Monk and Adams against the Day

[alice wellintown]

Imagine Thelonious Monk moving from the Rocky Mountains of North
Carolina to West 63rd Street. He The Speed, The Light, the Energy, the
Street must have been as  befuddling to a country boy of about six
years as the street had been to worldly Henry Adams,  who, after sixty
years of education,  describes, in his “Law Of Acceleration”, the
Street of the 20th century:
Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One's life had fattened on
impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four
impossibilities made actual — the ocean-steamer, the railway, the
electric telegraph, and the Daguerreotype; nor could he ever learn
which of the four had most hurried others to come. He had seen the
coal-output of the United States grow from nothing to three hundred
million tons or more. What was far more serious, he had seen the
number of minds, engaged in pursuing force — the truest measure of its
attraction — increase from a few scores or hundreds, in 1838, to many
thousands in 1905, trained to sharpness never before reached, and
armed with instruments amounting to new senses of indefinite power and
accuracy, while they chased force into hiding-places where Nature
herself had never known it to be, making analyses that contradicted
being, and syntheses that endangered the elements. No one could say
that the social mind now failed to respond to new force, even when the
new force annoyed it horribly. Every day Nature violently revolted,
causing so-called accidents with enormous destruction of property and
life, while plainly laughing at man, who helplessly groaned and
shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop. The
railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and
fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous
relaxation. An immense volume of force had detached itself from the
unknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to
be infinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with
more compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold that
ever existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb.
The increase of energy! Looking at the buildings, the size, the cars,
the speed, the mobs, the quantity of goods and services and people,
the multiplication of everything that man and machine might mass
produce, all reflect the use of enormous supply of fuel, of energy.
Power is cut loose from the Earth. Signal up all lines and limits,
geographic, natural, and human. The irregularities of the weather, the
whims of nature, the rain, the wind, the food for man and his beasts.

But power, though split from nature’s atoms, is still tethered to
Time. Power’s magic to reduce the time needed to complete work is
still proscribed by Time. A new and violent tempo of production, one
that frightened Adams, married to the regimentation of Time, Time that
is Money and must, like Souls, be saved with the Light. Work. Light up
the city and make a day of the night and work and work and work.  Make
your Byrons and Wordsworths Bartlebys!  And, Monk, at Stuyvesant
perhaps, where he was as rare as the visible stars over Manhattan, as
rare as a brother or sister still in that high school, must have
understood that he was playing against the Day.