Twice a day, six days a week, some 3,250.000 New Yorkers descend into the maelstrom of the subways with the haunted resignation of lemmings, there to die the small death of the rush hour. Their resurrection is recurrent, rapid and rumpled. The subway rider issues forth from a car door like breakfast food shot from gunswith the important difference that he is thereby shrunken rather than puffed.
Entombment in the subways bears some resemblance, anthropologically, to that of Ben Jonson, who was buried in Westminster Abbey standing up, although with considerable ceremony and no shoving. In New York, the ritual...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
