Rectangle Day Quotes

A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle. Half my days I cannot bear to touch you. The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear. No date. No name attached.

All at once she could hear the sullen patter of the rain and sense the sigh of the wind behind it. She remembered the sound, because it had rained like that the day Mom was buried, the day they lowered her into that little rectangle of darkness.

ROTHKO: (Explodes) 'Pretty.' 'Beautiful.' 'Nice.' 'Fine.' That's our life now! Everything's 'fine'. We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone's laughing all the time, it's all so goddamn funny, it's our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn't it? We're a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of 'fine.' How are you? Fine.. How was your day? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. What some dinner? Fine... Well, let me tell you, everything is not fine!! HOW ARE YOU?!... HOW WAS YOUR DAY?!... HOW ARE YOU FEELING? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine. We are anything but fine... Look at these pictures. Look at them! You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes but it’s also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL. Not nice. Not fine. Real. A moan of rapture. Something divine or damned. Something immortal, not comic books or soup cans, something beyond me and beyond now. And whatever it is, it’s not pretty and it’s not fine...I AM HERE TO STOP YOUR HEART‬

I made a decision a long time ago that I was going to choose joy. I even painted a big rectangle on my wall and printed it in big letters so I wouldn’t forget to make that choice every day. The major word in that rectangle isn’t joy, it’s CHOOSE. It’s looking around me when life is difficult and trading every complaint I have for something beautiful in my life that far outweighs it. I know, it’s that Pollyanna personified thing again, but living joyful beats being cynical any day of the week.

I was on South Bank one day by the Royal Festival Hall. It was a sunny day with a bright blue sky. I was looking up at a train crossing the Hungerford Bridge. Through the train I could see the sky successively framed by each window as the carriage passed. Each window moving quickly forward and away held briefly a rectangle of blue. The windows passing, the blue remained.

I hear the wind disturbing the trees. I hear birds gossiping in the mornings. I see the rectangles of sunlight that slip through my blinds and work their way across the room throughout the day.

Dan extinguishes the ignition and turns off the headlights. The house looks more charming, less shabby, and desolate in this purplish semi-dark. The house could be a life-size version of a model railroad house in which human beings can miraculously live among trees made of styrofoam behind opaque windows that are simply rectangles of yellow-tinted light glowing on a train table in somebody's basement.

At the time, I paid no heed to the emblem above the door of a compass crossed with a square; the library had been founded by Masons. There, in the quiet shadows, I read for hours from the books that the kind librarian allowed me to take from the shelves: fairy tales, adventure stories, adaptations of classics for children, and dictionaries of symbols. One day while browsing among the shelves I ran across a yellowed volume: Les Tarots by Eteilla. All my efforts to read it were in vain. The letters looked strange and the words were incomprehensible. I began to worry that I had forgotten how to read. When I communicated my anguish to the librarian, he began to laugh. “But how could you understand it; it’s written in French, my young friend! I can’t understand it either!” Oh, how I felt drawn to those mysterious pages! I flipped through them, seeing many numbers, sums, the frequent occurrence of the word Thot, some geometric shapes . . . but what fascinated me most was a rectangle inside which a princess, wearing a three-pointed crown and seated on a throne, was caressing a lion that was resting its head on her knees. The animal had an expression of profound intelligence combined with an extreme gentleness. Such a placid creature! I liked the image so much that I committed a transgression that I still have not repented: I tore out the page and brought it home to my room. Concealed beneath a floorboard, the card “STRENGTH” became my secret treasure. In the strength of my innocence, I fell in love with the princess.

forward to it, and Cooper, coatless and chilly in the desert evening, was thinking that the radio man was an asshole. He’d chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen. Vasquez had run, and

Jobs spent part of every day for six months helping to refine the display. “It was the most complex fun I’ve ever had,” he recalled. “It was like being the one evolving the variations on ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ ” A lot of features that seem simple now were the result of creative brainstorms. For example, the team worried about how to prevent the device from playing music or making a call accidentally when it was jangling in your pocket. Jobs was congenitally averse to having on-off switches, which he deemed “inelegant.” The solution was “Swipe to Open,” the simple and fun on-screen slider that activated the device when it had gone dormant. Another breakthrough was the sensor that figured out when you put the phone to your ear, so that your lobes didn’t accidentally activate some function. And of course the icons came in his favorite shape, the primitive he made Bill Atkinson design into the software of the first Macintosh: rounded rectangles. In session after session, with Jobs immersed in every detail, the team members figured out ways to simplify what other phones made complicated. They added a big bar to guide you in putting calls on hold or making conference calls, found easy ways to navigate through email, and created icons you could scroll through horizontally to get to different apps—all of which were easier because they could be used visually on the screen rather than by using a keyboard built into the hardware.

I love banned books. I used to read as many to you as I could when you were little, Mac.” “You read me banned books?” I say this sarcastically because I know he’s making it up. “Almost exclusively,” he answers—dead serious. “Charlotte’s Web and the poetry book by—uh—Silverstein—uh.” “Where the Sidewalk Ends?” I say. “And Reynolds—brave … uh …” “As Brave as You? No! How could anyone ban that?” “Yeah. And Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. Remember that one?” “I cried for a whole day.” Mom says, “Where the Wild Things Are. And Tango Makes Three. Melissa.” “Captain Underpants!” Grandad adds. “A lot of younger books you loved. I Am Rosa Parks,” Mom says. “And Last Stop on Market Street and Henry’s Freedom Box, and …” Grandad says, “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry!

WHEN YOU CROW UP IN KANSAS WEARING VERY LARGE SHORTS, thinking not very much of yourself, thinking mainly of your knees, looking mainly at your knees, your face a frisbee that cant fly, your teeth buck, your eyebrows rectangles, your forehead more than half of your face, your shirts shapeless, your shape shapeless, your Kansas shapeless, your lust absent, your legs bowed, your arches flat, your chest flat, your ears your only curves, your ears never pierced, your denim never dazzled, your sneakers white, your socks white, your teeth turquoise with rubber bands, your cheese orange, your milk whole, your bread wonder, your luxury a tuna casserole, your pale a neon pale, your fantasy to race a Mario Kart over the desert and into the final oasis, your earthly oasis a salted pretzel, your solitude total, your urges not even visible to you on the clearest days at the farthest horizons, your blank magnificent, your inertia wild and authentic, your nothing your preference, and then into it somebody walks, a Joan, this sudden hero can really take control. You’re susceptible first to idolatry, then to study, to apprenticeship, and finally to a kind of patient love that makes fun of itself and believes in itself without limit. Imagine being a pudding cup of a person and encountering a confident, elegant, powerful scholar who knows what to do with her shoulders. Imagine encountering you.

If a Victorian gentleman arrived in present-day London, he’d think we’d been invaded by glowing rectangles.

The photo was published in the majority of Brazilian newspapers in a full-page spread when CNN and all the television channels of the world broadcast the scene, they froze it for a few seconds. Or minutes, hours, I don't know. For me time has infinite duration--I don't know how to measure it by normal parameters. Trying doesn't even interest me. From the World Trade Center buildings, minutes, prior to their collapse--which would appear as a perfect and planned implosion--only a grayish-blue and black vertical lines can be seen. Like a modernist painting--by whom? Which artist painted lines? Mondrian? No, not Mondrian, he painted squares, rectangles. Anyway, in the picture, the man is falling head first. his body straight, one of his legs bent. Did he jump? Slip? Did he faint and then fall? He probably lost consciousness because of the height, the smoke. He fell. He disappeared from the scene, from life, from the city. A million tons of rubble buried him soon after. Nobody knows his name. Impossible for his family to have him identified. He's an unknown who entered into history at the twenty-first century's first great moment of horror--the history of the world, the United States, communications, photography. Without anyone knowing who he is. And nobody will ever know. We'll only have suppositions, families who'll swear that he was theirs. But was he Brazilian, American, Latino, Chinese, Italian, Irish--what? He could have been anything, but now he's nothing. One among thousands gone forever. And, while we're on the subject, what about the firemen who supposedly became such heroes that day--can you name a single one?

ORANGE, HONEY, AND THYME BISCUITS Hands-on: 23 min. Total: 36 min. Bake biscuits up to a day ahead, and keep in a sealed zip-top plastic bag. 2 ⁄ 3 cup nonfat buttermilk 2 tablespoons clover honey 2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme 2 teaspoons grated orange rind 10 ounces spelt four (about 2 cups) 5 teaspoons baking powder 1 ⁄ 4 teaspoon kosher salt 1 5 1 ⁄ 2 tablespoons chilled butter, cut into small pieces cooking spray 1. Preheat oven to 425°. 2. Combine the frst 4 ingredients in a small bowl, stirring with a whisk. 3. Weigh or lightly spoon four into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine four, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl, stirring with a whisk. Cut in butter with a pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk mixture to four mixture, stirring just until moist. Turn dough out onto a lightly foured surface; pat into a 7 1 ⁄ 2-inch square; cut into 12 rectangles. Place dough on a foil-lined baking sheet coated with cooking spray. Bake at 425° for 13 minutes or until lightly browned on edges and bottom. SErVES 12 (serving size: 1 biscuit) CalOriES 162; FaT 6.1g (sat 3.3g, mono 1.4g, poly 0.2g); prOTEiN 4g; CarB 22g; FiBEr 3g; CHOl 14mg; irON 1mg; SODiUM 330mg; CalC 61mg

He’d chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen.

The law gave me an entirely new vocabulary, a language that non-lawyers derisively referred to as "legalese." Unlike the basic building blocks- the day-to-day words- that got me from the subway to the office and back, the words of my legal vocabulary, more often than not, triggered flavors that I had experienced after leaving Boiling Springs, flavors that I had chosen for myself, derived from foods that were never contained within the boxes and the cans of DeAnne's kitchen. Subpoenakiwifruit. InjunctionCamembert. Infringementlobster. Jurisdictionfreshgreenbeans. Appellantsourdoughbread. ArbitrationGuinness. Unconstitutionalasparagus. ExculpatoryNutella. I could go on and on, and I did. Every day I was paid an astonishing amount of money to shuffle these words around on paper and, better yet, to say them aloud. At my yearly reviews, the partners I worked for commented that they had never seen a young lawyer so visibly invigorated by her work. One of the many reasons I was on track to make partner, I thought. There were, of course, the rare and disconnecting exceptions. Some legal words reached back to the Dark Ages of my childhood and to the stunted diet that informed my earlier words. "Mitigating," for example, brought with it the unmistakable taste of elementary school cafeteria pizzas: rectangles of frozen dough topped with a ketchup-like sauce, the hard crumbled meat of some unidentifiable animal, and grated "cheese" that didn't melt when heated but instead retained the pattern of a badly crocheted coverlet. I had actually looked forward to the days when these rectangles were on the lunch menu, slapped onto my tray by the lunch ladies in hairnets and comfortable shoes. Those pizzas (even the word itself was pure exuberance with the two z's and the sound of satisfaction at the end... ah!) were evocative of some greater, more interesting locale, though how and where none of us at Boiling Springs Elementary circa 1975 were quite sure. We all knew what hamburgers and hot dogs were supposed to look and taste like, and we knew that the school cafeteria served us a second-rate version of these foods. Few of us students knew what a pizza was supposed to be. Kelly claimed that it was usually very big and round in shape, but both of these characteristics seemed highly improbable to me. By the time we were in middle school, a Pizza Inn had opened up along the feeder road to I-85. The Pizza Inn may or may not have been the first national chain of pizzerias to offer a weekly all-you-can-eat buffet. To the folks of the greater Boiling Springs-Shelby area, this was an idea that would expand their waistlines, if not their horizons. A Sizzler would later open next to the Pizza Inn (feeder road took on a new connotation), and it would offer the Holy Grail of all-you-can-eat buffets: steaks, baked potatoes, and, for the ladies, a salad bar complete with exotic fixings such as canned chickpeas and a tangle of slightly bruised alfalfa sprouts. Along with "mitigating," these were some of the other legal words that also transported me back in time: Egressredvelvetcake. PerpetuityFrenchsaladdressing. Compensatoryboiledpeanuts. ProbateReese'speanutbuttercup. FiduciaryCheerwine. AmortizationOreocookie.

After changing into a yellow day dress with airy pagoda sleeves that ended at the elbow, she went to the family's private upstairs parlor. The family dogs, a pair of small black spaniels named Napoleon and Josephine, saw her in the hallway and trotted after her. The parlor was comfortably cluttered with heaps of colorful cushions on the furniture, a battered piano in the corner, and piles of books everywhere. She sat cross-legged on the carpet with the dogs, smiling as they bounded in and out of her lap excitedly. "We don't need Prince Charming, do we?" she asked them aloud. "No, we do not. There's a patch of sun on the carpet and books nearby- that's all we need to be happy." The spaniels stretched out in a bright yellow rectangle, wriggling and sighing in contentment. After petting and scratching the dogs for a while, Cassandra reached out to a stack of books on a low table, and sorted through them idly. Double Wedding... The Secret Duke... My Dashing Suitor, and other romantic novels she had read and reread. Much lower in the pile, there were books such as History of the Thirty Years' Peace and Life of Nelson, the kind one read in case one was called upon to make insightful comments at dinner.

Sûfîsm cherishes the esoteric secret of woman, even though Sûfîsm is the esoteric aspect of a seemingly patriarchal religion. Muslims pray five times a day facing the city of Makkah. Inside every Mosque is a niche, or recess, called the Mihrab - a vertical rectangle curved at the top that points toward the direction of Makkah. The Sûfîs know the Mihrab to be a visual symbol of an abstract concept: the transcendent vagina of the female aspect of divinity. In Sûfîsm, woman is the ultimate secret, for woman is the soul.

Then she got to work. Thinking a bit of organization would help, Rapunzel took out the wanted poster of Flynn and made a chart on the back, dividing the rectangle into twenty-eight days. She wrote the moon phases neatly on each. On Day One, New Moon, she wrote Murderhair. Now it was Day Six; Waxing Crescent. Under this she wrote Transformative-- Lizard to Dragon. Day 8 would be Waxing Half Moon-- that would be exciting, right? Maybe that would mean a really big change in her powers. For Day 15, Full Moon, she wrote Healing? She looked at her neat little chart and felt very pleased with herself. Projects. They were the best.

The public space of the museum is not my favorite, loud and full of tourists and school groups and hungry hordes. Their curiosity is endearing---they're acolytes for the natural world. And the marble gleams with architectural detail and precious objects all around. But on these, my gray days, entering the building carries the weight of death: all the specimens, thousands of carcasses of every species, stuffed or otherwise retrieved from oblivion so we can know them, yet all dead. The birds I draw and paint, all dead. On these days, my only defense is to imagine every pinned butterfly taking wing, every stuffed marsupial waking up, every preserved plant specimen blooming and carpeting the marble floor like a time-lapse forest, and every bird coming to life, flying up to the dome and away. On the days when the fog comes and hooks into my gut like a sharp-toothed parasite, these visions can save me. The steadier, more consistent salvation, of course, is the work. I can lose myself for hours drawing, for instance, the common loon, with its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings. With the right precision, I can bring the deadness of a bird skin to a striking facsimile of life.

I would have to fill those little white rectangles with a lifetime of things that could generate happiness, contentment, satisfaction, or pleasure. I would have to fill them with every good experience...I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live. pg. 137

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I make another trip to Rick's bakehouse to show people how he makes his pain au chocolat, that magical, flaky pastry filled with heavenly bites of chocolate. I shoot video of Rick laminating croissant dough, rolling and flattening and folding the butter-filled slab of pastry until the dough is as long as a beach towel and stratified with butter like canyon rock. He cuts it into rectangles and stuffs each one with two fat chunks of bittersweet chocolate inside. He bakes off five sheets in his convection oven, and when the croissants emerge, their golden tops glistening, I have to restrain myself from reaching out from behind the camera to stuff three or five into my face. As soon as the newsletter goes out the next week, Rick's customer base goes crazy. People line up and down the market thoroughfare, undeterred by the stifling July heat, clamoring for flaky pain au chocolat and crusty sourdough loaves. Day after day, he sells out everything at least thirty minutes before closing, and the chocolate croissants sell out in the first hour.

I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers. In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly. That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing. Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.” I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.

I would have to fill those little white rectangles with a lifetime of things that could generate happiness, contentment, satisfaction, or pleasure. I would have to fill them with every good experience I could summon up for a man whose powerless arms and legs meant he could no longer make them happen by himself. I had just under four months’ worth of printed rectangles to pack with days out, trips away, visitors, lunches, and concerts. I had to come up with all the practical ways to make them happen, and do enough research to make sure that they didn’t fail. And

I would have to fill those little white rectangles with a lifetime of things that could generate happiness, contentment, satisfaction, or pleasure. I would have to fill them with every good experience I could summon up for a man whose powerless arms and legs meant he could no longer make them happen by himself. I had just under four months’ worth of printed rectangles to pack with days out, trips away, visitors, lunches, and concerts. I had to come up with all the practical ways to make them happen, and do enough research to make sure that they didn’t fail. And then I had to convince Will to actually do them. I

now and had a merry smile on his face. ‘Well, goddammit, boys! If I ain’t just remembered! There’s a whorehouse open all night long just outside Pens’cola! You’re sure you won’t come with me?’ We were sure. He dropped us at the main gate of the station with cheery shouts of farewell and drove off about 1.30 in the morning to ‘round off his evening’. We were soon to learn that certain ‘Southern gentlemen’ dropped in to the local brothel with the easy nonchalance Englishmen pop into their local pub—but without their wives, of course! Generally speaking, it was rare for us to leave the station other than at weekends. Our working hours were long and our leisure hours short; so we had to find our entertainment within the station. However, almost every day we found time to swim in the lagoon which separates the mainland from Santa Rosa Island, where the big flying-boats taxied in and out, the deep rumble of their Pratt and Whitneys music to our ears. We became expert with surf-boards—rectangles of wood about the size of a large tea-tray with a pair of rope reins, towed behind a fast motor-boat. Was it the fore-runner of water-skis? The technique seems to have been virtually the same. But, whatever one’s leisure activities, life

Folding socks is even easier. If you’ve folded back the tops, start by unfolding them. Place one sock on top of the other and follow the same principles as those for folding clothing. For low-cut socks that just cover the feet, folding twice is enough; for ankle socks, three times; for knee socks and over-knee socks, four to six times. You can adjust the number of folds to achieve the height that best suits the drawer. It’s easy. Just aim to make a simple rectangle, the key to folding. Store the socks on edge, just as you did for clothing. You’ll be amazed at how little space you need compared to your “potato ball days,” and you’ll notice your socks breathing a sigh of relief at being untied.

I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine … I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground. Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment … after the last of our children had found employment and had moved out of our home, my wife and I were able to buy for ourselves things that had previously been beyond our means. I bought my first such luxury, as I called it, in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I bought there a complete set of coloured pencils made by a famous maker of pencils in England: a hundred and twenty pencils, each stamped with gold lettering along its side and having at its end a perfectly tapered wick. The collection of pencils is behind me as I write these words. It rests near the jars of glass marbles and the kaleidoscope mentioned earlier. None of the pencils has ever been used in the way that most pencils are used, but I have sometimes used the many-striped collection in order to confirm my suspicion as a child that each of what I called my long-lost moods might be recollected and, perhaps, preserved if only I could look again at the precise shade or hue that had become connected with the mood – that had absorbed, as it were, or had been permeated with, one or more of the indefinable qualities that constitute what is called a mood or a state of feeling. During the weeks since I first wrote in the earlier pages of this report about the windows in the church of white stone, I have spent every day an increasing amount of time in moving my pencils to and fro among the hollow spaces allotted to them in their container. I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. Their colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few moments when my face was brushed by a certain few leaves. Among the pencils are many differing only subtly from their neighbours. Six at least I might have called simply red if I had not learned long ago their true names. With these six, and with still others from each side of them, I often arrange one after another of many possible sequences, hoping to see in the conjectured space between some or another unlikely pair a certain tint that I have wanted for long to see.

And around this hub, its center enclosed by the rounded rectangle of the elevated Loop tracks, clustered the dozens of individual neighborhoods that together formed this huge and diverse metropolis. Here was Little Poland, Little Italy, the Black Belt, and Greektown, the silk-stocking districts and the New World shtetls, each one of which—whether made up of crumbling tenements, luxurious mansions, or neat little worker cottages—stood in many ways apart from the others, a self-contained enclave with its own ethos and mores. From this height, one could also see the engines that kept this collection of urban villages in operation—the interlocking feedlots and slaughterhouses of the stockyards district to the southwest, the enormous steel mills to the far south, the reaper works, the railcar factories, the gasworks, the warehouses and merchandise marts of the retailing trade, and the endless railyards full of trains that connected the city to the rest of the world. To call this conglomeration by a single name—Chicago—seemed wildly inappropriate. It was less like a city than a world unto itself, bringing together the artifacts and energies of a vast multitude.