But it was worth going back to.
Yet, after all, it isn't the food and drink, nor yet the unusual
surroundings, that bring you back to these places. It's the--well, one
has to use, once in a while, the hard-worked and generally
inappropriate word "atmosphere." Like "temperament" and
"individuality" and the rest of the writer-folk's old reliables,
"atmosphere" is too often only a makeshift, a lazy way of expressing
something you won't take the trouble to define more expressively. Dick
says in "The Light That Failed" that an old device for an unskilful
artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a
picture where it will cover up bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt
to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion.
But this is a fact just the same. Nearly all the Greenwich Village
places really have atmosphere. You can be cynical about it, or frown
at it, or do anything you like about it, but it's there, and it's the
real thing. It's an absolute essence and ether which you feel
intensely and breathe necessarily, but which no one can put quite
definitely into the concrete form of words.
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