Page 66 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

marvel, you’re hooked, you mount your wooden horse, you munch your

waffle, and you shout “Ooh” and “Ah” as you ride the roller coaster. Yet he
also knows that these are not the Gardens of Paradise, but little pieces of iron
piled up high to bring in serious money. Still, there’s nothing to be despised
about coming to douse your heart, amid the humid heat and the dead stones,
with airy and terrifying sensations. It gives you a chance to meet someone, to
place your hand on another hand, for a dress to lift a little and reveal a calf.
People have a right to fall in love, he thinks, in the magnificent blaze of

midnight, as they plunge into this poor man’s abundance and leave their
troubles behind. You’ve come by tram, the weather is fine, the sun beats
down. You laugh amid this extraordinary thing which has been made for us.
Oh! let the wheel rise and leave the two of us alone above the world.
Everybody else looks so small, and suddenly our fatigue and our efforts are

nothing; seen from here, our past life looks so tiny, but so beautiful! We don’t
know what to think. There’s something frightening up here, when your seat on
the Big Wheel leaves you suspended for a moment above the void. You look,
and then everything is forgotten: the dust and the chaos, the money problems,
having to make ends meet; there’s just the glorious blue of New York Bay, the
seagulls and the irrational feeling that sears us: “Is it possible that we’re
different? Different from the others? different from the people down there,

now, queuing in the heat while we’re up here, in the heavens?”