A GREAT CITY

It's a great city for walking, this New York. After lazing about a bit at home, we set out into the streets and walked from our place on 56th Street down Broadway and across to the Rockefeller Plaza, where we stopped to watch the ice skating...

... and catch a cup of coffee. We enjoyed the irony of these two fellows, one with a hammer, the other with a sickle..

etched in relief into the wall of this monument to American capitalism (under the guise of homage to the "worker"); and noted the sadly optimistic inscription about the entry: "Wisdom and Knowledge Shall Be the Stability of Thy Times."

Not much of either around these days...

From the Rockefeller Plaza, we followed Fifth Avenue south. It's a chronicle of wealth, from the Guggenheim and the Met and the discreetly opulent hotels and apartments of the Upper East Side, past stores like Tiffany's and Bergdorf Goodman in midtown to the endless rows of souvenir shops at the southern end. We stopped a the great New York City Library...

... repository of the collective wisdom of the Western world--and some of the East, and spent an hour in its timely exhibition of Three Faiths, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, whose devotional texts are copied, illustrated and eventually printed with a loving care that sadly belies the strife that has existed historically between the three. It was amazing, to me, to stand looking at a copy of the Gutenberg Bible!

Back on Fifth Avenue, on the same note, we passed the church where Norman Vincent Peale preached his version of the Christian gospel of prosperity, and where the outer railings, today...

... have become a memorial to those killed in action in the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, row upon row of ribbons, a fluttering yellow and blue-green prayer for peace. And passed the elegantly deco Empire State Building, a reminder of those American "empire" days which seem, now, about to pass. We are going the way of all empires, all human societal constructs and all vain aspirations for power and dominance.

Reaching the Flatiron district, I recalled that my first novel was published by St. Martin's Press--at that time (still?) installed in the Flatiron Building itself. We stopped for lunch at the new Italian-flavored food emporium, the Eataly...

... where New York-style crowds jostled for places at bars and gelato counters, coffee shops and restaurants set in amongst the many stores hawking cold cuts and vegetables, fish and cheeses, beer and wine... We were fortunate to find a table fairly speedily at a pizza and pasta restaurant, where we were served by a jaunty young man from Seattle with, I suspect, theatrical ambitions.

We stopped at the gelato stand to indulge the sweet tooth, and took our tubs across to the Madison Square Park, relaxing for a few minutes and enjoying the spectacle of the dogs of all shapes and sizes frolicking joyfully in the dog park, and the squirrels, pigeons, sparrows and starlings--New York's principal wild life, and not very wild at that--competing for a handout with their fellow, two-legged homeless ones.

From the park, it was just a couple of blocks north to the Museum of Sex. Yes! It had been highly recommended by the young man who came to fix our online connection, so we decided to stop by and see for ourselves. We were not, honestly, that enchanted. The bottom floor is devoted to a somewhat scant history of eroticism and pornography in film, still photography and video, with a few genuinely entertaining glimpses into what was considered naughty in the past. All genders and orientations happily included. The second floor devoted to kinky sex, from cross-dressing and mechanical means to technology and sado-masochism. Good for the occasional chuckle and raised eyebrow: really? On the third floor, I learned more about the mating habits of animals than I ever needed to know--with a rather heavy emphasis on same sex encounters, including a startling case of duck necrophilia. Don't ask.

We walked west to Broadway for the long walk north--a compleat encyclopedia of the hustle. At the southern end, endless open storefronts leading into interiors crammed with stuff of every imaginable kind: cheap jewelry and watches, luggage, underwear and overwear, electronic goods and camera and video equipment... everything imaginable in wholesale quantity. Everywhere, too, particularly further north, as we approached Times Square, men and women with signs for goods and services, barkers handing out leaflets to the gathering stream of pedestrians--a stream that became a river, then a flood as we continued north. Times Square, brilliant with neon and flashy commercial images...

... was so crowded it was barely possible to elbow one's way through. (These pictures taken from the middle of an intersection, and give no sense of what I'm talking about.) A seething mass of humanity, a single, vast living body, a fine Buddhist metaphor for the body each of us inhabits, not the firm, stable body it so often seems but rather an activity, a process in which change never, for one instant, stops.

It was a moving and a humbling experience, but I was happy, further north, past Times Square, to be back on a simply crowded sidewalk. We made it back to our apartment, rested a while, then headed out for a Thai dinner around the corner. We have no television here, as I may have mentioned, and it's a new and somewhat unsettling experience to be cut off from the news. We found Comedy Central on the computer, and settled for late night's Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.