“I have seen Paris; but shall I affirm I can form such an idea of that city as will perfectly represent all its streets and houses in their real and just proportions?”

If I decide to visit my parents in the city, I must also visit the station and catch a train. This prompts me to take a book along, sit down in the cabin, turn to the first page, and look out the window. Things move by, I shut the book and I am in the city.

From the heavy-rail platform, I walk to the subway terminal and I find my train waiting or I do not find my train waiting. I open my book and read the first page until my train arrives. I sit in the car and crack the cover, but then I look up at the other passengers in the car and then I close my book and I look up and then I leave.

I walk to the boulevard and then I walk to the avenue, but I cannot read as I walk, so I clutch my book in my armpit until I reach a distant part of the avenue and enter my parents’ house which is an English tudor of textured stucco which is what He must have had in mind when He textured shit.

I enter the house and I make coffee. When it is ready, I drink it and make another four cups and then I walk around the house and return to the kitchen where I make my coffee and drink another four cups.

When the sun sets, I tuck myself in and I open my book. I read a few lines and I think about the lines, which makes me look up, and looking up makes me forget about the lines. When I look up in my bedroom, I cannot look at people or anything particularly interesting, so I listen to cars driving by and distant honking and clanging. Then I listen beyond the particular rumbles and clanks, fixing upon the low din of the city.

I imagine myself hovering over the streets like an angel or a bird and I try to visualize it grid for grid, working out from my immediate area, into my periphery.

What slimy depths I fathom on the Hollywood strip, what, with SS runes scrawled in some occult place across the street from Mann’s Chinese, and a doodle of a boar-like negro on the door of the parking structure next to a field. On the final floor of the parking structure there is a compartment and that’s where the pig-man is, as well as something that resembles a three class Venn diagram and a radiator with a patina. Everything is filthy and squalid here.

I work out still farther and I encounter little blank spots and uncharted waters on my feeble mental map. What crevices are unknown to me with what treasures-what unknown x’s are to be found in those places that make me draw a blank?

Suddenly, I realize that I can travel no farther-the city is simply too big and I cannot hear the full extent of its workings. I think of an intestine too deep for the doctor’s prodding instrument.

We must operate. So, I leave the house and attempt to fill my x’s, only to find myself fixed upon every little microcosm so that I may only concern myself with its particular x’s as if the microcosm were a city in itself.

Hours later you might find me combing through the most minute cracks in the sidewalk, with microphone devices attached to my ears to seek out the faint city whispers. I would sprout a snout and a pair of claws to burrow into the earth or into the deepest pores of matter to behold city foundations.

Except that, the city is so large that a man might spend his life fathoming its nature, and by nature I am a lazy and irresolute man, or if you prefer, a nomad, a Scythian galloping about the steppes-commanded by nothing but his caprice and commanding nothing under his horizon. In time, my bones will rest and then my bones will turn to dust. A little later, the horizon will close and take the dust with it.