There could be no other town like it. If you were sensitive to crowds, you might expire in summer from human propinquity. On the other hand, if you were unable to endure loneliness, the vessel of your person could fill with dread during the long winter. Martha’s Vineyard, not fifty miles to the south and west, had lived through the upsurge of mountains and their erosion, through the rise and fall of oceans, the life and death of great forests and swamps. Dinosaurs had passed over Martha’s Vineyard, and their bones were compacted into the bedrock. Glaciers had come and gone, sucking the island to the north, pushing it like a ferry to the south again. Martha’s Vineyard had fossil deposits one million centuries old. The northern reach of Cape Cod, however, on which my house sat, the land I inhabited—that long curving spit of shrub and dune that curves in upon itself in a spiral at the tip of the Cape—had only been formed by wind and sea over the last ten thousand years. That cannot amount to more than a night of geological time.
Perhaps this is why Provincetown is so
beautiful. Conceived at night (for one would swear it was created
in the course of one dark storm) its sand flats still glistened in
the dawn with the moist primeval innocence of land exposing itself to the sun for the first
time. Decade after decade, artists came to paint the light of
Provincetown, and comparisons were made to the lagoons of Venice
and the marshes of Holland, but then the summer ended and most of
the painters left, and the long dingy undergarment of the gray New
England winter, gray as the spirit of my mood, came down to visit.
One remembered then that the land was only ten thousand years old,
and one’s ghosts had no roots. We did not have old Martha’s
Vineyard’s fossil remains to subdue each spirit, no, there was
nothing to domicile our specters who careened with the wind down
the two long streets of our town which curved together around the
bay like two spinsters on their promenade to church.
NORMAN MAILER,
from Tough Guys Don’t Dance