“As I was walking down 125th Street, I suddenly stopped and stared around me in amazement,” Ginsberg wrote. He was seeing something he had never noticed before, something that now inspired awe: the accumulated “intelligence and care” that had gone into molding the cornices and rooftops of the buildings in Harlem. All around him were these relics of the consciousness of people long dead. He had a sudden awareness of a “vast endless space reaching back into time and reaching forward into the future.” And he felt a parallel awareness that he was also one of the “artifacts of that long evolution.”
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