1.
The large, loose, knuckle-jointed, work-roughened hands of his father lying for a rare moment passive on dungareed knees or lap, filled him with terror and yet a strange burning un-nameable longing; he imagined those hands alert and agile with the bricklayer's trowel and chisel, flashing in the weak mocking winter sunshine on scaffolding high above the city, piling brick upon brick with brisk brave strokes, the sinewy wrist moving subtly, magically moulding a patchwork pyramid of cemented rectangles to enclose the lives, loves, labours, passions, despairs of innumerable strangers; those master-craftstman's hands turning deserts of empty spaces into jungles of human dwellings, offices, stores, theatres, churches, schools, hospitals, fun palaces, the desparate disarray or organized chaos and convoluted canyons, where men and women worked, made love, bore children, longed for heights and strange lands and slowly ceased to dream through a myriad profusion of cement-dry days and nights punctuated by traffic screams and the wail of ships' sirens from the foggy river and feeling again with the far-off shrill of a train in the dark morning the loneliness of being on earth….