Every Evening Freedom

"Like any other great city, this one offered its populace more than merely every evening freedom. It offered a variety of slaveries to which the freedom might be put. This was necessary, Goliath knew, because he who has given away his soul between nine and five cannot usually bear to face it (or does not know where to find it) between five and nine. The city offered distractions, glorious dreams. One could descend from the unreality of an office to the unreality of a street and thence to the unreality of a night club, a theatre, a public meeting, a music hall, a religious activity, a library, a brothel, a circus, a gambling casino, a street filled with whores and whoresses, a picture gallery, a queer bar, a luna park, or most frequently the rectangular darkness of the national church with its two dimensional gods in technicolor. Those who had been unable to encounter themselves throughout the day thronged these places at night that they might escape themselves a little while. Goliath often found he had been dragged in along with them and for much the same reasons. All was dissolved into the evening’s pasture. O delicious! O the grasses of oblivion! Their fragrance wrapped around him, spun his shadow into the world of men. The show, the dance, the frantic toilings were. But he was not. All existed because he perceived, and all being perceived he did not exist. Despite the narcotic joy he took from these moments, they were the most anxious of his life."

— Alfred Chester, Behold Goliath: A Collection of Stories (New York: Random House, 1965)