But the old ones cling to their seats as though these were symbolic and could not be given up. Here in the station it is in no way different save that the city is busy in its snows. Then the temperature would fall and they would drop away into the white oblivion of the snow. Numbed and forgetful and frost-blackened, the hum of the spring hive still resounded faintly in their sodden tissues. In a precisely similar manner I have seen, on a sunny day in midwinter, a few old brown wasps creep slowly over an abandoned wasp nest in a thicket. It is here that a certain element of the abandoned poor seeks a refuge out of the weather, clinging for a few hours longer to the city that has fathered them. It is, however, always frequented-not so much by genuine travelers as by the dying. It is always in the shadow and overhung by rows of lockers. There is a corner in the waiting room of one of the great Eastern stations where women never sit. The Brown Wasps Loren Eiseley, 1969 “The Brown Wasps” was published in 1971 in Eiseley’s essay collection The Night Country.
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