense is rooted in a beautiful and disconcerting compromise of
truth.
Cities do grow through their romances and their adventures. The
commonplaces of life never opened up new worlds nor established them
after; the prose of life never served as a song of progress. Never a
great onward movement but was called impossible. The things that the
sane-and-safe gentleman accepts as good sense are not the things that
make for growth, anywhere. And the principle, applied to lesser
things, holds good. Who wants to study a city's life through the
registries of its civic diseases or cures? We want its romances, its
exceptions, its absurdities, its adventures.
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