The Brooklyn Bridge was his symbol of New York, of America, and of Joan's and his love which they had shared in its shadows. And the bridge had come to know them, and to show them its own moods of happiness in the sunlight, and strangeness in the fog. It was strong, and beautiful, flinging itself into the sky, defying age, and being still young, and the heart of power itself. Now he was going to Paris, by plane, and it was as easy for him to leave America physically, as it was for him to dig up the shallow roots, and prepare to plant them elsewhere. The Brooklyn Bridge was his anchor in America, not a family, nor a race, nor a religion, nor an identification with a whole people. Joyce had said he had to leave Ireland to forge the uncreated conscience of his race. He could not feel it that way. Could there be a conscience to America, could New York and Texas, and Chicago, share the same wonders, the same hatreds and stupidities, and greatnesses?     Maybe the Brooklyn Bridge would have been at home in California, maybe, maybe it carried in its old weather-beaten stone the conscience of America. And if this were so, he had a right to leave it for a moment, to get from under its shadow, stand clear, renew his perspective, and set down what he saw from afar. He often wondered what it would be like to say, with pride, I am a German, or a Frenchman, or an Englishman, and there are no better people, and my family goes back ten generations, all fine people, and we have gone to the same church in all that time, and worshipped the true god, the only god, and when we die we shall be buried in the same place we have always been buried, and our children shall carry on after us. None of these thoughts had ever been his, as a mongrel Jewish-Irish product he was second generation American, midwestern, commercial, without land, without church, without an old family, and with none of the pride or security which sometimes seemed to go with those things, and he had not even a secure class identification or a family profession to follow.