Feelings
The first chapter shows how fast a lifetime goes by in the eyes of an outsider. I understand Corrigan’s desire to help others that need whatever he has more than he does, but his prolonged exposure, in his apartment in the Bronx, to the underbelly of the city is doing more harm to him then is worth it for the meager offerings he can dish out to those he has elected himself to serve. His brother attempts to rescue him, but doesn’t understand any reason to endure the smog of lust, greed, and literal living to simply survive however possible, when his own survival thought is screaming at him to leave. The two brothers resemble the two tear drops from the yin yang symbol, one of which is shed in response to an event seemingly unrelated.
Geography
The prologue begins with a man taking the attention of passerby in Manhattan by walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers. The chapter begins in the hometown of two brothers in Dublin who live with their mother. After her death, the charitable brother joins an organization he refers to as the order, and is sent on a mission to Naples, then rerouted to New York City, settling in an apartment in the Bronx. The first brother, also the narrator, stays in Dublin, leaving only after a bomb went off near him, and soon after he lands in JFK airport to meet his brother. Corrigan takes him back to his apartment. The apartment is not a home, it is a vessel through which Corrigan tries to, as non-invasively as possible, take on the haze of the world threatening to smother those that work at street corners late at night by providing, but what seems like an afterthought makes all the difference to those treated like the merchandise they sell themselves as. Corrigan takes his brother to the hospital at which his duty is to bring a few of the elderly outside to sunshine and open air. Here the narrator meets the woman his brother is smitten by, also the woman who caused him to drive to Long Island while contemplating his feeling for her, and the conflict potentially arising from the strict rules, including celibacy, in the order he has aligned himself with.
