and dreary—the image of a life that was itself as rootless, insecure, and drearily pretentious as the little painted frames it lived in.
It was Sunday, and as they drove up to the station he saw before a Greek confectionery and newspaper store a group of the town sports. They were dressed up in their cheap Sunday finery, and their faces wore a smirk. As Joel got out of the car, the sports tried to look nonchalant and easy in their relations with one another, but a kind of uneasy constraint had fallen upon them and held them until he had gone. And yet he had not noticed them or done anything that might have caused them this discomfort.
In the gravelled parking space before the station several cars were drawn up. Their shining bodies glittered in the hot sunlight like great beetles of machinery, and in the look of these great beetles, powerful and luxurious as most of them were, there was a stamped-out quality, a kind of metallic and inhuman repetition that filled his spirit, he could not say why, with a vague sense of weariness and desolation. The feeling returned to him—the feeling that had come to him so often in recent years with a troubling and haunting insistence—that “something” had come into life, “something new” which he could not define, but something that was disturbing and sinister, and which was somehow represented by the powerful, weary, and inhuman precision of these great, glittering, stamped-out beetles of machinery. And consonant to this feeling was another concerning people themselves: it seemed to him that they, too, had changed, that “something new” had come into their faces, and although he could not define it, he felt with a powerful and unmistakable intuition that it was there—that “something” had come into life that had changed the lives and faces of the people, too. And the reason this discovery was so disturbing—almost terrifying, in fact—was first of all because it was at once evident and yet indefinable; and then because he knew it had happened within the years of his own life, few and brief as they were—had happened, indeed, within “the last few years,” had happened all around him while he lived and breathed and worked among these very people to whom it had happened, and that he had not observed it at the “instant” when it came. For, with an intensely literal, an almost fanatically concrete quality of imagination, it seemed to him that there must have been an “instant”—a moment of crisis, a literal fragment of recorded time in which the transition of this change came. And it was just for this reason that he now felt a nameless and disturbing sense of desolation—almost of terror; it
