Subway Train Quotes

It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!

It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!

Of course, in Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car.

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself. In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

Do you know, I always imagine that the subway trains are dragons,' Rose said to Bear as they clung to his coat for support in the swaying car. 'Tearing back and forth across the city in their underground caves, devouring people and spitting them out at random destinations.

Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies.

It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!

Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You've carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are - cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.

Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wishful hunch now seems confirmed by the way she's reading her Time magazine article next to me.

It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me, and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm, and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.

You ever sit in the car, or in a window seat on the subway, and the car or train next to you starts to move? And you think you're the one moving? And you'd swear by it? And sometimes, in your stomach, you can even feel it? That. I say. That's what life's like now.

It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

I was born in a village in the northeast, and it wasn’t until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it. Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime. I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn’t until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me.

Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew a long time ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by apathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.

The walk back to the subway and the subsequent ride to my apartment in Queens is long, providing me with too much time to ask myself exactly what the fuck I'm getting myself into. Nell is bad news. She’s got major damage, a baggage train a mile long. And so do I.

Then he explains Chinese food in Manhattan to me: 'See the way it works is, there's one central location out on Long Island where all this stuff is made. Then it's piped into the city through a series of underground pipes that run parallel to the train and subway tracks. The restaurants then just pull a lever. One lever for General Tso's chicken, another for beef with broccoli sauce. It's like beer; it's on tap.' It's amazing how convincing he is when he says this. There's no pause in his description, nowhere for him to stop and think, to make this up as he goes along. It's as though he's simply repeating something he read in the Times yesterday. This makes me love him more than I did just five minutes ago.

I remember reading the Times in the subway, folding it awkwardly while leaning against the door, caught up in the words, worried about crashing to the floor or tripping over some lightly clad beauty (there was always at least one), but even more afraid to lose the thread of the article in front of me, my spine banging against the train door, the clatter and drone of the massive machine around me, and me, with my words, brilliantly alone.

How we hate to admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woman, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires—is he not the slave of his slave? How easy it is, in this relationship, for the woman to upset the balance of power! The mere threat of self-dependence, on the woman’s part, and the gallant despot is seized with vertigo. But if they are able to throw themselves at one another recklessly, concealing nothing, surrendering all, if they admit to one another their interdependence, do they not enjoy a great and unsuspected freedom? The man who admits to himself that he is a coward has made a step towards conquering his fear; but the man who frankly admits it to every one, who asks that you recognize it in him and make allowance for it in dealing with him, is on the way to becoming a hero. Such a man is often surprised, when the crucial test comes, to find that he knows no fear. Having lost the fear of regarding himself as a coward he is one no longer: only the demonstration is needed to prove the metamorphosis. It is the same in love. The man who admits not only to himself but to his fellowmen, and even to the woman he adores, that he can be twisted around a woman’s finger, that he is helpless where the other sex is concerned, usually discovers that he is the more powerful of the two. Nothing breaks a woman down more quickly than complete surrender. A woman is prepared to resist, to be laid siege to: she has been trained to behave that way. When she meets no resistance she falls headlong into the trap. To be able to give oneself wholly and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution. The personal life is altogether based on dependence, mutual dependence. Society is the aggregate of persons all interdependent. There is another richer life beyond the pale of society, beyond the personal, but there is no knowing it, no attainment possible, without firs traveling the heights and depths of the personal jungle. To become the great lover, the magnetiser and catalyzer, the blinding focus and inspiration of the world, one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool. The man whose greatness of heart leads him to folly and ruin is to a woman irresistible. To the woman who loves, that is to say. As to those who ask merely to be loved, who seek only their own reflection in the mirror, no love however great, will ever satisfy them. In a world so hungry for love it is no wonder that men and women are blinded by the glamour and glitter of their own reflected egos. No wonder that the revolver shot is the last summons. No wonder that the grinding wheels of the subway express, though they cut the body to pieces, fail to precipitate the elixir of love. In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage…

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.

The Dr. Nuts seemed only as an acid gurgling down into his intestine. He filled with gas, the sealed valve trapping it just as one pinches the mouth of a balloon. Great eructations rose from his throat and bounced upward toward the refuse-laden bowl of the milk glass chandelier. Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen. Everywhere there lurked pitfalls like Abelman, the insipid Crusaders for Moorish Dignity, the Mancuso cretin, Dorian Greene, newspaper reporters, stripteasers, birds, photography, juvenile delinquents, Nazi pornographers. And especially Myrna Minkoff. The musky minx must be dealt with. Somehow. Someday. She must pay. Whatever happened, he must attend to her even if the revenge took years and he had to stalk her through decades from one coffee shop to another, from one folksinging orgy to another, from subway train to pad to cotton field to demonstration. Ignatius invoked an elaborate Elizabethan curse upon Myrna and, rolling over, frantically abused the glove once more.

There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater job of it. They couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was there she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside of the hospital. They did not blow-up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane. “I’m cold,” Snowden had whimpered. “I’m cold.” “There, there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him. “There, there.” They didn’t take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn’t explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn’t drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn’t get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, blugeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain’t. There were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.

And then, every time I didn't see her, there was a fall involved. I thought about dancing on the fifth-floor ledge outside out apartment. Every train she wasn't on felt something like hitting the pavement from five floors up. So maybe my father was right about that. Maybe happiness and excitement really are dangerous things.

We’re lost in each other, in the heart of Toronto, slow dancing to nothing but the beat of my heart and the sound of her breath on my neck. I know the subway trains are trembling beneath my feet and that we’re amidst the constant buzz of city life, yet I hear nothing but my heart beating and feel nothing but her breath on my neck.

So Kiku has figured out a way to be alone in the city. All you have to do is stand at the end of the subway platform and scream as the train comes into the station.

People will always respond differently to the story of a sexually abused third grader than they will that of a young woman who is violated by a friend at a booze-soaked house party. There is a kind of fairness in that, since they are very different stories. Yet, in many ways, they are so intimately intertwined: they both rely on the belief in ownership of the vulnerable body, whether female or child or both. The idea that one violation is vastly worse than the other is probably not so different a rationalization than what goes through a date rapist’s mind. Those who are disgusted at the idea of touching a child may be the exact same that would grope an adult woman in an alleyway or on a crowded subway train—or worse.

Once, headed uptown on the 9 train, I noticed a sign posted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority advising subway riders who might become ill in the train. The sign asked that the suddenly infirm inform another passenger or get out at the next stop and approach the stationmaster. Do not, repeat, do not pull the emergency brake, the sign said, as this will only delay aid. Which was all very logical, but for the following proclamation at the bottom of the sign, something along the lines of, “If you are sick, you will not be left alone.” This strikes me as not only kind, not only comforting, but the very epitome of civilization, good government, i.e., the the crux of the societal impulse. Banding together, pooling our taxes, not just making trains, not just making trains that move underground, not just making trains that move underground with surprising efficiency at a fair price—but posting on said trains a notification of such surprising compassion and thoughtfulness. I found myself scanning the faces of my fellow passengers, hoping for fainting, obvious fevers, at the very least a sneeze so that I might offer a tissue.

Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was beginning to understand how a person could become very tired here. She'd seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who'd worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains.

She throws herself down the subway stairs, races to the platform, and there, somehow in perfect alignment with the universe, is the Q waiting for her with doors open. She lunges onto the train as they slide shut. Momentum carries her across the aisle, and she smacks into the opposite side of the car, startling a drunk couple so much, they nearly drop their takeout. To her right, a voice says, “Hell of an entrance, Coffee Girl.

You’re not quite the one because you don’t feel permanent. You’re lovely. You’re here. You’re soft and comfortable and I can curl up beside you and hey, at least neither of us are alone. You don’t feel like the start of something, you feel like the continuation of nothing. You’re not quite the one because we’re not even thinking about crazy concepts like the “one.” No one is meeting anyone’s parents. No one is going to be a plus-one at anyone’s friend’s weddings. No one is holding hands on the subway train. You’re not quite the one because you’re not meant to be the one. You’re a bookmark, a beautiful pause, a blinking light on hold at an office desk.

Richards remembered the day - that glorious and terrible day - watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24-7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn't even remember why. He'd thought it right then; no, he'd felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they'd all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees - the subjects hadn't changed, they never would, all coming down, after you'd boiled away the bullshit, to somebody's quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where - but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It’s so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It’s long since filled up the plain, and now it’s creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it’s already become out of date. It’s a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one. Things are always moving below you, and above your head. All these people, flyovers, cars, walkways, subways, offices, tower blocks, power cables, pipes, apartments, it all adds up to a lot of weight. You have to do something to stop yourself caving in, or you just become a piece of flotsam or an ant in a tunnel. In smaller cities people can use the space around them to insulate themselves, to remind themselves of who they are. Not in Tokyo. You just don’t have the space, not unless you’re a company president, a gangster, a politician or the Emperor. You’re pressed against people body to body in the trains, several hands gripping each strap on the metro trains. Apartment windows have no view but other apartment windows.

a passerby would never know—or probably even imagine—that inside a basement apartment in southeastern Queens there lay such a beautifully appointed dinner table. It was like catching a glimpse of the glittering soul inside a rumpled passenger on a subway train.

In the train station, people were drinking coffee and reading newspapers. I felt glad to see that life was going on—actual life, where people were working and staying awake and trying to accomplish things, which was the point of coffee. There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, artist.” It sounded better in Russian, because the word for “artist” had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like “spaghetti,” or “appendix.” Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.

The train came, and Jules Jacobson stepped on and thought: I am the loneliest person in this subway car.

Developing new neighborhoods without rapid transit would be like building a forty-story office tower without an elevator.

The war—the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more—the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are—would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn’t notice and couldn’t remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees—the subjects hadn’t changed, they never would, all coming down, after you’d boiled away the bullshit, to somebody’s quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where—but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.

The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus.

There are men who carefully manoeuvre a large limousine out of the garage at eight o'clock every morning. Others leave an hour earlier, traveling in a middle-class sedan. Still others leave when it is not yet light, wearing overalls and carrying lunch boxes, to catch buses, subways, or trains to factories or building sites. By a trick of fate, it is always the latter, the poorest, who are exploited by the least attractive women. For, unlike women (who have an eye for money), men notice only woman's external appearance. Therefore, the more desirable women in their own class are always being snatched away from under their noses by men who happen to earn more. No matter what a particular man does or how he spends his day, he has one thing in common with all other men - he spends it in a degrading manner. And he himself does not gain by it. It is not his own livelihood that matters: he would have to struggle far less for that, since luxuries do not mean anything to him anyway it is the fact that he does it for others that makes him so tremendously proud. He will undoubtedly have a photograph of his wife and children on his desk, and will miss no opportunity to hand it around. No matter what a man's job may be - bookkeeper, doctor, bus driver, or managing director - every moment of his life will be spent as a cog in a huge and pitiless system - a system designed to exploit him to the utmost, to his dying day. (...) We have long ceased to play the games of childhood. As children, we became bored quickly and changed from one game to another. A man is like a child who is condemned to play the same game for the rest of his life.

If you are a person with low awareness and absent-minded, you will be shocked by what life brings you suddenly, like being startled by a train that suddenly appears from the darkness in the subway!

I was in college when I first saw You've Got Mail, and I loved Kathleen Kelly instantly. I was mostly past my wistful gade-school days of wishing myself into every novel I read, but I was alarmingly struck by how she echoed my old fear of settling for my real life, musing in one scene, "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?" Her impetus was this: once she'd read a story about a butterfly in a subway train, and then...she saw one! The film shows Kathleen rattling along on the train, an open book in her lap, when a butterfly suddenly flits into her field of vision. You can see her visceral delight. That thing she'd only read about had come true. Yet she wondered if her experience was cheapened because she'd read it before she lived it, and my twenty-year-old self wondered right along with her. But I'm not the girl--or the reader--I was then, and I now know the times when reading cheapens anything are few and far between. I've seen how our on -the-page experiences set the stage for our actual lives. Our books frame the scenes for us so we can better understand and experience what's happening when it happens to us--

Next time you leave the house, think about who might be watching you. Do you pass a traffic camera? Do the shops you go to have security cameras? Is there a camera on board your train or bus? What about in your school? The cafes and restaurants where you eat? Street corners? Subways? And who is on the other side of that camera? A private security guard? The police? The government? How can you tell?

I wish I were the graceful sort. I was trained to be. "Never chase men or buses," my mother told me. "Another one will always come along." Still, I always run after the subway, and when men go, I follow.

I got up on time this morning, boarded the train, changed to the subway, and worked like an aggressive career woman in one of the biggest corporations around. At night I transformed into a prostitute sought out by men. Suddenly I remembered the argument I had had earlier with Arai and stopped short. I'm a company employee day and night. Or is it that I'm a prostitute night and day? Which is it? Which one is me?

I remember once when I was young, and I was coming back from some place, a movie or something. I was on the subway and there was a girl sitting across from me and she was wearing this dress that was bottoned queer up right to here, she was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And I was shy then, so when she would look at me I would look away, then afterwards when I would look back she would look away. Then I got to where I was gonna get off, and got off, the doors closed, and as the train was pulling away she looked right at me and gave me the most incredible smile. It was awful, I wanted to tear the doors open. And I went back every night, same time, for two weeks, but she never showed up. That was 30 years ago and I don't think that theres a day that goes by that I don't think about her, I don't want that to happen again. Just one dance ?.

In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that’s a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the train slows for a station, and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss like the sigh of a great ugly beast, and passengers lurch off, and new passengers lurch on, and I lift my eyes hopeful and yearning Who will be my destiny? Which one of you?

Always lost, always striking out in the wrong direction, always going around in circles. You have suffered from a life-long inability to orient yourself in space, and even in New York, the easiest of cities to negotiate, the city where you have spent the better part of your adulthood, you often run into trouble. Whenever you take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan (assuming you have boarded the correct train and are not traveling deeper into Brooklyn), you make a special point to stop for a moment to get your bearings once you have climbed the stairs to the street, and still you will head north instead of south, go east instead of west, and even when you try to outsmart yourself, knowing that your handicap will set you going the wrong way and therefore, to rectify the error, you do the opposite of what you were intending to do, go left instead of right, go right instead of left, and still you find yourself moving in the wrong direction, no matter how many adjustments you have made. Forget tramping alone in the woods. You are hopelessly lost within minutes, and even indoors, whenever you find yourself in an unfamiliar building, you will walk down the wrong corridor or take the wrong elevator, not to speak of smaller enclosed spaces such as restaurants, for whenever you go to the men’s room in a restaurant that has more than one dining area, you will inevitably make a wrong turn on your way back and wind up spending several minutes searching for your table. Most other people, your wife included, with her unerring inner compass, seem to be able to get around without difficulty. They know where they are, where they have been, and where they are going, but you know nothing, you are forever lost in the moment, in the void of each successive moment that engulfs you, with no idea where true north is, since the four cardinal points do not exist for you, have never existed for you. A minor infirmity until now, with no dramatic consequences to speak of, but that doesn’t mean a day won’t come when you accidentally walk off the edge of a cliff.

Mostly, I feel a distance from people, like we're in a subway station, and they're on a different platform. I can't cross the tracks to join them, and the noise from the trains is so loud I can barely make out what they're saying.

Everything around me was changing so fast—my apartment block, the local shops, the alleys, the roads, the subway lines. Beijing was moving forwards like an express train, but my life was going nowhere. Okay, so I was getting lots of work, but it was all the same. Woman Waiting on the Platform, Lady in Waiting, Bored Waitress. I was only in my twenties, but I felt seventy. I had to do something, ask my brain to start working, so I could match this fast-moving city.

Kind of,” she says. And, “Pull my hair.” For a few ringing seconds, August imagines herself melting onto the floor of the train like the ghosts of a million spilled subway slushies and dropped ice cream cones. Completely under control.

It was a terrible,  indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry——Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

They [the dying in hospitals] did not blow up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian's tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane. […] They didn't take it out on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn't explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn't drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn't get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, bludgeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don't business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain't. There were no famines or floods. Children didn't suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh! accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hair strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry

I can’t help but be attracted to pregnant women. Unless they’re malnourished. I’ll see a malnourished pregnant woman on the subway sometimes, big in the belly but with stick-figure arms and hair like a rat’s, and I want to buy her a space heater. I want to yell at her parents. I remember going up to this real malnourished-looking pregnant lady on the G train one time and asking her if she’d like a free dinner at Junior’s. She couldn’t believe I was trying to pick her up on the G train, a pregnant woman with a ring on her finger. I hadn’t noticed the ring. It was one hell of a big ring. I tried to convince her that I wasn’t trying to pick her up. I offered to give her fifty bucks for cooking oil. That just made matters worse. Turns out she was a famous model. I’ve seen her on billboards.

A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on the subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol. (Preface)

Preface A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol. CHESTER HIMES

Loneliness is one of the most universal human experiences, but our contemporary Western society has heightened the awareness of our loneliness to an unusual degree. During a recent visit to New York City, I wrote the following note to myself: Sitting in the subway, I am surrounded by silent people hidden behind their newspapers or staring away in the world of their own fantasies. Nobody speaks with a stranger, and a patroling policeman keeps reminding me that people are not out to help each other. But when my eyes wander over the walls of the train covered with invitations to buy more or new products, I see young, beautiful people enjoying each other in a gentle embrace, playful men and women smiling at each other in fast sailboats, proud explorers on horseback encouraging each other to take brave risks, fearless children dancing on a sunny beach, and charming girls always ready to serve me in airplanes and ocean liners. While the subway train runs from one dark tunnel into the other and I am nervously aware where I keep my money, the words and images decorating my fearful world speak about love, gentleness, tenderness and about a joyful togetherness of spontaneous people.

Saying good-bye to Ben is Sarina's least favorite activity. So sad the number of times she's had to do it. Ball games, recitals, the homes of friends, rented shore houses, through car windows after dropping off some forgotten camera to Annie. Goodbye. See you later. Nice seeing you. She has mastered it: A dismissive peck on the cheek. A hug like an afterthought. Telling herself, Do not watch him walk away. Watching him walk away. Watching him drive away. Watching him descend the stairs to the subway. How many times have they said goodbye to each other? Already tonight, twice. He interrupts her before she can get the second goodbye out. "How would you feel," he says, "about missing your train?" Once at the beach, Sarina watched a crane bathing in a gully at dusk. It used its wings to funnel the water over its back, then shook out the excess in a firework of droplets. After several minutes it took off, arcing out over the fretless sea. That felt like this.

Having lived most of my life in the most crowded city in the world, I have become used to this constant physical proximity. Wherever I look the gaze is broken by people; in train and subway I am constantly brushed by others. One learns to ignore them, to see past them or through them. And when they get in the way, one politely endures them. They are not regarded as people. There are too many of them. They are things. I read once that a wolf can tolerate the company of only fifty other wolves—after that he turns savage and attacks. With humans the number must be higher. Attacks occur, however, and will become more frequent as the earth fills up. And it will.

When Jack was returning to America from his years in Thailand, he sought out an elderly Western monk and asked him if he had any advice about being back in the West. “Only one thing,” said the monk. “When you’re running to catch the subway and you see it leaving without you, don’t panic, just remember, ‘There’s always another train.

I want to be free of cities and sexual entanglements. Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that floats out of the subways and the tunnels. It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.

He moves to stand on a nearby subway grate, through which he can hear a 1 train idling on the platform below. He spreads his hands to feel the gentle waft of warm, funky-smelling subway air along his skin. (No one pays attention when he does this, because few people bother paying attention to odd behavior in New York, and he wouldn't care if they did, because few New Yorkers care what other people think.)

By necessity, we are direct and swift in speech and movement. This is the true dynamic that underlies our apocryphal rudeness. Also true: we do not make eye contact. Neither do we encourage it. Consider the number of humans a New Yorker will pass on a given day – on the subway, in a train or bus terminal, in an office or simply walking down the street. To facilitate speed and minimize drama, it’s productive to keep one’s eyes focused ahead.

He was nearly to the subway’s escalator when he turned back to see what the crowd had been looking at. Sam could imagine reporting the congestion in the train station, and Marx saying, “Weren’t you even curious what it was? There’s a world of people and things, if you can manage to stop being a misanthrope for a second.” Sam didn’t like Marx thinking of him as a misanthrope, even if he was one, and so, he turned. That was when he espied his old comrade, Sadie Green

ON THE A TRAIN There were no seats to be had on the A train last night, but I had a good grip on the pole at the end of one of the seats and I was reading the beauty column of the Journal-American, which the man next to me was holding up in front of him. All of a sudden I felt a tap on my arm, and I looked down and there was a man beginning to stand up from the seat where he was sitting. "Would you like to sit down?" he said. Well, I said the first thing that came into my head, I was so surprised and pleased to be offered a seat in the subway. "Oh, thank you very much," I said, "but I am getting out at the next station." He sat back and that was that, but I felt all set up and I thought what a nice man he must be and I wondered what his wife was like and I thought how lucky she was to have such a polite husband, and then all of a sudden I realized that I wasn't getting out at the next station at all but the one after that, and I felt perfectly terrible. I decided to get out at the next station anyway, but then I thought, If I get out at the next station and wait around for the next train I'll miss my bus and they only go every hour and that will be silly. So I decided to brazen it out as best I could, and when the train was slowing up at the next station I stared at the man until I caught his eye and then I said, "I just remembered this isn't my station after all." Then I thought he would think I was asking him to stand up and give me his seat, so I said, "But I still don't want to sit down, because I'm getting off at the next station." I showed him by my expression that I thought it was all rather funny, and he smiled, more or less, and nodded, and lifted his hat and put it back on his head again and looked away. He was one of those small, rather glum or sad men who always look off into the distance after they have finished what they are saying, when they speak. I felt quite proud of my strong-mindedness at not getting off the train and missing my bus simply because of the fear of a little embarrassment, but just as the train was shutting its doors I peered out and there it was, 168th Street. "Oh dear!" I said. "That was my station and now I have missed the bus!" I was fit to be fled, and I had spoken quite loudly, and I felt extremely foolish, and I looked down, and the man who had offered me his seat was partly looking at me, and I said, "Now, isn't that silly? That was my station. A Hundred and Sixty-eighth Street is where I'm supposed to get off." I couldn't help laughing, it was all so awful, and he looked away, and the train fidgeted along to the next station, and I got off as quickly as I possibly could and tore over to the downtown platform and got a local to 168th, but of course I had missed my bus by a minute, or maybe two minutes. I felt very much at a loose end wandering around 168th Street, and I finally went into a rudely appointed but friendly bar and had a martini, warm but very soothing, which cost me only fifty cents. While I was sipping it, trying to make it last to exactly the moment that would get me a good place in the bus queue without having to stand too long in the cold, I wondered what I should have done about that man in the subway. After all, if I had taken his seat I probably would have got out at 168th Street, which would have meant that I would hardly have been sitting down before I would have been getting up again, and that would have seemed odd. And rather grasping of me. And he wouldn't have got his seat back, because some other grasping person would have slipped into it ahead of him when I got up. He seemed a retiring sort of man, not pushy at all. I hesitate to think of how he must have regretted offering me his seat. Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.

I have this dream in which I am standing on the subway platform and the train is delayed. It has taken entirely too long in coming. And I think maybe, just maybe, I should leave the station and look for a taxi. But I am afraid that the moment I leave, the train will come. When people do ask why I haven’t left New York, this is my best answer... what I do know is that I will leave NY with different dreams than this with which I first arrived. Smaller dreams, simpler dreams - an extra set of hands.

And to the extent that it can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending put-downs of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art-form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, for the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion, or vulnerability. Other people become judges; the crime is naïveté. The well-trained viewer becomes even more allergic to people. Lonelier. Joe B.’s exhaustive TV-training in how to worry about how he might come across, seem to watching eyes, makes genuine human encounters even scarier. But televisual irony has the solution: further viewing begins to seem almost like required research, lessons in the blank, bored, too-wise expression that Joe must learn how to wear for tomorrow’s excruciating ride on the brightly lit subway, where crowds of blank, bored-looking people have little to look at but each other.

Fretting makes us important. Say you're an adult male and you're skipping down the street whistling "Last Train to Clarksville." People will call you a fool. But lean over to the person next to you on a subway and say, "How can you smile when innocents are dying in Tibet?" You'll acquire a reputation for great seriousness and also more room to sit down. ...Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say "I've got cancer" and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy?

The T is the oldest subway system in the United States, and I figure if it has lasted this long, it must have been built right in the first place. The train I took from the airport gradually filled with students. They all seemed to be wearing T-shirts with messages on them. Signaling each other like fireflies. NERD PRIDE, said one, and on the back: A WELL-ROUNDED PERSON HAS NO POINT. Another one: THERE ARE ONLY 10 KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. THOSE WHO UNDERSTAND THE BI-NARY SYSTEM AND THOSE WHO DON’T. Both got off at the MIT stop.

For years, Britain operated a research facility called the Common Cold Unit, but it closed in 1989 without ever finding a cure. It did, however, conduct some interesting experiments. In one, a volunteer was fitted with a device that leaked a thin fluid at his nostrils at the same rate that a runny nose would. The volunteer then socialized with other volunteers, as if at a cocktail party. Unknown to any of them, the fluid contained a dye visible only under ultraviolet light. When that was switched on after they had been mingling for a while, the participants were astounded to discover that the dye was everywhere—on the hands, head, and upper body of every participant and on glasses, doorknobs, sofa cushions, bowls of nuts, you name it. The average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, and each of those touches transferred the pretend pathogen from nose to snack bowl to innocent third party to doorknob to innocent fourth party and so on until pretty much everyone and everything bore a festive glow of imaginary snot. In a similar study at the University of Arizona, researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines. In the real world, such infestations can stay active for up to three days. Surprisingly, the least effective way to spread germs (according to yet another study) is kissing. It proved almost wholly ineffective among volunteers at the University of Wisconsin who had been successfully infected with cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus. A study in Switzerland in 2008 found that flu virus can survive on paper money for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot. Without snot, most cold viruses could survive on folding money for no more than a few hours.

The rails intersect and combine in complex and convoluted ways. There are sixteen platforms in total. In addition, there are two private rail lines, the Odakyu line and the Keio line, and three subway lines plugged in, as it were, from the side. It is a total maze. During rush hour, that maze transforms into a sea of humanity, a sea that foams up, rages, and roars as it surges toward the entrances and exits. Streams of people changing trains become entangled, giving rise to dangerous, swirling whirlpools. No prophet, no matter how righteous, could part that fierce, turbulent sea.

Subway tunnels breathe. They exhale when trains come and inhale when they leave. Their concrete lungs fill with smoke and soot and rubber and the scents of a hundred ladies’ perfumes. When trains aren’t running, the tunnels hold their breath. They might let wisps of warm air drift into the cold night, draw in slow nips of bracing frost, but mostly they sit still, waiting for trains to bring them back to life. A thousand times a day their breath coursed over Joe Tesla’s body. It was not so warm as human breath, nor yet so cold as stone. He was used to it, now. Because he lived here, underground, in the tunnels of New York City.

At 5pm every weekday,,,JB got on the subway and headed for his studio in Long Island City. The weekday journey was his favorite: He'd board at Canal and watch the train fill and empty at each stop with an ever-shifting mix of different peoples and ethnicities, the car's population reconstituting itself every ten blocks or so into provocative and improbably constellations of Poles, Chinese, Koreans, Senegalese; Senegalese, Dominicans, Indians, Pakistanis; Pakistanis, Irish, Salvadorans, Mexicans; Mexicans, Sri Lankans, Nigerians, and Tibetans - the only thing uniting them being their newness to America and their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses.... The other aspect of those weekday-evening trips he loved was the light itself, how it filled the train with something living as the cars rattled across the bridge, how it washed the weariness from his seat-mates' faces and revealed them as they were when they first came to the county, when they were young and America seemed conquerable. He'd watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine.

Why would intelligent, capable British and French government officials continue to invest in what was clearly a losing proposition for so long? One reason is a very common psychological phenomenon called “sunk-cost bias.” Sunk-cost bias is the tendency to continue to invest time, money, or energy into something we know is a losing proposition simply because we have already incurred, or sunk, a cost that cannot be recouped. But of course this can easily become a vicious cycle: the more we invest, the more determined we become to see it through and see our investment pay off. The more we invest in something, the harder it is to let go. The sunk costs for developing and building the Concorde were around $1 billion. Yet the more money the British and French governments poured into it, the harder it was to walk away.3 Individuals are equally vulnerable to sunk-cost bias. It explains why we’ll continue to sit through a terrible movie because we’ve already paid the price of a ticket. It explains why we continue to pour money into a home renovation that never seems to near completion. It explains why we’ll continue to wait for a bus or a subway train that never comes instead of hailing a cab, and it explains why we invest in toxic relationships even when our efforts only make things worse. Examples

I’m not saying I’ll turn down a good road trip, but it has been the trains, ferries, subways, and most frequently the buses that have most helped me travel the world. When I want to explore a place, to get a sense of its culture, people, and neighborhoods (even my own), I have found that there is no better way to travel than public transportation. Crowded or nearly empty, full of conversations or silence, scheduled or unscheduled, with live chickens or Styrofoam packets of eggs, on sleek coaches or beat-up minibuses, whether in my hometown or a new town in a foreign country: traveling on public transportation becomes a primary insight into a place and culture.

He should have caught up with me inside of fifteen minutes at the outside, if he'd been able to get on the next train after mine. But then there was that station agent to be considered. And Rafe didn't have a solitary coin on him; he'd have to break one of those fifties. I now remembered something that I'd been noticing half my life and that had never meant anything to me until today - a little sign outside each subway change booth, advising the public that the agent wasn't obliged to make change for anything bigger than $1. Never get mixed up in a murder, flashed through my mind insanely, unless you've got plenty of small change. ("Don't Wait Up For Me, Tonight")

She can’t believe she asked Jane out. Jane. Jane of the effortless smiles and subway dance parties, who is probably a fucking poet or, like, a motorcycle mechanic. She probably went home that night and sat at a bar with her equally hot motorcycle poet friends and talked about how funny it was that this weird girl on her train asked her out, and then went to bed with her even hotter girlfriend and had nice, satisfying, un-clumsy sex with someone who isn’t a depressed twenty-three-year-old virgin. They’ll get up in the morning and make their cool and sexy sex-haver toast and drink their well-adjusted coffee and move on with their lives, and eventually, after enough weeks of August avoiding the Q, Jane will forget all about her.

Sometimes, down in the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one, like a series of fortune-telling cards being deal and slid in front of her. The Scholar, The Unhoused, The Warrior Thief, The Haunted Woman... After a while Maxine has come to understand that the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own - they are the day's messengers from whatever the Beyond has for a Third World, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.

Those groans men use passing a woman on the street or on the steps of the subway to tell her she is a female and their flesh knows it, are they a sort of tune, an ugly enough song, sung by a bird with a slit tongue but meant for music? Or are they the muffled roaring of deafmutes trapped in a building that is slowly filling with smoke? Perhaps both. Such men most often look as if groan were all they could do, yet a woman, in spite of herself, knows it's a tribute: if she were lacking all grace they'd pass her in silence: so it's not only to say she's a warm hole. It's a word in grief-language, nothing to do with primitive, not an ur-language; language stricken, sickened, cast down in decrepitude. She wants to throw the tribute away, dis- gusted, and can't, it goes on buzzing in her ear, it changes the pace of her walk, the torn posters in echoing corridors spell it out, it quakes and gnashes as the train comes in. Her pulse sullenly had picked up speed, but the cars slow down and jar to a stop while her understanding keeps on translating: 'Life after life after life goes by without poetry, without seemliness, without love.

However we decide to apportion the credit for our improved life spans, the bottom line is that nearly all of us are better able today to resist the contagions and afflictions that commonly sickened our great-grandparents, while having massively better medical care to call on when we need it. In short, we have never had it so good. Or at least we have never had it so good if we are reasonably well-off. If there is one thing that should alarm and concern us today, it is how unequally the benefits of the last century have been shared. British life expectancies might have soared overall, but as John Lanchester noted in an essay in the London Review of Books in 2017, males in the East End of Glasgow today have a life expectancy of just fifty-four years—nine years less than a man in India. In exactly the same way, a thirty-year-old black male in Harlem, New York, is at much greater risk of dying than a thirty-year-old male Bangladeshi from stroke, heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. Climb aboard a bus or subway train in almost any large city in the Western world and you can experience similar vast disparities with a short journey. In Paris, travel five stops on the Metro’s B line from Port-Royal to La Plaine—Stade de France and you will find yourself among people who have an 82 percent greater chance of dying in a given year than those just down the line. In London, life expectancy drops reliably by one year for every two stops traveled eastward from Westminster on the District Line of the Underground. In St. Louis, Missouri, make a twenty-minute drive from prosperous Clayton to the inner-city Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood and life expectancy drops by one year for every minute of the journey, a little over two years for every mile. Two things can be said with confidence about life expectancy in the world today. One is that it is really helpful to be rich. If you are middle-aged, exceptionally well-off, and from almost any high-income nation, the chances are excellent that you will live into your late eighties. Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor—exercises as devotedly, sleeps as many hours, eats a similarly healthy diet, but just has less money in the bank—can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner. That’s a lot of difference for an equivalent lifestyle, and no one is sure how to account for it.

The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.

The Man-Moth Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the façades, his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head through that round clean opening and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light. (Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.) But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt. Then he returns to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

After the Second and Third Avenue Els were torn down, East Side property owners had prospered as brownstones, loft buildings, and tenements were replaced by high-rise offices and apartment buildings. The area east of Central Park between 59th and 96th Streets, known as the Upper East Side, became home to fashionable boutiques, luxury restaurants, and expensive furniture houses. With thousands of well-educated young professionals moving there, the neighborhood contained the greatest concentration of single people in the entire country.3 Even though the number of cars registered in the United States grew by 47 percent in the 1950s, New York City’s economy still relied on the subway in the early 1960s. During the 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. rush hour, 72 percent of the people entering the CBD traveled by subway, which could move people far more efficiently than automobiles. Each subway car could carry approximately one hundred people, and a ten-car train could accommodate a thousand. Since trains could operate every two minutes, each track could carry thirty thousand people per hour. By comparison, one lane of a highway could carry only about two thousand cars in an hour.4 Although Manhattan and the region were dependent on the rail transit system, 750,000 cars and trucks were entering the CBD on a typical weekday, three times more than had been the case thirty years earlier. Many New Yorkers expected the city to accommodate the growing number of cars. For example, the Greater New York Safety Council’s transportation division claimed that Americans had a fundamental freedom to drive, and that it was the city’s obligation to accommodate drivers by building more parking spaces in Manhattan. The members argued that without more parking, Manhattan would not be able to continue its role as the region’s CBD because a growing number of suburbanites were so highly conditioned to using their cars.5 In

Although Cuomo could not get much support in the legislature for changing the MTA’s structure, Ravitch decided to resign anyway. He was frustrated and exhausted after four years of intense pressure in a position that did not pay him anything. He gave Cuomo only an hour’s notice before an August press conference announcing his resignation. The MTA chair did not want to give Cuomo an opportunity to say that he had pushed Ravitch out.78 In his autobiography, published in 2014, Ravitch wrote that both Carey and Koch had staffed their administrations with the highest-quality people they could find and did not try to micromanage them or begrudge them credit. Control, he said, “was not uppermost in their minds.” Ravitch then took a dig at New York State’s fifty-second and fifty-sixth governors (Mario Cuomo and his son, Andrew), saying, “This was not and is not the Cuomo style.

The abandoned Second Avenue tunnels in East Harlem and Chinatown, hidden from the public, did not provide New Yorkers with any benefits. If the Transit Authority had an opportunity to build another subway expansion, it should do so incrementally, so that each segment, once completed, could provide useful services.

Congress also saw how Ronan and his contemporaries stretched the truth in order to obtain federal funding for their rail projects. In 1989, a US Department of Transportation researcher, Don Pickrell, meticulously compared project sponsors’ initial forecasts with the actual costs and benefits of projects after they were completed. Pickrell found that transit agencies grossly overestimated the number of passengers their proposed rail lines would carry. In fact, nearly all recently built projects were carrying less than half the number of forecasted riders. Likewise, nearly all the projects cost more than expected. Because of this, the 1991 federal transportation law that authorized about $800 million per year for large transit projects mandated a rigorous review process to evaluate the cost effectiveness of proposed projects.16

Ravitch had no interest in restarting the Second Avenue subway, and the project was a low priority for many of the communities it would serve. During the 1970s, East Harlem lost more than 22 percent of its population, and one-quarter of those who remained were on welfare. In seven Bronx census tracts, more than 97 percent of the buildings were either burned down or abandoned, leaving block after block of rubble. On the Lower East Side, where the number of apartments fell by 7.5 percent, a nonprofit environmental group known as the Green Guerillas took over vacant lots and turned them into community gardens.

While MTA officials were completing the assessment of their needs, they learned that President Carter was not going to be the system’s savior. On November 4, he lost his reelection bid to Ronald Reagan, a California Republican who wanted to slash federal aid to urban areas. Three weeks after the election, the MTA board issued a detailed report proposing a ten-year, $14.4 billion capital program to restore the system to a state of good repair. Most importantly, the board suggested ways to pay for the capital program and new legislation that would streamline the process so that projects could be completed in a more cost-effective and timely manner.44 Ravitch said, “I will not cease for a minute petitioning the government to provide more capital funding. But on the other hand, we should not put our heads in the sand and think that we have fulfilled our responsibilities at the MTA merely by exhorting elected officials to provide funds which, as a practical matter, are simply not available.” That is why Ravitch was prepared for the MTA to take on billions of dollars in new debt to pay for improvements. He suggested increasing the maximum amount of bonds that the MTA’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA) could issue, and allowing its bond proceeds to be used for transit improvements, something it had never done before. He also proposed that the MTA be able, for the first time, to issue bonds that would be paid back from future fares.

Ravitch was hoping to change the public debate so that the media reported on the transportation network’s long-term needs rather than just its short-term financial woes. That would help him generate support for his plan to restore and then perpetually maintain the MTA’s physical network. Ravitch’s detailed list of needs and financing ideas gave his plan credibility. Now all he had to do was gain approval from the governor, mayor, state assembly, state senate, US House of Representatives, US Senate, and US president. Not exactly a walk in the park.

Many East Siders pushed the MTA to add a station at 96th Street. Metropolitan Hospital, a city-owned facility located at 97th Street, sent about one hundred doctors, nurses, and other employees to the hearing. One of its directors charged the MTA with “brutal insensitivity toward the sick poor” and said it was not a coincidence that Rockefeller University and New York Hospital, where the governor was a major benefactor, would have much more convenient access. After the hearing, which lasted four hours and fifteen minutes, the MTA board subsequently voted to add a new station at 96th Street. The Bronx did not have as much political clout as the Upper East Side.

The MTA had even bigger problems than financing the Second Avenue subway. In 1971, a Wall Street bond specialist said that working together, the Mad Hatter (a wacky Alice in Wonderland character) and Mr. Micawber (an ever-hopeful Charles Dickens character who landed in debtors’ prison) could never have dreamed up anything as strange as the Transit Authority’s finances. Fares, tolls, taxes, and federal funds have never been able to keep up with the MTA’s needs. At times, the state has tried to solve the problem by levying fees and taxes that most people would not notice. For example, only a year after the MTA was formed, the state legislature increased the tax that homebuyers pay when they take out a mortgage, and dedicated the additional revenue to the MTA.72

The MTA had limited flexibility to cut its expenses. The subways had very high fixed costs and the Transit Authority needed to provide enough services for the four-hour peak commuting period. While a private business would have tried to replace full-time workers with part-time workers or scaled back salaries and benefits, those were not feasible options for a state-run enterprise whose workers were politically influential. Instead, a new union contract in 1968 allowed transit workers to retire with half pay after twenty years of work, exacerbating the MTA’s financial problems and affecting service quality after most of the car maintenance workers and 40 percent of the electrical workers retired in the next two years.75 With

New York City’s fiscal health was no better than the state of its subways. Lindsay and the city comptroller, Abe Beame, were engaging in a series of fiscal gimmicks to keep the city’s operating and capital budgets afloat. They were trying to satisfy too many constituents by undertaking ambitious capital projects, minimizing fare increases, and providing some of the most generous pension benefits in the nation to municipal employees. Government agencies have two types of budgets: operating budgets and capital budgets. The operating budget pays for day-to-day expenses such as salaries, pensions, and office supplies, as well as ongoing maintenance and basic repairs, such as cleaning buses and filling potholes. The capital budget funds the construction and rehabilitation of the city’s infrastructure and facilities.

Unaware of New York City’s budget shenanigans, taxpayers expected city officials to keep the transit fare low and expand the city’s already generous municipal services. Making matters worse, the city had fewer middle-income taxpayers to pay for rising government expenses. New York City’s loss of manufacturing jobs meant fewer employment opportunities for the low-skilled, poorly educated workers who were attracted to the city. While middle-class taxpayers moved from the city out to the suburbs, the poor people who moved in required more expensive city services. In the early 1970s, the city had more than one million residents receiving welfare benefits, nearly a tenth of the nations’ recipients. More than three-quarters of the city’s welfare recipients had not even been born in New York City. Although the state and federal government paid for three-quarters of the welfare costs, the city’s share created a huge burden on its budget.82

The audio tape from their meeting, stored at Nixon’s presidential library in California, reveals that Nixon gave Rockefeller and Ronan a warm welcome but did not promise to support any additional funding. He did say that the Second Avenue subway would happen only “when the leaders of the city, the establishment if I may pardon the term, get off their butts.” He added that business leaders “can’t just bitch about everything, they’ve got to help run that city. They’ve really got to do it.” Referring to the city’s future, he said, “Unless what we call the business establishment in New York takes a hell of a lot greater interest in sound decent government for the city … it’s had it. It’s going to be finished.”9 Nixon

A transit advocate, Theodore Kheel, wrote in New York magazine that “for decades, New York City’s subways were neglected by the people who managed them, despised by the people who worked them, and, God knows, unloved by the people who had to use them.” Pointing to the prospects of the Second Avenue subway, gasoline rationing, stricter air quality controls, and more federal mass transportation aid, he claimed, “Thanks to an extraordinary accident of history, a coincidence of forces no one could have foreseen, all that seems now to be changing, literally before our eyes.” Kheel was wrong about the subways having hit rock bottom and gasoline rationing being imminent, but he did predict that New York would beat out Los Angeles and other US cities because “the city with the best public transportation system is going to be the one most likely to thrive in the future.

In 1974, few people questioned the wisdom of continuing work under Second Avenue. Construction was not facing any organized community opposition, in part because most of the work was taking place in East Harlem, which had fewer people, offices, and shops than the rest of the route. Many of the low-income housing projects that lined the avenue in East Harlem were set back from the street, which gave their residents a buffer from the cut-and-cover construction. The neighborhood was facing much more serious issues than subway construction impacts, including a persistently high unemployment rate, an increasing number of abandoned buildings, and a heroin epidemic.

Cuomo and de Blasio also agreed to cut $3 billion from the capital program and reduce funding for the second phase of the Second Avenue subway from $1.5 billion to $500 million. In October 2015, the MTA board approved a revised capital program. The Second Avenue subway advocates, however, still had some political clout. At a rally on 96th Street, a coalition—including city council members, state legislators, contractors, the Regional Plan Association president, the city comptroller, the Manhattan borough president, environmentalists, and labor unions—urged the MTA to restore the $1 billion that was cut from the project’s second phase. They were afraid the MTA would abandon future phases after it opened the stations at 72nd Street, 86th Street, and 96th Street. Extending the subway to East Harlem had become an issue not only of transportation but of environmental justice, with the funding cut seen as a slap in the face to East Harlem’s predominantly Hispanic community.18 State legislators all across the city understood the need to relieve crowding on the Lexington Avenue line, according to Assemblyman Brennan. He said, “The concept of abandoning the Second Avenue subway, especially for the Manhattan delegation, was not even discussable, not even conceivable.” Even though the mayor had agreed with the governor in private to cut funding for the second phase, de Blasio joined all of Manhattan’s elected officials in criticizing the MTA.19 Behind

Given the difficulties of working with New York’s regulations, its unions, and the MTA’s bureaucracy, not as many firms bid on the large transit projects in New York compared to other cities, an important factor behind the Second Avenue subway’s high construction costs. News reports have insinuated that the MTA’s bidding process is “rigged” to favor certain contractors who have close ties with MTA officials. This is a costly perception because fewer firms prepare bids for projects when they think the deck is stacked against them.

Instead of funding the completion of the Second Avenue subway, billions of dollars may very well be used for other transportation megaprojects in the New York metropolitan area, such as constructing a sorely needed new Hudson River railroad tunnel for New Jersey Transit and Amtrak, replacing the world’s busiest bus terminal at 42nd Street, and improving rail connections to the region’s airports. The MTA still needs to finish the Long Island Rail Road connection to Grand Central Terminal, a project that started along with the Second Avenue subway in the 1960s. Nagaraja, who as president of MTA Capital Construction was once responsible for its construction, referred to this project as “one of the biggest disasters in transit history.

So, what should be New York’s highest-priority project? Unfortunately, no objective measure or crystal ball exists to answer that question. Peter Hall’s 1982 book, Great Planning Disasters, reveals the difficulty of trying to assess and compare megaprojects. The author, a world-renowned urban planner, singled out the Sydney Opera House and San Francisco’s BART rail system as planning disasters. The opera house had faced massive cost overruns and its design made it unable to function as a major opera house, while the BART system was attracting far fewer riders than expected. Hall had no idea that these two projects would prove to be wildly successful. The opera house is now Australia’s top tourist destination and the country’s most iconic structure, while BART has become essential to the economic health of the San Francisco Bay Area and the backbone of its transit system. Hall’s effort to determine the success of these two projects after they were built was relatively straightforward compared to a task that requires even more guesswork—assessing projects before they are built, when estimates of both costs and benefits are subject to wide debate and manipulation.

In the foreseeable future, New Yorkers are likely to find themselves in familiar territory—waiting for the completion of a new subway line that is too popular to be canceled and too expensive to build. That was the situation when the Second Avenue subway was delayed for several years in 1932. Likewise, in 1944, Fiorello La Guardia told city council members that “the preparation of engineering plans for the construction of the Second Avenue subway has not been interrupted.” In a similar manner, the subway was postponed for further study in 1953. When construction was halted in 1975, Mayor Abe Beame declared, “We cannot abandon the Second Avenue subway; we must, however, defer it.” The following year, when asked whether the line would ever be completed, the MTA chair, David Yunich, responded, ‘‘Well, ‘ever’ is a long time.”57 In 2004, New Yorkers were told that an 8.5-mile Second Avenue subway with sixteen stations would be completed by 2020. Its completion—along with a subway system in a state of good repair—remains decades away.

The MTA had become increasingly reliant on borrowing money against its future revenue rather than on funding from the state and city. The State of New York had contributed $1.8 billion for the MTA’s first five-year capital program, but nothing for the 2000–2004 program. Meanwhile, successive mayors cut New York City’s contributions to the MTA’s capital programs. The public did not understand the MTA’s predicament. A citywide survey indicated that most New Yorkers thought the MTA earned a profit on its subway service. In fact, subway riders paid only 44 percent of the authority’s operating costs, with taxes and tolls making up the rest. In 2004, the fastest-growing portion of the MTA’s budget was the interest expenses on its debt. The MTA’s outstanding debt had skyrocketed from $9 billion in the early 1990s to nearly $20 billion by 2004, and its annual interest payments were over $800 million.95

Tendler explained, “NYC Transit had way too much to do with not enough resources, human or financial. I wanted to be equitable across the city and be more sensitive to lower-income communities that were not getting as much attention.” She referred to the Upper East Siders as “whiners” and thought the retailers were exaggerating the impacts on construction. “People don’t go out of their way to do their dry cleaning,” she said. She had a point. Although storefront vacancies on Second Avenue did rise after construction began, the recession also caused a spike in vacancies on First and Third Avenues.55

I imagine the woman on the train, clutching the subway pole because no one will give up their seat for her. I want to fight them all.

The world is a place where, when push comes to shove, nearly everyone shoves. This maxim can easily be put to the test by riding a crowded subway train during the height of the morning rush hour.

The city pounced on him when Jake opened the front door of the building. Even at this early hour, people were on the move, a fraction of them in the city’s decrepit subway trains, the rest above ground, pushing forward with determination below long rows of trees recently planted along what used to be parking lanes. It hit him every time he opened the door—how the street had shrunk, how the sidewalks and bike lanes had expanded, and how these rearranged proportions had changed the atmosphere into something radically new, an entirely different city.

Sitting in the subway, I am surrounded by silent people hidden behind their newspapers or staring away in the world of their own fantasies. Nobody speaks with a stranger, and a patroling policeman keeps reminding me that people are not out to help each other. But when my eyes wander over the walls of the train covered with invitations to buy more or new products, I see young, beautiful people enjoying each other in a gentle embrace, playful men and women smiling at each other in fast sailboats, proud explorers on horseback encouraging each other to take brave risks, fearless children dancing on a sunny beach, and charming girls always ready to serve me in airplanes and ocean liners. While the subway train runs from one dark tunnel into the other and I am nervously aware where I keep my money, the words and images decorating my fearful world speak about love, gentleness, tenderness and a joyful togetherness of spontaneous people.

The subway, too, was not as she had expected. She had thought a subway would be a shining thing way way down in the middle of the earth. But there, one had merely to go down a flight of stairs and one beheld the subway; and she did not see the escalator that Papa flew up. But in New York Rachel tasted the best meal she ever had in her whole life. She and Mama had walked for miles and miles and hours and hours. They had had nothing to eat because on the train Rachel had eaten up the hard-boiled egg sandwiches that were supposed to be eaten in some quiet park with the squirrels and pigeons.

When an editor once tried to kill herself by diving in front of a subway train, Edna Chase was pained by her vulgarity. If a Vogue editor was forced to resort to suicide, she should have enough sense to swallow sleeping powders instead of leaving messes for the city sanitation department.

In any case, it has been left to the world of science and rationalism to make a business of purveying of the private and the offensive. Picture magazines and tabloid newspapers place before the millions scenes and facts which violate every definition of humanity. How common is it today to see upon the front page of some organ destined for a hundred thousand homes the agonized face of a child run over in the street, the dying expression of a woman crushed by a subway train, tableaux of execution, scenes of intense private grief. These are the obscenities… The extremes of passion and suffering are served up to enliven the breakfast table or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home. The area of privacy has been abandoned because the definition of person has been lost; there is no longer a standard by which to judge what belongs to the individual man.

the agonized face of a child run over in the street, the dying expression of a woman crushed by a subway train, tableaux of execution, scenes of intense private grief. These are the obscenities. The rise of sensational journalism everywhere testifies to man’s loss of points of reference, to his determination to enjoy the forbidden in the name of freedom. All reserve is being sacrificed to titillation. The extremes of passion and suffering are served up to enliven the breakfast table or to lighten the boredom of an evening at home. The area of privacy has been abandoned because the definition of person has been lost; there is no longer a standard by which to judge what belongs to the individual man.

The drone of the city was everywhere, a mix of countless sounds: subway trains, sizzling hamburgers, cars on elevated highways, automatic doors opening and closing.

I’ve got a better idea,” says my mother. “Tell me about what you did today. Tell me about New York.” So I do, I tell the lifelong New Yorker who chucked it for the woods about the streets of the city: how the subway was so crowded this morning I had to let four trains pass in a row and I was a half hour late to work; how I had a meeting in Times Square and I saw an army of painted topless women posing with tourists for money; how I saw two people dressed up as Disney characters get into a fistfight; how I ate a hot dog from a stand after my client meeting bombed and when I finished it I ate another, on one of the chairs scattered in Bryant Park. A string quartet was playing nearby, under a sponsor banner. “The music part was the part that saved me,” I say. “All of it would have saved me,” says my mother.

Author Alix Kates Shulman describes her experience this way in her memoir Drinking the Rain: I was sitting alone on the downtown subway on my way to pick up the children at their after-school music classes. The train had just pulled out of the 23rd Street station and was accelerating to its cruising speed … Then suddenly, the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began as a desultory thought grew into a vision, larger and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun—our entire living cohort—formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life. No matter what our countless superficial differences, we were equal, we were one, by virtue of simply being alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching endlessly back and ahead. The vision filled me with overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surpassingly lucky to be alive. Then the train pulled into the station and I got off.

He took hold of my arm, and swung me around. “For one thing, I still owe you eternal servitude for saving my life, remember? And for another, the subway station’s that way, stupid. Let’s go.” There isn’t anything in the least romantic about being called stupid. Really. Especially since I knew there was no way Zach would ever be interested in a red-haired, violin-playing preacher’s daughter when there was the remotest chance he could have gorgeous, physical-therapist-in-training Petra. So

only, talking about the people and laying bets on other people’s behaviors. And Rachel stopped fidgeting. Twice Jason found his hand covering hers, and once he looked down to see her hand on top of his. Once in Manhattan, she followed close behind as they switched trains. He pointed out the trains that went uptown and which ones went downtown. They stood facing each other and holding on to a pole. A couple of times, he held on to her when the train took off or came to a stop. Unlike the first leg, this time she jumped right into talking about anything and everything. When he led her from the subway and onto the snowy streets of Manhattan, she was chatting like she always did. She glanced at her watch. “I still have twenty

the directors of the Tesco food-marketing business in South Korea set a goal to increase market share substantially and needed to find a creative way to do so. They looked at their customers and realized that their lives are so busy that it is actually quite stressful to find time to go to the store. So they decided to bring their store to the shoppers. They completely reframed the shopping experience by taking photos of the food aisles and putting up full-sized images in the subway stations. People can literally shop while they wait for the train, using their smartphones to buy items via photos of the QR codes and paying by credit card. The items are then delivered to them when they get home. This new approach to shopping boosted Tesco’s sales significantly.5

Yes, Katie would enjoy America, Frances thought as she put on her coat and her hat; in fact, America would enjoy Katie. She left her apartment block and, crossing the road, walked the short distance to the Ninth Avenue Elevated line at South Ferry. Although the elevated line took longer, she preferred not to take the subway system, being slightly claustrophobic. The idea of speeding along in a small underground train made her feel dizzy, so she preferred to travel aboveground by the El for her day of work as a domestic at the Walker-Browns’ residence. As she took her familiar journey north that morning, along Greenwich Street and Battery Place to Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan and on to Ninth Avenue

The black market was closing. The last sellers and buyers clustered behind an out-of-business toy store in Brooklyn, where the road smelled of trash and the subway trains that ran high above the street rattled the loudest. There were no children for sale at this hour. The last and least important bits of the day’s tidings were hastily sold.

Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated? How Tokyo became the largest city? Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city. There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue. A technological Metropolitan No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.

was now over two million dollars, a nice little nest egg nobody knew about, not even his ex-wife. The $200,000 from Smith would simply be walking-around cash. The St. Paul police and the bureau suspected Smith had a partner when they took him down, but Smith never put Burton’s name in play. He took all the weight. When Smith was being sodomized in jail, when the bureau visited him, talking about how they could make his life easier if he just told them who he worked with, he didn’t give in, didn’t fold, and didn’t turn in his partner. Burton knew all this, tracking his partner’s incarceration, always worried he might break. He never did. Meanwhile, Burton moved to kidnapping and found his true calling within the bureau. When he brought home the daughter of one of New York’s wealthiest businessmen, taking down the kidnappers in a spectacular chase through the subway tunnels, his name and reputation were cemented. He published a book. Traveled the country speaking about his cases, and now performed training for the bureau. Retiring at the end of the year, he could expect to greatly enhance his wealth on the speaking circuit. Several prestigious colleges had inquired of his interest in teaching. His life was set. Then, four months ago Smith showed up on his doorstep. Burton owed him and there was no argument. His life was what it was because Smith never turned him in. Smith took all the heat, and Burton ended up with all the glory. Burton spent days and nights thinking of ways out of helping Smith. He offered up part of his nest egg. Smith wasn’t interested. Burton offered to put him in touch with people who would put him to work, let him earn a respectable living, start a new life, a comfortable life, a decent life. Smith wasn’t interested in any of that. He wanted one thing: he wanted Charlie Flanagan, and he didn’t just want to hurt him, he wanted to gut him. And Burton owed him. And if Burton refused, Smith would kill him. If he could just get through the next day, help Smith get what he wanted and get his crew theirs; he’d be free and clear. Smith would be gone. Burton could retire a happy and wealthy man. If Charlie Flanagan, Lyman Hisle, and their daughters had to pay the ultimate price for that—well, it was him or them. If that was the way it had to be, he’d

At railroad and bus stations across the country, which includes subways, checkpoints are set-up as you come into the station. Like the airports, the TSA will screen all travelers, and if necessary, frisk a traveler if TSA finds anything suspicious. Train and bus schedules, like airline schedules, will necessarily be delayed as travelers are screened. Remember, your safety is of paramount importance to your government as we do not want to see our fellow Americans killed by more random acts of terrorism.

There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.

The Invitation There are lives in which nothing goes right. The would-be suicide takes a bottle of pills and immediately throws up. He tries to hang himself but gets his arm caught in the noose. He tries to throw himself under a subway but misses the last train. He walks home. It is raining. He catches a cold and dies. Once in heaven it is no better. He mops the marble staircase and accidentally jams his foot in the pail. All his harp strings break. His halo slips down over his neck and nearly chokes him. Why is he here? demands one of the noble dead, an archbishop or general, a leader of men: If a loser like that can enter heaven, then how is it an honor for us to be here as well – those of us who are totally deserving? But the would-be suicide knows none of this. In the evening, he returns to his little cloud house and watches the sun set over the planet Earth. He stares down at the cities filled with people and thinks how sad it is that they should rush backwards and forwards as if they had some great destination when their only destination is death itself – a place to be reached by sitting as well as running. He thinks about his own life with its betrayals and disappointments. Regret, regret – how he never made a softball team, how his favorite shirts always shrank in the wash. His eyes moisten and he sheds a few tears, but secretly, because in heaven crying is forbidden. Still, the tears tumble down through all those layers of blue sky and strike a salesman rushing between Point A and Point B. The salesman slips, staggers, and stops as if slapped in the face. People on the street think he’s crazy or drunk. Why am I selling ten thousand ballpoint pens? he asks himself. Suddenly his only wish is to dance the tango. He sees how the setting sun caresses the cold faces of the buildings. He sees a beautiful woman and desperately wants to ask her to stroll in the park. Maybe he will kiss her cheek; maybe she will love him back. You maniac, she tells him, didn’t you know I was only waiting for you to ask me?

When a stretch of Eye Street was finally ready, he had the barricades gracefully opened by two trained bears on loan from the circus. As a result, both Metro and the circus got good press. Even then Pfanstiehl could not please everybody; a labor representative berated him for giving work to nonunion bears.

If I took the nicer subway, it meant I had to go through Manhattan every morning to get there, and that took a really long time. The subway line that ran the short way was the G line, which stopped exclusively in Brooklyn and Queens. That might be the only time the word exclusive has been used to describe the G train.

This is a Rockaway Parkway–bound L train,” the automated voice announced as the urine-and-pickle-scented subway train jolted to a violent stop, as if on a mission to send as many passengers careening into the walls as possible. Rae managed to avoid toppling over only because she was sitting down and wedged tightly in a man-sprawler sandwich.

She redid her bun twice more to optimize the careless effect, then changed from one pair of black jeans into another and pulled on her coat, one with a hood that she used as a cocoon on crowded subway trains.

New York City’s laudable policies designed to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor were simply not sustainable. On average, residents paid 10.2 percent of their incomes to the city in 1975, more than a third higher than a decade earlier. The city’s elected officials (the mayor, comptroller, borough presidents, and city council members) provided services for its citizens and offered benefits to its municipal workers that the city could not afford.52 Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. set the tone in the 1960s. When submitting his last budget, he said, “I do not propose to permit our fiscal problems to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city.” In Lindsay’s first term as mayor, the city’s labor force grew from 250,000 to 350,000 and the city’s budget rose almost 50 percent. The public university system eliminated all tuition charges and accepted any student with a high school diploma. State officials, including Rockefeller, enabled the city’s profligate spending. At the federal level, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s new programs to eradicate poverty passed along costly mandates to local governments.53

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Caemmerer was an important advocate for improving public transportation in both the city and its suburbs. Growing up, he had taken the Long Island Rail Road to his high school in Manhattan, and as state senator he represented thousands of railroad riders. When Caemmerer first started calling for transit operating subsidies in the 1960s, his Republican colleagues were appalled by what they considered to be his “socialist” position. He emphasized the subway’s importance by referring to it as the second-largest single public investment ever made by Americans, eclipsed only by the Panama Canal.

After the MTA released its $14.4 billion plan in November 1980, a governor’s aide told Ravitch that Carey was not interested in entertaining a fare hike or a tax package for the MTA. Carey preferred holding down the fare rather than financing a multibillion-dollar capital program. The governor also saw Ravitch’s proposal as a threat to Westway. A coalition of thirty-seven civic and environmental groups had filed suit in federal court to stop the highway project. They wanted the state to take the federal transportation funds designated for the project and use them for transit improvements instead. If Carey admitted that the transit system was underfunded and starved for capital, it would have played into the hands of the Westway opponents.48 Faced with resistance in Albany, Ravitch began a lobbying effort that no state official other than Robert Moses at the height of his powers could have undertaken. He started by pleading with the governor and his staff, explaining that without new sources of revenue he would have to dramatically raise the fare. Then he took his case directly to the public. Rather than minimizing the transit system’s problems, Ravitch made sure that reporters learned about all the delays and breakdowns occurring in MTA facilities. He visited editorial boards and told them, “If you don’t pay attention, the politicians won’t.” He talked to every reporter who called. Unlike his predecessors, he admitted that the MTA’s services, particularly during peak hours, were “deteriorating at an accelerated rate.” The newspapers, he said, were “my shield and my sword.

One legislative staffer said about the MTA, “It’s a Catch-22. The service is so bad nobody wants to say give them more money to spend—but if they don’t get more money to spend, service will never get better.” Not only did the assembly and senate need more than two days, but the Democratic leaders in both houses did exactly what Carey had feared would happen: they called on the governor to trade in the federal funds earmarked for Westway to help pay for the MTA’s capital program.

In March, Koch threatened to stop Westway if the state did not provide funding to protect the fare at the same time that it passed an MTA capital program. That was not an idle threat, since federal officials did not want to be caught in the middle of a local battle. The US Department of Transportation had clearly stated that federal funds for Westway would be awarded only if both state and city officials agreed that it should be built. In response, the governor told reporters that Westway would be built and that he was not planning on meeting with the mayor to discuss the issue. He said, “If the mayor wants to come to a meeting, tell him to bring money.” Deputy Mayor Bobby Wagner pointed out that “traditionally the politics of mass transit brings out the worst in public officials.”60

Carol Bellamy, the city council president, who also served on the MTA board, supported Ravitch and publicly feuded with the mayor over the MTA’s capital program. In March, she said, “There is so much posturing. All the characters—the governor, the mayor, the MTA, the comptroller, the legislative leaders, the council president—trying to avoid responsibility, and meanwhile the system collapses around us.” An exasperated Ravitch remarked, “There are always four factors involved in these types of decisions. They are personalities, political interests, geographic and economic interests, and substance. In this case, we have an excess of the first three.”61

B train for Brighton Beach. Though the subway trip may have been shorter than going by car, it still seemed interminable, and just when I thought I couldn’t take one more second, the train rocketed out of the tunnel and up onto an elevated track. I should have realized part of the trip would be aboveground, but I hadn’t been expecting it. We rattled along the track, past endless grim, grimy red-brick buildings. A few seconds later, we pulled into

Subway Series is a series of baseball games between two New York City teams, since fans can reach the stadiums via subway trains. The first Subway Series were played as World Series games. For example, the Yankees played the New York Giants in 1921, and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941. More recently, the Mets and the Yankees have been playing Subway Series games during the regular season. They typically play groups of two or three games at each team’s stadium. The Mets and the Yankees competed in a World Series Subway Series in 2000, and the Yankees won in five games.

Mom used to say she became a New Yorker the day she openly wept on the subway. She’d gotten cut in the final round of an audition, and an old lady across the train car had handed her a tissue without even looking up from her book.

How I wish I could fold inward and shut down and shake off predators with one touch. What a skill, what a thrill that could be. Touch me now on the dance floor, don't you see my wedding ring? Touch me not in the subway; touch me not on the train, one the plane, in a cab or a limo. Touch me not in a funicular going up the side of a mountain, touch me not on the deck of a cruise ship, touch me not in the green room right before I go onstage, touch me not at the bar while I wait for my to-go order, touch me not at a faculty party, touch me not if you are a visiting writer, touch me not at the post office while I'm waiting to send a letter to my grandmother, let me and my children and everyone's children decide who touches them and who touches them not, touch them not, touch them now.

A pillar of water rose in the sea halfway between them; something black shot out of the base of the pillar, turning end over end with incredible rapidity, rising out of Krause's sight and roaring overhead with a sound like the fastest subway train ever heard.

She got off the train, thinking that she never felt really human until she reached Harlem and thus got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown streets and in the subway. Escaped from the openly appraising looks of the white men whose eyes seemed to go through her clothing to her long brown legs. On the trains their eyes came at her furtively from behind newspapers, or half-concealed under hatbrims or partly shielded by their hands. And there was a warm, moist look about their eyes that made her want to run. These other folks feel the same way, she thought—that once they are freed from the contempt in the eyes of the downtown world, they instantly become individuals. Up here they are no longer creatures labeled simply 'colored' and therefore all alike. She noticed that once the crowd walked the length of the platform and started up the stairs toward the street, it expanded in size. The same people who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platform, suddenly grew so large they could hardly get up the stairs to the street together. She reached the street at the very end of the crowd and stood watching them as they scattered in all directions, laughing and talking to each other.

that her father died yesterday evening, of a heart attack, playing patience on his bed. They leave for India six days later, six weeks before they’d planned. Alan and Judy, waking the next morning to Ashima’s sobs, then hearing the news from Ashoke, leave a vase filled with flowers by the door. In those six days, there is no time to think of a good name for Gogol. They get an express passport with “Gogol Ganguli” typed across the United States of America seal, Ashoke signing on his son’s behalf. The day before leaving, Ashima puts Gogol in his stroller, puts the sweater she’d knit for her father and the paint-brushes in a shopping bag, and walks to Harvard Square, to the subway station. “Excuse me,” she asks a gentleman on the street, “I must get on the train.” The man helps her carry down the stroller, and Ashima waits on the platform. When the train comes she heads immediately back to Central Square. This time she is wide awake.

So: the end of the line. How slow its approach, how sudden its arrival. We never truly believe it's coming, he thought, and then before we know it, it's here. All the things we've done in our lives, and the undone things as well, extinguished in an instant.

When I travel in airplane or the subway train, I feel my 'self ' is constant. In both cases I cover the time and space, hence the 'Self ' is out of these realms.

Writer Gina Trapani has pointed out three prime spots to turn off our brains and take a break from our connected lives: • Commute. A moving train or subway car is the perfect time to write, doodle, read, or just stare out the window. (If you commute by car, audiobooks are a great way to safely tune out.) A commute happens twice a day, and it nicely separates our work life from our home life. • Exercise. Using our body relaxes our mind, and when our mind gets relaxed, it opens up to having new thoughts. Jump on the treadmill and let your mind go. If you’re like me and you hate exercise, get a dog—dogs won’t let you get away with missing a day. • Nature. Go to a park. Take a hike. Dig in your garden. Get outside in the fresh air. Disconnect from anything and everything electronic. It’s very important to separate your work from the rest of your life.

Rather than create a city where all residents would be within walking distance of rapid transit services, officials built one where all residents would be within a short drive from a highway.

and she giggled as she walked against the current of bodies in the crosswalk. The subway was right there, but she didn’t want to take it yet—the beauty of New York City was walking, was serendipity and strangers, and it was still her birthday, and so she was just going to keep going. Alice turned and walked up Eighth, past the crummy tourist shops selling magnets and keychains and i ♥ ny T-shirts and foam fingers shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Alice had walked for almost ten blocks when she realized she had a destination. She and Sam and their friends had enjoyed many, many hours in bars as teenagers: they’d spent nights at the Dublin House, on 79th Street; at the Dive Bar, on Amsterdam and 96th Street, with the neon sign shaped like bubbles, though that one was a little too close to home to be safe; and some of the fratty bars farther down Amsterdam, the ones with the buckets of beers for twenty dollars and scratched pool tables. Sometimes they even went to some NYU bars downtown, on MacDougal Street, where they could dash across the street for falafel and then go back to the bar, like it was their office and they were running out for lunch. Their favorite bar, though, was Matryoshka, a Russian-themed bar in the 50th Street 1/9 subway station. Now it was just the 1 train, but back then, there was also the 9. Things were always changing, even when they didn’t feel like it. Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone

A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol. CHESTER HIMES

Only one moment surprised her, when a young woman in a clutch of young people—an art class assigned to the event, after all these years she could spot them without trying—asked earnestly, “Could you tell us the secret to your success?” It had the feel of a rehearsed question, as though the young woman had said it over and over to herself on the subway train on the way to the hotel. Rebecca’s answer was completely unrehearsed. “The secret is that there is no secret,” she replied. “That’s true of almost everything, in my opinion. Everything is accidental.

Much of the signal system was installed in the 1930s and transit employees now have to fabricate their own replacement parts for obsolete equipment. While subway riders have to rely on this century-old technology, New York's automobile drivers take advantage of traffic signals that are part of a sophisticated information network. Above the streets, the city's Department of Transportation monitors data from sensors and video cameras to identify congestion choke points, and the remotely adjusts computerized traffic signals to optimize the flow of vehicles. Drivers obtain accurate, real-time traffic condition information via electronic signals, computers and smartphones.

The cost of the first phase was astronomical because of 1) inefficient phasing and high real estate costs, 2) powerful unions earning high wages and dictating costly work rules, and 3) regulations and environmental sensitivities.

If you have measles, you’re so contagious that 90% of all susceptible people that come close to you will be infected just by being in your vicinity. So if you have it and other, non-vaccinated people share a subway train or a classroom with you, it is highly likely that you will infect others.

I am also way too lazy to be a foodie. Foodies will travel for miles in search of the perfect hamburger. “There is this place in Greenpoint that’s only an hour by train and a forty-minute walk from the subway that has the best burger in town!” It can’t be better than the burger I can get across the street. Mostly, I just want the closest best burger in town.

Trains, bike shares, subways, shuttles, and car services are all locked in horizontal competition, but smart partnerships and platforms will help commuters carry their identity across all these networks seamlessly and intuitively.

I’m starting to see what you mean about city living—in the sense that you begin to disconnect a little, turn inward into your own little bubble. I suppose it makes sense, when you’re sharing such tight spaces so often. So odd that on the subway you actually touch people with your legs and arms—at rush hour bodies are pushed up against each other almost intimately. It’s something that would be quite awkward even on a different type of train. It’s all about context, isn’t it?

He slept in the park, on the subway trains, or with friends from work. He never had a home of his own.

A subway car is a microcosm of our planet. You saw all nationalities, creeds, genders, persuasions. You saw public displays of affection and arguments. You heard music and voices, laughter and tears. There were rich people in business suits (often Simon himself) and there were panhandlers. You were all equals on the train. You all paid the same fare. You all had the same right to the same seats.

A few days later, at three a.m. on a weekday, he arrived at Fulton Street Station. Once he descended inside, Phillip walked onto the subway platform. When nobody was around, Phillip jumped to the subway track. After he examined the place for cameras, motion detectors, and subway workers, he paced into the tunnel. No trains were around, so he proceeded. Immersed in blue light, perspiration and his body odor, he proceeded with trembling feet. Little by little, Phillip made his way into City Hall station.

At the subway station you wait fifteen minutes on the platform for a train. Finally a local, enervated by graffiti, shuffles into the station. You get a seat and hoist a copy of the New York Post. The Post is the most shameful of your several addictions. You hate to support this kind of trash with your thirty cents, but you are a secret fan of Killer Bees, Hero Cops, Sex Fiends, Lottery Winners, Teenage Terrorists, Liz Taylor, Tough Tots, Sicko Creeps, Living Nightmares, Life on Other Planets, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Miracle Diets and Coma Babies.

She got on the train and found a seat on the cold molded plastic. Looking around, Olivia saw her fellow passengers wearing masks of disinterest. But Olivia knew that very few of those masks reflected what was going on in the brains of their owners. Everyone was entertaining their own parties of inner turmoil. No one had it easy.

I think about what makes us lonely on a recent subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As the train hurtles over the Manhattan Bridge, the subway car is silent, save for the muffled beats of a pop song. A woman up front is reading a book, and a few commuters are dozing. The rest of us are glued to our devices: heads bent, earbuds in, fingers scrolling. The trains sputters and then stops completely mid-bridge; plugged into our own curated digital landscapes, no one looks up. What was once a period of contemplation, boredom, small talk, confrontations, maybe even some light flirting, has been replaced by screens. In addition to filling the blank spaces in our day, our phones double as a crutch to “lean on when we are socially anxious or uncomfortable,” says Julia Bainbridge, a freelance writer and editor, who, in 2016, launched The Lonely Hour, a podcast dedicated to exploring the condition. The world is unpredictable, but our screens provide a convenient buffer against the possibility of spontaneous human interaction.

A train horn blew, but it seemed a little distant, like it was coming from somewhere up ahead. It blew again, louder this time. “There’s another train coming!” shouted Ruby. “We’re going to crash!” “Don’t worry,” said the captain cheerfully. “Vermillion knows what to do.” Matt closed his eyes and waited for impact, but it never came. The train picked up speed, faster and faster. It roared so loud Matt couldn’t even hear his own voice. He covered his ears. The whole train was vibrating violently, and then it lurched forward with such a jolt that the three Hudsons toppled over each other and landed hard on the floor. Ruby gasped. “The floor!” she said. “What the . . . what?” said Corey. Matt looked down. He could hardly believe his eyes. The floor appeared to be melting, morphing from the smooth worn floors of the subway car to cracked and rough wooden planks. A nail head poked at his hand. Matt looked up. All around him the train car was altering, growing, transforming. The walls expanded, and the windows shrank. Lacy curtains unfurled and crawled down the sides of the windows like fast-growing vines. The hard plastic benches of the subway swelled into plush chairs and tables with white tablecloths. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling contracted and then dropped, forming crystal chandeliers. A plush rug sprouted beneath him. It grew through the floor as though it were a carpet of grass pushing through dirt. Matt picked himself up, then helped Corey and Ruby, who had somehow gotten tangled in the rug. It seemed to have grown up and around Ruby’s wrists and ankles, as though it were trying to weave her into itself. Matt and Corey helped free her, and then Ruby yelped as the white rat leaped across their faces and landed on a little table. It pulled a match out of the table drawer with its tail, struck it against the wall, and began lighting lanterns and sconces, then the crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, until the space was well lit once again. It was not at all like the train they had been in before. The subway car no longer looked like a subway at all. Rather, it looked like a very old-fashioned train, but one for rich passengers.

One study found that the reading scores of students in a New York City elementary school were significantly lower if their classrooms were situated close to elevated subway tracks on which trains rattled past every four to five minutes. When the researchers, armed with their findings, pressed NYC transit system officials and Board of Education members to install noise-dampening materials on the tracks and in the classrooms, students’ scores jumped back up. Similar results have been found for children near airplane flight paths. When the city of Munich, Germany, moved its airport, the memory and reading scores of children near the new location plummeted, while those near the old location rose significantly.

Dreams? Yours are skewed versions of your everyday reality. Of Java, Oracle and servers, greasy subway trains and skyscrapers. You do fall off the precipice sometimes, naked, fly into three-dimensional turquoise oceans. At times you see pixels around you. Sperms. Electrons and black holes, the matrix, 0’s and 1’s, polarised light.

Construction for Hylan’s new subway lines coincided with a booming New York City economy. Skyscrapers were rising in Midtown Manhattan, while new apartment buildings and single-family homes sprouted up near subway stations all across the city. In the 1920s, one out of every five new apartments and homes in the entire country was built in New York City.

The city’s garment industry thrived on cheap immigrant labor and inexpensive transit services. But the combination of rapidly increasing ridership and insufficient funding for the subways created a problem that raised the ire of numerous civic groups in the mid-1920s. A leader of the Metropolitan Housewives’ League pointed out “the inhuman, indecent, and dangerous crowding and jamming of passengers, the unclean trains and platforms, and especially the conditions of the public waiting and toilet rooms which are filthy, unsanitary and disease breeding.” Likewise, the City Club of New York told city officials, “We do not get a civilized ride for a nickel today. We get instead a chance to hang on, like a chimpanzee, to a flying ring suspended from the roof of the car while we are crushed to the point of indecency by our fellow sufferers.

On a per-mile basis, the completed section of the Second Avenue subway was the most expensive subway extension ever built anywhere in the world. Costs were high because of inefficient phasing and high real estate costs, powerful unions earning high wages and dictating costly work rules, and extensive regulations and environmental sensitivities. If the Second Avenue subway’s thirteen other planned stations are ever completed, the 8.5-mile line would be one of the world’s most expensive infrastructure projects, surpassing the $21 billion rail tunnel between England and France. Given the extraordinary cost and lengthy construction period, the Second Avenue subway will more than likely be the last subway line built in New York for generations to come.

The Board of Estimate’s widely publicized hearings did not attract unruly and sizable crowds. In fact, only a few hundred spectators attended. A Cornell University public health professor, Wilson Smiley, was one of the sixty-nine people who testified. He warned that overcrowded subway cars were increasing the dangers of spreading influenza and pneumonia. When the mayor asked him, “Wouldn’t that apply to people going to churches?” Smiley responded to great laughter, “Our churches are commodious and well-ventilated, but very seldom overcrowded.

You already have a lot of ideas about Hell. It’s amazing what Dante and thousands of years of folklore can do to a place’s reputation. I mean, I’m not going to lie to you: it is Hell. It’s not fantastic. But let’s see if this is relatable: You’re late to your aunt’s boyfriend’s birthday brunch because your alarm was on mute even though you know you turned it up the night before. You barrel onto the subway, managing to squeeze yourself between the woman blasting a Techno for the Lonely playlist and the man who farts every time he sneezes, and, just when the lights of the station are out of view, the train lurches to a stop with a death rattle and goes dark. The woman elbows you in the gut as she hits Replay, and the man’s snot tickles as it spays your cheek, and you think about how you don’t even like your aunt’s boyfriend or even your aunt and you hate brunch, and what do you see? I’ll tell you; I’ve heard it a million times. You say, ‘This is Hell’. Well, you're right. That's Hell. At least the top floors of it.

Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew long ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now. They walk by pathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.

ON MOST DAYS, I enter the Capitol through the basement. A small subway train carries me from the Hart Building, where my office is located, through an underground tunnel lined with the flags and seals of the fifty states. The train creaks to a halt and I make my way, past bustling staffers, maintenance crews, and the occasional tour group, to the bank of old elevators that takes me to the second floor. Stepping off, I weave around the swarm of press that normally gathers there, say hello to the Capitol Police, and enter, through a stately set of double doors, onto the floor of the U.S. Senate.

New York might run on Dow Jones, lattes, dollar signs, and neon lies, but what beats in its breast is it’s people: it’s hip-hop, it’s bodegas, it’s art, it’s Union Square grifters, it’s subway mariachi, it’s two-jobs-and-night-school-thank-you-I’m-fine mothers, it’s daughters full of dreams of making it big, it’s multicolored sons and their hopes blazing bright as a meth tweaker’s eyes.

several steps back. “A chip like that is bad news,” he said slowly, as if I were stupid. “It might be NSA. I won’t mess with it. Look, you stay away from me! Next thing, they’ll be after me.” He backed away into the darkness, his hands up as if to ward off evil. “I hate them! Hate them!” Then he was gone, back into the bowels of the tunnels. “See ya,” I whispered. “Wouldn’t want to be ya.” Fang looked at me irritably. “I can’t take you anywhere.” I so wished he weren’t all banged up—so I could whack him. 120 We tried to get some sleep—God knows we needed it. I kind of dozed off. Then I wasn’t asleep, I knew that much. But I wasn’t awake, exactly. I’d been, like, sucked into another dimension, where I could feel my body, sort of, knew where I was, and yet was powerless to move or speak. I was in a movie, starring me, watching it all happen around me. I was going down a dark tunnel, or the tunnel was slipping by me, and I was staying still. Trains were rushing past me on both sides, so it was a subway tunnel. I was thinking, Okay, subway tunnel. Yeah, so? Then I saw a train station: Thirty-third Street. The Institute’s building was on Thirty-first Street. In the darkness of the waking-dream subway tunnel, I saw a filthy rusted-over grate. I saw myself pulling the grate up. Fetid brown water gurgled below. Bleah—it was the sewer system, beneath the city. Hello. Beneath a rainbow . . . Bingo, Max, said my Voice. My eyes popped wide open. Fang was watching me with concern. “Now what?” “I know what we have to do,” I said. “Wake everyone up.” 121 “This way,” I said, walking in the darkness of the tunnels. It was as if a detailed map was imprinted on my retinas, so I could see it laid over reality, tracing the path we needed to follow. If this map effect was part of my life forever, I would go nuts, but right now it was dang useful. One

In her dreams, the hand is a white spider. Its legs are translucent, its body the color of bones. It latches its fangs into Delilah and her arm falls from her body like a cut of meat. Delilah collapses into parts, a puzzle coming undone, and Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts. An arm is not a person, so if Delilah is an arm underneath a train and a leg on a subway platform and a head lost in the crevices of the tracks, which part is the real Delilah?

Watching politics is like watching the grass grow. But one day you turn your head and everything has changed.” A

Gene Russianoff from the Straphangers Campaign said that because New York had not built a new subway line in half a century, subway riders had to deal with “elbow-in-the-ribs crowding that would violate Department of Agriculture guidelines for shipping cattle.” He argued, “If the region can raise $3.5 billion to spare tens of thousands of daily Long Island Rail Road commuters, we must find the resources to come to the rescue of the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers suffering from grossly inadequate subway service on the East Side.” Robert Paaswell, the director of City College’s transportation research center, explained that overcrowding on platforms and stairways causes people to fall and get jammed up as they try to get on and off trains. He warned that the problem could be especially dangerous for the elderly and disabled. Then he brought up a question that had not yet received any attention in the Second Avenue subway discussion: what would happen if an overcrowded Lexington Avenue–line subway station needed to be suddenly evacuated in the event of a terrorist attack?83

The default mode in New York is nothing happens. You need a powerful coalition of interests that politicians and bureaucracies can’t say no to.” When Yaro told Sander that he wanted the coalition to make the Second Avenue subway a priority, Sander initially thought Yaro was joking, because it seemed so far-fetched. Sander was convinced of the project’s viability only after talking with one of his colleagues, Sheldon Fialkoff, who had worked for Bob Olmsted at the MTA.62

I let myself cry a few tears on the subway platform. A woman hands me a tissue without breaking her stride. It’s all very New York, I think, this feeling of being lonelier and less known than ever but being in a city teeming with people who have all felt shades of the same thing. The subway train feels like a strange safe haven from my thoughts, lulling me into a calm with its newly familiar rocking and whining, with these strangers who shoot me sympathetic glances that all seem to say, Been there, publicly cried about that.

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On the subway" "we rode the trains" "Got on, got off" "Sat & watched, sat" "& slept" "Walked from car to car" "Stood in stations" "We were caught up" "in movement" "in ongoingness" "& in ongoingness" "of voices," "for example" "Which of us spoke? did" "it matter?" "Who saw what" "was being seen," "knew what" "was known?" "Gradually what was seen" "became what I saw," "to me" "Despair & outrage" "became mine too" "Sorrow" "became mine—" "To ride a" "mechanical" "contrivance" "in the darkness" "To be steeped in" "the authority" "of" "another's mind" "the tyrant's mind" "Life of bits & pieces" "cars & scenes" "disconnected" "little dreams" "False continuum" "mechanical time:" "What do we miss?" "What do we miss?" "Was there once" "something else?" "There are animals" "in the subway" "But they" "are mute & sad" "There are singers" "There are corpses" "There is substance" "of darkness" "And emotion" "strong emotion" "The air" "is all emotion

We couldn't find" "our fathers— " "there were several" "of us" "We were walking through subway cars" "looking" "for our fathers" "Endless train" "It seemed the longest" "train there is" "as if it circled" "the world—" "& we walked it, we were searching" "for our fathers,

But he didn’t get on that escalator. Instead, he walked toward the subway and went through the turnstile and got on the microbe spore biodome coaster that was the 1 train and headed downtown to Houston Street. There, he alighted, trudging up the stairs.

vapour. It was a terrible,  indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry——Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed— had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.

We convened the leading financial CEOs at the New York Fed that evening for an emergency meeting. We met in a dark conference room behind wrought-iron gates on the first floor, where we could hear the rumble of the subway trains underground. Faces were drawn and tense. Careers and fortunes were in jeopardy. No one in the room could be sure their firm would survive. None of us had seen anything like this in our lifetimes.

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