Free The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze by William Saroyan Page A

the music a second time. The whole thing was really very amusing, he thought. He had got the music and the girl and the house together as one significance in his mind, and it was amusing.
    But the next day I began trying to locate her. It happened automatically. I was taking a walk and before I knew it I was at her old address, asking the people who had moved into the house if they knew where she had gone. They did not know. I walked until one o’clock in the morning. The music was getting into me again, and I was beginning to hear it very often.
    Whenever he sat down to operate the teletype machine, he would begin to hear the music, emerging from the machine,
one two three four five six seven eight
. Every Sunday he found himself begging the machine to bring her to him again. It was preposterous. He knew that she was no longer with thecompany, and yet he found himself expecting the machine to tap out her old greeting to him,
hello hello hello
. It was preposterous. Absolutely.
    He had never known a great deal about her. He had known her name and what she had meant to him, but nothing more.
    And the music: over and over again.
    One afternoon, he got up from the teletype machine and removed his work jacket. It was a little after two, and he quit his job and went away with his money. I don’t want any of the prosperity, he said. He went up to his room and put all the things he wanted to take away with him into two suitcases.
    The phonograph and the records he presented to Mrs. Liebig, the landlady. The phonograph is old, he told her, and it is apt to groan now and then, especially when you put on anything by Beethoven. But it still runs. The records aren’t much. There is some decent music, but most of the records are monotonous jazz. He was feeling the music while he was speaking to the landlady, and it was really paining him to be leaving the phonograph and the records in a strange house, but he was sure he didn’t want them any longer.
    Walking from the waiting room of the depot to the train, I could feel the music tearing out my heart, and when the train began to get under way and when the whistle screamed, I was sitting helplessly, weeping for this girl and the house, and sneering at myself for wanting more of life than there was in life to have.

And Man

    One morning, when I was fifteen, I got up before daybreak, because all night I hadn’t been able to sleep, tossing in bed with the thought of the earth and the strangeness of being alive, suddenly feeling myself a part of it, definitely, solidly. Merely to be standing again, I had thought all night. Merely to be in the light again, standing, breathing, being alive. I left my bed quietly in the darkness of early morning and put on my clothes, a blue cotton shirt, a pair of corduroy pants, stockings and shoes. It was November and it was beginning to turn cold, but I did not wish to put on more clothes. I felt warm enough. I felt almost feverish, and with more clothesI knew it would not happen. Something was going to happen, and I felt that if I put on too much clothes it would dwindle away and all that I would have would be the remembrance of something expected, then lost.
    All through the sleeplessness of the night I could feel turning in me, like a multitude of small and large wheels, some swift and wordless thought, on the verge of articulation, some vast remembrance out of time, a fresh fullness, a new solidity, a more graceful rhythm of motion emerging from the hurried growth that had taken place in me during the summer.
    With the beginning of spring that year came the faint and fragmentary beginning of this thought, burning in my mind with the sound of fire eating substance, sweeping through my blood with the impatience and impetuosity of a deluge. Before the beginning of this thought I had been nothing more than a small and sullen boy, moving through the moments of my life with anger and fear and bitterness and doubt, wanting desperately to know the meaning and