“In Vilnius there can never be just the two of you. If you sit with a friend or a woman, Vilnius will, without fail, sneak up on you like some odd third one. You can’t get away from Vilnius. There isn’t another city like it in the world… America’s blacks know this sensation well. Their Vilnius, that third one, is called the blues. Not a song, not the music… I don’t know… a mood, or God fluttering in the air… In a word—the blues. One old man in Harlem explained it to me this way: when some other old negro talks, and I listen, it ain’t just the two of us, there’s always a third, and his name is
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