Manhattan as sublime +/or a stockyard / the Quote Of The Day

so much to read, so little time
Today’s QOTD comes from Lapham’s Quarterly / a magazine of history and ideas (h/t Andrew Sullivan), into which I have barely dipped a toe. His October 3 Preamble includes this insight (one small part of a long essay; memo to self: find out more about Lapham; consider the $49/yr for this quarterly Quarterly??):

When seen at a height or a distance, from across the Hudson River or from the roof of Rockefeller Center, Manhattan meets the definitions of the sublime. At ground level Manhattan is a stockyard, the narrow streets littered with debris and laid out in the manner of cattle chutes, the tenements and storefronts uniformly fitted to fit the framework of a factory or a warehouse. The modus vivendi under the boot of the modus operandi. The commercial imperative comes with no apology. Like most other American cities, New York is a product of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, built on a standardized grid, conceived neither as a thing of beauty nor as an image of the cosmos, much less as an expression of man’s humanity to man, but as a shopping mall in which to perform the heroic feats of acquisition and consumption.

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© Sandy Mattingly 2010