The search for sublimity in the city is one of the most traditional quests of modernity. Urban life is a sacrifice of nature for culture, but it is not obvious that culture can provide the same exaltations as nature. When I saw Manhattan from 17,000 feet a few days ago, it looked like a folly, a vast vain pile of blocks and cubes into which the air and the light seemed to disappear. In the city, the question of being (I’m dating myself here) is a little ludicrous. What is the metropolitan sublime? The city is built on delineations and differentiations, and its particular beauty is owed to its artifice, to its rejection of stillness, to the almost anarchic spectacle of its many relations. It is a pluralist world. It is not created for oneness or wholeness, or to strike you dumb. Instead it articulately disperses you. Sometimes the art of the city has renounced these profane fascinations for an ontological ambition--as in the late Eliot, or Rothko, or Morton Feldman--but these experiments in timelessness seem almost like protests against the subways and the streets, in the name of a more fundamental plenitude, with no parts. (Critics were quick to discern Friedrich in Rothko.) Sometimes even the most sophisticated man needs to see the sky. The urban-spiritual question is whether the soul can subsist only on the experience of other people. Is the Other--the epic hero of contemporary thought--enough? We have been trained to think so. There is a current in modern philosophy that attempts to confer upon the encounter with other persons a metaphysical dazzle, but this is a romantic mistake: the prosaic character of moral conduct, its secular sufficiency, is an important element of its universality. Materialists, too, aspire to goodness. And there is an older modern tradition that discovers transcendence in the social rapture of the city, in the delirium of the crowd--un bain de multitude, Baudelaire called it. “Not all men have the gift of enjoying a crowd-bath,” he wrote, in which “multitude and solitude are equal.” I am one of those lesser men. I detest crowds and their oceanic effects; for me, they promise only conformity and violence. But last week the disorder of the city delivered another sort of release. It was a sunny morning. The snows were finally melting, and the appearance of the toys that were buried in the deep drifts heartened me. The busyness all around me, which usually I dislike, looked to me only like a lot of life. On my way to work I stopped at a local filling station, and as I stood at the pump I was taken up contentedly with errands and obligations. I phoned a friend to talk about the battle of Marja. I reviewed the plans for Purim. I made a mental note to check on the publication date of Saul Bellow’s letters. I looked at some girls. The public square was a rich and good place to be. And then I heard the tapping of a cane against an oil truck parked nearby, and then against the pump. When I turned around, I saw a hideously mutilated man. He was tall and thin, with a dancer’s body, and dressed in jeans and a red sweater; but there was a crater where his nose would have been, and his upper lip was ripped and pulled and seemed to have been soldered to his cheek. The skin on his face was twisted and flattened, like a mask gone horribly wrong. And he was blind. The deformed man immediately emptied my mind. All my contentment was banished by the shock. For a few moments, he was everything I knew. I am embarrassed to say that pity gave way to fear. It was suddenly an uglier universe. The image of this devastation filled me with a sense of all possible horror. I lived with the shudder for most of the day. My last stop was the flower shop, and I bought thistles.

For years, I have been reading Michael Greenberg's remarkable column in the Times Literary Supplement and wondering what the English make of it. The New York Jewish quality of Greenberg's take on the writer's life, under the rubric "Freelance," is emphasized by the way he takes turns writing the column with an English poet, Hugo Williams, who is a writer of a wholly different species. Williams is deeply ensconced in the world of poetry-writing programs, residencies, and workshops--the whole infrastructure of institutionalized creativity, which seems no less formidable in the United Kingdom than in the United States. When Williams is not writing about giving a reading or teaching a class, he is often discussing his wife's chateau in France, or his father, a British theater and film star from the 1950s.

In its long and distinguished history, The New Republic is again about to break new groun: the first four fold table in a book review. (I am feeling the same pangs of achievement as when I invented the "illustrated footnote" while writing a history of American political cartoons.)

The purpose of the following table is to establish some distinctions for reviewing a novel that is not by Saul Bellow and does not pretend to be.