Afterword

Abstract

Everywhere north of the World Trade Center, New York is a rectilinear city, a managed arrangement of verticals and horizontals that stretch themselves in an orderly fashion around Central Park. Its cross-hatchings of avenues and streets make the stranger seem deceptively at home amidst the skyscrapers, while bestowing on him what E. B. White called “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” It becomes natural to locate yourself in its three dimensions by thinking in a kind of Cartesian coordinates: the hotel was at Broadway and Church Street, the room on the twenty-first floor, from where you could look down on the gargoyles of the gothic church opposite. I gave my paper in the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. The British Consul General held a reception for us at 51st and 3rd. Afterwards some of us dashed to the World Trade Center to try to get into the Windows on the World bar on the one hundred and seventh floor of the North Tower. Someone had heard that they closed the doors at eleven pm, so we had to hurry. Uniformed security men held the elevator doors open for us, laughing. The windows of the nightclub extended from floor to ceiling. From there I could see the city lights stretched out in their neat verticals and horizontals, like the rows and columns of a thousand account books, all showing a profit.