|
so:text
|
More than anywhere else in this book, the author must now steer between Scylla and Charybdis, between saying too much and too little. How can we talk about the Statue of Liberty without seeming ridiculously supererogatory? But how can we omit Brooklyn Bridge and still give a fair, comprehensive picture? One must either take the space to mention something that everybody knows everything about, or else risk omission of things that everybody will think ought to be included. Park Avenue in summer near Grand Central, a thin quivering asphalt shelf, and the asphalt soft, a thin quivering layer of street separating the automobiles above from the trains below; avenues as homespun with small exquisite shops as Madison and streets as magnificent as 57th; the fat black automobiles doubleparked on Fifth Avenue on sleety afternoons; kibitzers watching strenuously to see if the man running will really catch the bus; bridges soaring and slim as needles like the George Washington; the incomparable moment at dusk when the edges of tall buildings melt invisibly into the sky, so that nothing of them can be seen except the lighted windows; the way the pace of everything accelerates near Christmas; how the avenues will be cleared of snow and actually dry a day after a six-inch fall, while the side streets are banked solid with sticky drifts; how the noon sun makes luminous spots on the rounded tops of automobiles, crowded together on the slope of Park Avenue so that they look like seashells; the shop that delivers chocolates by horse- all this is too familiar to mention. (en) |
