And wanted Gerald to know that you
know, and, in the end, I rather think she wanted God to know.
THE VERTICAL CITY
In the most vertical city in the world men have run up their dreams
and their ambitions into slim skyscrapers that seem to exclaim at the
audacity of the mere mortar that sustains them.
Minarets appear almost to tamper with the stars; towers to impale
the moon. There is one fifty-six-story rococo castle, built from the
five-and-ten-cent-store earnings of a merchant prince, that shoots
upward with the beautiful rush of a Roman candle.
Any Manhattan sunset, against a sky that looks as if it might give to
the poke of a finger, like a dainty woman's pink flesh, there marches a
silhouetted caravan of tower, dome, and the astonished crests of office
buildings.
All who would see the sky must gaze upward between these rockets of
frenzied architecture, which are as beautiful as the terrific can ever
be beautiful.
In the vertical city there are no horizons of infinitude to rest the
eyes; rather little breakfast napkins of it showing between walls and
up through areaways.
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