It's Been So Long Since A Talented

Living In Cities Is An Art, And We Need The Vocabulary Of Art, Of Style, To Describe The Peculiar Relationship Between Man And Material That Exists In The Continual Creative Play Of Urban Living. The City As We Imagine It, Then, Soft City Of Illusion, Myth, Aspiration, And Nightmare, Is As Real, Maybe More Real, Than The Hard City One Can Locate On Maps In Statistics, In Monographs On Urban Sociology And Demography And Architecture.

Lincoln, Steeped In The Bible And Shakespeare, Set An Impossibly High Bar For Presidential Prose.

The Only Real River I Knew Was Hardly More Than A Brook. It Spilled Through A Tumbledown Mill At The Bottom Of Our Road, Opened Into A Little Trouty Pool, Then Ran On Through Water Meadows Over Graveled Shallows Into Fakenham [england], Where It Slowed And Deepened, Gathering Strength For The Long Drifts Across Muddy Flatlands To Norwich And The North Sea.

Life, As The Most Ancient Of All Metaphors Insists, Is A Journey; And The Travel Book, In Its Deceptive Simulation Of The Journey's Fits And Starts, Rehearses Life's Own Fragmentation. More Even Than The Novel, It Embraces The Contingency Of Things.

Seattle Is A Liberal City, Its Politics Not So Much Blue In The American, Not The British, Sense As Deep Ultramarine, And Its Manners Are Studiously Polite.