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FANTASTICA
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of warmth; it may have been the desperate mood, which still would not explain the first sign of activity in the brick tenement. A tenement observed almost daily for years from the vantage point of the head of the first subway car with the skyscrapers starting to loom up across the river."
Through the windows he saw snatches of life, the often sad, grim life in the tenements along Third Avenue. Above them the glories of Western architecture; below and on a level of the elevated train, the poor. When he came home back to the endless rows of look-alike houses in Flushing, was there a reprieve? 
One must not forget the inspiration which provided Cornell with his own bright, particular reprieve. There was his brother Robert,

a tiny, twisted creature almost inarticulate of speech or gesture, a flawed human being, an invalid, totally dependent on others, a permanent child. Yet in that gnarled and helpless frame were eyes that spoke, and a brain and imagination always seeking activity, fun, surcease from his hideous misfortune. Joseph had, throughout most of the forty-six years Robert lived (he died in 1968), sought to provide an endless entertainment for his "little" brother. One of the most elaborate entertainments was a toy landscape that filled a large part of the living room. Robert could be seated at one side of this landscape, in front of him a mechanism covered with switches and buttons. By pushing a button or a switch lights would go on, little villages would become alive, a train

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