Cincinnati, 3/19/2010
After the incident on the Roebling the other day, I became puzzled by a strange sense of deja vous, a feeling that I had had such an experience before. Eventually, I realized that I was not recalling a remembered event but an incident from a book, a description of a similar horror. Today, at last, I found the passage.

I kept walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anything. Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I'd just go down, down, down, and nobody'd ever see me again. Boy did it scare me. You can't imagine. I started sweating like a bastard--my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time I'd get to the end of a block I'd make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I'd say to him, "Allie, don't let me disappear. Allie, don't let me disappear. Please, Allie." And then when I'd reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I'd thank him. Then it would start all over again as soon as I got to the next corner. (my italics)

The speaker here, of course, is Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye,  a novel written, incredibly, in the early Fifties.

If anyone doubts the often cited hypothesis that writers are mankind's Distant Early Warning System--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. calls them "specialized cells in the social organism," "evolutionary cells" which function as alarm systems, alerting us to perils ahead--surely this prescient passage, this imaginative phenomenology of a disorder that would not exist for half a century should convince them.