The Eternal Round.

Somerset Maugham said that if you sat in the Cafe de la Paix in Paris long enough, everyone would pass by. The force of his observation depends on grasping the full meaning of passing by. Everyone will appear, and, just as suddenly, disappear. At the Cafe de la Paix, or in New York, you are constantly, briefly, meeting people and things and losing them forever.

Leave French bikinis on Hawaiian island girls to the Beach Boys; sunny beaches have time and space for baking and staring. The ideally urban woman's fashion is the long slit skirt under a long coat. Worn over a jaunty stride, they show a little leg -- a very little leg. Calves and knees appear like dots in Morse code. It is voyeurism by strobe light, display in homeopathic doses. Who needs the expense and mutual degradation of peep shows? These are public, free, and voluntary.

The ideal urban form of poetry is the haiku. Japanese haiku are meant to capture a momentary perception of the unity or the transience of nature. Cawing crows are like winter; snowing cherry blossoms are like life. City life makes it own haiku by yanking the mind from object to object. No poet at first glance looks less like a miniaturist than the mountainous Brooklynite Walt Whitman. But his word heaps turn out to be haiku-length perceptions raked together: "The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer -- the reporter's lead flies swiftly over the note- book -- the sign-painter is lettering with red and gold . . ."

Sounds pelt us as unforgivingly as sights. Left to its own internal logic, the din of city life would become unendurable. The legions of sanity fight endless frontier war against the roar. In the early Eighties earphones muzzled radio, and Giuliani, a decade later, cracked down on the boom boxes of the incorrigible. But then cell phones proliferated. What was worse, the bass hooks of rappers or the sprightly William Tell Overtures that signal incoming calls? The urban chorus reached a climax in my gym when, for a year or so, you could hear the radio (generally hip-hop), the TV (generally a psychopathic talk show), and the thunder of 75-lb. free weights hitting the floor after a set of chest presses. Now that the management keeps the TV on mute it feels like the country.

Wrapped in your own thoughts, you nevertheless show your thoughts to the world. In the subway car the Chinese man reads a textbook on programming, the Japanese man reads a Brazilian newspaper, the Hispanic woman reads the Bible, the kid underlines Jane Eyre. Zealots occasionally leave their thoughts on the seat for others. The bearded young man ostentatiously puts down his Daily Worker (though I haven't seen that for a while), the Hasidic man leaves a flier about Nazi-like archeological digs in Israel, the pamphlet with a clever teaser on its cover turns out to be about Christ. What a symposium they would all make, ...