I have turned from sickness and death
To seek my soul in the movies …
I still believe in magic …

All the players are spoilt sweet children,
They are spiritual dwarfs …
They play forever in a pleasure-house of the imagination,
And he who is king today is beggar tomorrow …
They need no masks like the Greeks: they are masks …

I am strangely troubled and sensuously happy among them …
Cæsar-Christ almost half believes he can play on the floor with dolls and fire-engines …
He writes romantic melodrama for the actors …
He feels himself the Brutus of his Cæsar, the Judas of his Christ …

His intellect rises like a spire in the vast glass-roofed studio, for there is no mind there …
The players have jealous little egos, petulant caprices, impatient whimsies …
They cannot understand his abysmal darkness …
He cannot understand, how, when the gong rings, and the director cries ready,
And in the painted scene the ghastly serpent-light inundates the actors,
And at last, in silence, the camera begins its clicking,
As by a magic wand these children are transformed into the characters of the play …
So lightly they move from world to world of self …

If he is on the height, he must stay there,
And if in the depth, he is manacled there …
He who desires nothing but a looking-glass world
Is even alien in the heart of this mirage …

And so he muses on America which he sees as a movie-land,
A clutter of mechanism in which the petulant children play,
And he who is beggar today is king tomorrow,
And over it all is the touch of quick money and quick results …

A world of hot excitements and dull indolences,
Of dreams that are bought and sold, of palaces reared and shattered,
A world of daubs, masks, patches … of towns put up over-night like the scene in a play
And cast in the junk-heap tomorrow …
A bright forced artificial bloom that is partly painted decay …

He grows sick: in this original and native art,
America's art, art of the machine,
He seeks his soul and finds only alkali desert,
The Dead Man's Land of America at play.