Author’s note: “Weekend Short” is a weekly profile of a short story. Additional analysis by the readership is encouraged in the comments section.

Welcome to the weekend!

It’s May, which means NextDoor apps across America are afire with debates over whether NoMowMay is a Communist plot to ruin good American landscaping or just a scheme for the “In This Home” wokesters to put yet another virtue-signaling piece of signage in the yard.

While waiting for Amazon to deliver one such piece of lawn-related Commie agriprop [sic], I discovered firsthand why the V-shaped jacks commonly issued in the posteriors of European automobiles are referred to as “widow-makers.”

When a car is 30 years old, it doesn’t matter if the jacking point and procedure are correct. Welds failed, and my car’s underbody now has a postmodern industrial design. Thankfully, the failure occurred on the last side to come down, so, besides a Code Brown, the car landed well on its new struts without the fool-in-residence beneath it — DIY saves money only so long as a fellow stays out of the hospital.

Today’s story is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” Published in 1840 and set in London, the tale is alien to the comfortable, arms-length experience of pre-technology reality we enjoy in the West. Then, the urban man dwelt in the “tumultuous sea of human heads.” Poe describes a world without technological advances in conveyance outside of what a man might wear on his feet. The activity he observes from a coffeehouse is homogenous in its pedestrianism — throngs of foot-bound men and women assimilating and atomizing as the streams of London’s citizenry conduct the everyday. Observing the press, Poe’s narrator offers some of the gooey humanism of Foss’s “House by the Side of the Road” (1897) paired with a stiff tot of T. S. Eliot’s caustic presentation of man’s folly in “Cyclops” of his Ulysses (1922).

Poe writes:

Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul.—La Bruyère.

It was well said of a certain German book that “er lasst sich nicht lesen”—it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors and looking them piteously in the eyes—die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burthen so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.

You can read the rest here (15 minutes); enjoy the audio format here.

Before analyzing further, it’s worth enjoying again the sentence, “We stood before one of the huge suburban temples of Intemperance—one of the palaces of the fiend, Gin.” Poe makes a booze-house sound like a hellish Babylonian foundry; it is a fantastic sentence.

At the most surface level, the narrator’s target for much of the story is a man with the sight of whom elicited “the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of supreme despair.” In other words, this man is Man — a “fiend” worthy of Retzch’s [sic] attention and paints. We discover that for all that is interesting about the figure — his joy and despair — all he’s searching for is the company of others. We’re led to believe that he never sleeps or stops, doomed to haunt the steps of Londoners ever after. “He is a man of the crowd.”

I wonder about the inverse: The man who cannot bring himself to socialize. Certainly, the increased loneliness of Americans is attributable to events and policies in the last few years. Still, emotions of detachment were growing even before we shuttered ourselves from the perceived threat of one another.

Innately social creatures, a truth reflected in the three Abrahamic religions and their models of community rites and worship, we degrade without one another. For evidence, we can look to the increased lifespans of grandparents involved with their grandchildren. The mental and physical complexity, not to mention joy, of such a relationship has health benefits for all parties.

Between the fiend’s pursuit of companions and the arrogance of the emotionally removed narrator — who routinely misquotes and misspells sections to indicate his foolishness (Eliot would employ this tactic to convey Buck Mulligan’s intellectual gaseousness and Leopold Bloom’s ego) — there’s a middle ground we see in the “tribes of young clerks” walking together. Are they supercilious? Yes, perhaps. But they have an identity, a satisfaction, unobserved in the tale’s primary subjects.

And I’m sure there’s more to be said.

Here’s Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” a song for the ramblers in the gray:

Thanks to Ken for the suggestion.

Author’s note: If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.