Translation:
The Love of Ugliness
One winter day a few years ago, I left Pittsburgh on an express train of the Pennsylvania Railroad and headed east for a while. Hours later, he traveled through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland County. This is a place I know well, having passed through it frequently both as a child and as an adult. But never before had I felt so horribly desolate. This is the heart of industrialized America, the center of its most profitable and typical activities, the pride and pride of the richest and greatest country in the world - and yet the scene here is so hideously ugly, so desolate and miserable. It is so intolerable that human ambition and aspirations become a macabre and depressing joke here. The wealth here is incalculable and unimaginable - and it is also here that people's living conditions are so bad that even the wild cats wandering the streets are shy.
I’m not just talking about dirty. The steel towns were expected to be dirty. I mean that there was not a single house that I saw that was not painfully ugly and disgustingly misshapen. From East Liberty to Greensburg, on this 25-mile road, when viewed from the train, there is not a single house that does not make the eyes uncomfortable and uncomfortable. Some of the houses were horrifyingly bad, but these houses were some of the most important buildings - churches, shops, warehouses, etc. People looked at these houses in shock, as if they were seeing a man whose face had been shattered by a bullet. Some remain in memory, and are even terrifying to recall: a strange-looking little church west of Janet, like a dormer window stuck to a bare, leprous-like hillside; The Veterans of Foreign Wars headquarters was located in another bleak town not far from Janet's past. A short distance east along the railway line is a steel frame that looks like a giant mousetrap. But the three main points that appear in my memory are still a general impression - continuous ugliness. From Pittsburgh to the Greensburg train yard, there was not a single decent house as far as the eye could see. There is not a single building that is not crooked, not a single building that is not in tatters.
Although there are factories everywhere and smoke and dust everywhere, the natural beauty of this area is not bad. In terms of topography, it is a narrow river valley with deep streams originating from the mountains. Although the population is dense, there is no sign of overcrowding, and even in some of the larger towns there is plenty of room for architectural development. It is rare to see high-density buildings here. Almost every house, regardless of size, has remaining open space around it. Apparently, if there had been a few architects in the area with any sense of professional responsibility or honor, they would have built some elegant Swiss-style mountain chalets - with steeply pitched roofs to help shed snow in the winter - clinging to the hillsides. , the width is greater than the height, a low wooden house built on the mountain. But, how do they actually do it? Using the upright brick as a model, they built a nondescript house with dirty wainscoting, a narrow, flat roof, and resting entirely on thin, grotesque stacks of bricks. superior. Hundreds of these ugly houses were scattered on the bare hillsides, like tombstones erected in a vast and desolate cemetery. The high side of these houses is about three, four, or even five stories high, while the low side looks like a group of pig gongs buried in a mire. Less than one-fifth of the houses are vertical, and most of them are swaying and precariously fixed on the foundation. There are traces of dirt accumulated on each house, and in the gaps between the traces, there are also some faint paint stains like eczema scabs.
Occasionally, you can see a brick house, but what kind of brick is that? When it was newly built, it was the color of a fried egg. However, once it was contaminated by the smoke emitted from the factory and covered with a layer of green rust, its color became like the rotten egg that no one cares about. Did it have to be this terrible color? This is as pointless as building all houses upright. If a house is made of red brick, it can look older and more grand, even in a steel town. Even if the red bricks are dyed pitch black, they still look pleasing to the eye, especially if they are edged with white stone. After being washed by rainwater, the soot and dirt will remain in the recesses, and the original color of the convex areas will be exposed, and the red and black will stand out, making it even more beautiful. But in Westmoreland County, people prefer to use the yellow color of blood and urine, so there are some of the ugliest and most disgusting towns and villages in the world.
It was only after painstaking research and constant prayer that I presented this ugliest crown to Westmoreland County. I believe I have seen all the ugliest towns in the world, and they are all in the United States. I saw the declining industrial towns of New England and the desert cities of Utah, Arizona, and Texas. I was familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn, and Chicago, and had made scientific expeditions to Camden, New Jersey, and Newport News, Virginia. I had traveled safely in a Pullman car through the bleak towns of Iowa and Kansas and the smoky coastal fishing villages of Georgia. I've been to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I've been to Los Angeles.
Yet I have never seen anything anywhere in the world, at home or abroad, that can compare with those villages that crowded along the stretch of the Pennsylvania Railroad from the Pittsburg Yards to Greensburg. They are unparalleled both in color and style. It was as if there was some supernatural genius who was sworn in dissatisfaction with human beings and worked hard to mobilize the uncanny craftsmanship in the devil's kingdom to build these extremely ugly houses. These houses are not only ugly but also grotesque. When people look back, they suddenly feel that they have turned into green-faced and fanged demons. People can't imagine how human power alone can create such a terrible thing, and it's hard to imagine.
Original text: the depths and the high spots washed by the rain. But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.
< p>5 I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N. J. and Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman , I have whirled through the g1oomy, Godforsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, andthe malarious tidewater hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle aloha the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius , uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making
of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect ,become almost diabolical.One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them.
6 Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners--dull, insensate brutes, with no love of beauty in them? Then why didn't these foreigners set up similar abominations in the countries that they came from? You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe--save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England. There is scarcely an ugly village on the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habits, even in Spain. But in the American village and small town the pull is always toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion. It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.
7 On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to
mere inadvertence , or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands. The taste for them is as enigmatic and yet as common as the taste for dogmatic theology and the poetry of Edgar A Guest.
8 Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of the honest folk of Westmoreland county, and especially the 100% Americans among them, actually admire the houses they live in, and are proud of them. For the same money they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better. They might, in- deed, have built a better one of their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it , they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They like it as it is: beside it,
the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice: After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible penthouse painted a staring yellow, on top of it. The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of