New York at Night – Amy Lowell

A near horizon whose sharp jags
Cut brutally into a sky
Of leaden heaviness, and crags
Of houses lift their masonry
Ugly and foul, and chimneys lie
And snort, outlined against the gray
Of lowhung cloud. I hear the sigh
The goaded city gives, not day
Nor night can ease her heart, her anguished labours stay.
Below, straight streets, monotonous,
From north and south, from east and west,
Stretch glittering; and luminous
Above, one tower tops the rest
And holds aloft man’s constant quest:
Time! Joyless emblem of the greed
Of millions, robber of the best
Which earth can give, the vulgar creed
Has seared upon the night its flaming ruthless screed.
O Night! Whose soothing presence brings
The quiet shining of the stars.
O Night! Whose cloak of darkness clings
So intimately close that scars
Are hid from our own eyes. Beggars
By day, our wealth is having night
To burn our souls before altars
Dim and tree-shadowed, where the light
Is shed from a young moon, mysteriously bright.
Where art thou hiding, where thy peace?
This is the hour, but thou art not.
Will waking tumult never cease?
Hast thou thy votary forgot?
Nature forsakes this man-begot
And festering wilderness, and now
The long still hours are here, no jot
Of dear communing do I know;
Instead the glaring, man-filled city groans below!

Mary tells Katie to take an old, empty coffee can, nail it to the floor in the back of the closet, and no matter what, put a nickel into that can every single day. “In three years,” Mary says, “you will have fifty dollars.” And in 1901 fifty dollars is enough to buy a small plot of land.

But Katie is doubtful. “Mother,” she asks, “how can I put five cents aside every day? We need every penny just to survive.” But Mary is prepared, and knows how it’s done. Mary herself has saved that money, twice. The first time, she tells Katie, it took her almost 10 years to save the fifty dollars, and she went to buy a piece of land, but was “swindled” by a loathsome thief who gave her a worthless piece of paper in exchange for her money. The second time she saved the fifty dollars, it took longer, and her husband found the money and invested it in chickens instead of land, which turned out to be a very poor investment indeed. Mary is now on her third round of savings, and is hopeful this time everything will work out.

So how does someone with nothing save five cents each and every day? Simple. “When you are at the store and you want to buy carrots,” Mary tells Katie, “just look for the damaged, older carrots that are almost rotted, and ask for a 5 cents discount. Or, on a cold night, when you are about to turn on the furnace; wait an hour before you do. During that hour, when you are sitting all bundled up against the cold, remember that you are saving those pennies so that one day you will have something.”

The message is, in other words, that we must make sacrifices for the future, and it is urgent that we do so. One day the future will be here, and if we want a better life for ourselves and for our children, we need to put in the effort now to make it so then.

What good advice, which, even though we live in one of the most affluent societies which ever existed in history, is as true today as ever, perhaps even more so. Today, in the consumer culture of New York and the United States as a whole, we are sent the message that we can have everything we want now. But ultimately this is foolish advice, and when banks collapse and debt increases, and money for loans dry up, the wisdom of delaying satisfaction and instead saving and investing becomes crystal clear.