[Greenwich Village by Anna Alice Chapin]@TWC D-Link book
Greenwich Village

CHAPTER VIII
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Like two-thirds of the Village, he is playing his game with his whole heart and soul, with all that is in him.

I am afraid that it would be hard to say as much for a certain class of outside-the-Village fakers who, from time to time, drift into the cheery confines thereof and carry away sacks of shekels--though not, let us hope, as much as they wanted to get! Have you ever heard, for instance, of the psychoanalysts?
They diagnose soul troubles as regular doctors diagnose diseases of the body, and they are in great demand.

Some of them are alienists, healers of sick brains; some of them are just--fakers.

They charge immense prices, and just for the moment the blessed Village--always passionately hospitable to new cults and theories and visions--is receiving them cordially, with arms and purses that are both wide open.
None of us can afford to depreciate the genius nor the judgment of Freud, but I defy any Freud-alienist to efficiently psychoanalyse the Village! By the time he were half done with the job he would be a Villager himself and then--pouf! That for his psychoanalysis! Have you ever read that most enchanting book of Celtic mysticism, inconsequent whimsey and profound symbolism--"The Crock of Gold"-- by one James Stevens?
The author is not a Villager, and his message is one which has its root and spring in the signs and wonders of another, an older and a more intimately wise land than ours.

But when I read of those pure, half-pagan immortals in the dance of the _Sluaige Shee_ (the Fairy Hosts) I could not help thinking that Greenwich Village might well adopt certain passages as fitting texts and interpretations of themselves and their own lives--"The lovers of gaiety and peace, long defrauded." The Shee, as they dance, sing to the old grey world-dwellers,--or Stevens says they do, and I for one believe he knows all there is to know about it ('tis a Leprechaun he has for a friend): "Come to us, ye who do not know where ye are--ye who live among strangers in the houses of dismay and self-righteousness.


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