✴✴✴

The faces drawn with anxiety over the day about to begin, the dejected looks in the morning subway-trains; the profound weariness, spiritual rather than physical, reflected in the general bearing, the expression, the set of the mouth, at quitting-time; the looks and attitudes of caged beasts, after the ten-day closing when a factory reopens its doors as the signal for the beginning of another interminable year; the pervasive brutality; the importance almost every one attaches to details trivial in themselves but distressing as symbols, such as the matter of identification cards; the pitiful boasts bandied about by the crowds at the entrances to hiring halls, boasts which express so many real humiliations; the incredibly poignant words that sometimes escape, inadvertently, the lips of men and women who had seemed to be just like all the rest; the hatred and loathing of the factory, the place of work, often evidenced in words and acts, a loathing that casts its shadow over any possible comradeship and impels working men and women, once they have cleared the factory exit, to hasten separately to their respective homes, with scarcely a greeting exchanged; the joy during the sit-down strikes, of possessing the factory in thought, of exploring its several parts, the completely new pride in showing it to their loved ones and of pointing out their work stations - a fleeting joy and pride that expressed, by contrast, in so poignant a manner the permanent suffering of minds nailed down to a point in time; all the emotional tides of workfolk, so mysterious to onlookers, in reality so easy to seize; how not trust to these signs, when at the very moment he reads them about him, he experiences within him the feeling corresponding to those signs?