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TALK WITH JACQUES LIPCHITZ

We had travelled underground to the end of Bronx and there we emerged into the open world. The rest travelled on and I went down the stairs and from the platform of the subway to the platform of New York Central. The crowded city stood in the distance, in the skyline, and around me was the green earth. A freezing wind was blowing down  the Hudson and rain particles were whipping my face. Even in Manhattan were the ground is burried under fifty stories, a hundred stories of concrete, steel, alluminum and glass, even there we celebrated the changing seasons. The heat and humidity of Manhattan in August make Soddom look like Midsummer Night's Dream, but then you (I) fall in love with Fall. How many times did we rhime this word Fall with all and all without ever seeing the passing away - in a thousand colors and graceful ceremony - of a woodful of leaves. Six weeks earlier we were driving north. The forest was color-manic. Fall, my friends, is not that simple - leaves drying and falling with a kirk and a krak. Fall is a big orgy conducted by the leaves before their death, trees burning like firecrackers in reds, yellows and purples, bursting and dripping, drip and drip. And then there is no Automn, no Fall. There are naked boughs and winter.
Now I mounted the New York Central, toward Hastings-on-Hudson. The river was wise and the sky grey. Beyond the mist the forest was sliding down from the hills of New Jersey. We were travelling and travelling. Water and woods and a railway. As if Manhattan is not really in spitting range, as if we proceeded Mr. Hudson and discovered India and its Indians.
But Hasting itself does not belong to the Indians. It is the residence of those who make their living in Manhattan and go back here to live. In its backyard lies Scardale, the home of those whose money nourishes and multiplies itself, like amoebae. But Hasting itself is modest, does not show off with mansions deep in the woods. It is more like an English town on the Thames.
Here lives Jacques Lipchitz, to whom I was going, one Saturday afternoon. I saw him before, in the exhibition he had in New York, in the 57th street, number 41, 17th floor, and exhibition of his works in the last year, bronze pieces done - as stated in the program - "in the lost wax process". But in the small, crowded rooms of an opening day, I could not really see the man, who is - they say - seventy, but he is broad-shouldered and his face