City Desk: The N.Y. Difference.(New York City, after 9/11/01)(Brief Article)

Sometimes New York just tires you out. Work is tiring; play is tiring; commuting is tiring, whether by subway if you live in town, or by train or car if you come in from the suburbs, or by car or bus if you have a weekend place in the country (New York can make even relaxation tiring). So you have to get away, to some place like Spanish Town in the Caribbean, where the temperature falls to 83 degrees before dawn and rises to 85 degrees in the middle of the afternoon, where the micro-activity is the waves and the macro-activity is the tide, and where the tallest things are the century plants on Cow Hill. But even as leaving is part of New York life, so is coming back. At the interface of return everything becomes fresh again, and for a moment the strangeness of New York is actually strange.

It starts with the nighttime lights as the flight lumbers into JFK. There are many more of them in New York than there are in Spanish Town. What is even more noticeable is the greater density. The lights of Spanish Town are separated by dark rural patches-goat runs, chicken rambles, junk-car graveyards. People in the outer boroughs have little grass patches to put their Nativity scenes on, but no New Yorker has had a real yard for a hundred years. When the Trade Towers fell, a plane tree outside St. Paul's Chapel toppled in the blast. The buildings will be rebuilt before such a tree grows again; we want the buildings, as is proved by the fact that Manhattan has more skyscrapers than plane trees.

There are more people in New York than in Spanish Town, obviously, but there are many more night people, even at 11:15 on a Sunday. At that hour, we could not order from our favorite take-out place, so we had to choose between the two good 23-hour-a-day restaurants within five minutes of our apartment building. The only difference night made was that we got a smaller rather than a larger booth at the restaurant we chose because the day staff, which knows us, was off (probably out partying). We ordered coffee, with caffeine: Why try to sleep? We were already up.

The stars over Spanish Town are huge, passive, and lustrous. The Pleiades there recall Sappho (freely translated): "The moon has set / But not the Pleiades / Let's have a Red Stripe." The stars over New York are hard, watchful little points. The real stars are the headlights, the spots under apartment awnings to light the doorman's stand-up, the neon in the windows of all-night delis.

Dawn brings the sound of life everywhere. In Spanish Town, the ground doves, which look like cinnamon buns, start weeping, and you become aware of the hushing mother at the beach: ssh, ssh. In New York, the lady upstairs with high heels begins pacing over the floor she will never carpet; the surf of traffic rolls up Third Avenue. Despite the blackout curtain you have pulled to prolong the night that you shortened at the other end by drinking regular coffee, it's time for a new day.

In Spanish Town, the resorts offer wan faxed digests ...