The Taste of the Town
A visit to Antwerp is the stimulus for an odd comparison through simile of a city with a beverage. The imagery situates the place as something with a distinct flavor that can be tasted:
“The taste of the town was thick, rich, ripe, like a sweet wine”
The Smell of New England
Adams’ situates those who grow up in New England as possessing sensory intake that is intensified; more so than other regions. Especially palpable is the sense of smell there:
“Boys are wild animals, rich in the treasures of sense, but the New England boy had a wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates…smell was the strongest--smell of hot pine-woods and sweet-fern in the scorching summer noon; of new-mown hay; of ploughed earth; of box hedges; of peaches, lilacs, syringas; of stables, barns, cow-yards; of salt water and low tide on the marshes”
The Pathos of German Students
Adams is quite specific in his rebuke of the German education system, noting a direct ratio between its efficiency and the effect of pathos among the students. The imagery in his description brings to vivid life those conditions in a way that touches every sense:
“German food was bad at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could never be good; but it was not the food alone that made their faces white and their flesh flabby. They never breathed fresh air; they had never heard of a play-ground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every room was tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all decency”
White Society: Red Wigglers
Adams offers a unique image of society in America, conjuring up a comparison that is absolutely striking in its juxtaposition to the subject at hand:
“Society in America was always trying, almost as blindly as an earthworm, to realize and understand itself; to catch up with its own head, and to twist about in search of its tail.”
