comment on theme

Si Morley chooses to live in the New York of 1882. He finds that old New York has a quality of life that modern New York cannot match. Although more primitive in technology, its citizens have a joyousness about life, a knowledge of why they are alive, that twentieth-century New Yorkers no longer possess. Two world wars and a current desultory military action in Vietnam, Si Morley discovers, have taken the spirit out of people and have left them confused about the purpose of living.