“On a dark winter evening when Yankee Stadium is all lit up, it radiates an annunciatory glow, as if an amazing idea had just occurred to it.”
From “Knights vs. Cyclones” by Ian Frazier in the January 16, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
“The penny post (with its stamps and its uniform rates) arrived in the United Kingdom in 1840, and in the decade that followed Anthony Trollope, a postal inspector, was travelling all over Ireland on the swift new express trains and persistent locals, to make sure that every letter, wherever bound, was actually being delivered the next day. On those same trains, he sat and wrote novels, and in the novels dukes and barristers and young MPs and wary heiresses and country doctors were writing letters that moved the plot along or reversed or tilted it in some way.”
From a Roger Angell essay on the Postal Service and the writing of letters, in the January 2, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
Being a water person, I was interested to read that “growing up by the sea” was a major influence on the development of architect Renzo Piano’s ideas. In an Q&A with Belinda Luscombe in the July 4, 2011 issue of Time magazine, Mr. Piano explained the desires/obsessions this caused: “Growing up by the sea, you get an idea of the infinite surface of the world, and you grow up with a number of desires … One is for light. Light is probably the most untouchable, immaterial material of architecture. I have another obsession: fighting gravity. In the sea, everything floats.”
Another early influence — the fact that he came from a family of builders — accounts for Mr. Piano’s ability to mesh the often disparate worlds of contruction and architecture. He said, “I’ve never betrayed the idea that architecture starts with construction. Architecture is the art of making good, solid, safe buildings for humans.”
“He began his writing career with stories drawn from his childhood and his wartime experiences, but he instinctively found his way to poetry. ’One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and a poem started,’ he told National Public Radio in 2006.”
From the August 25, 2011 New York Times obituary of poet Samuel Menashe.
“The idea was long dismissed as a quixotic fantasy.”
These words — describing an idea that is now a flourishing reality, a park called the Walkway Over the Hudson — were written by Peter Applebome in his October 17, 2011 New York Times article about a nearby Hudson River span, the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is slated for demolition and replacement. Some people want see the Tappan Zee preserved and also turned into walkway (the first one was a former railroad bridge) or a bikeway. Others envision a park like Manhattan’s High Line, another long-shot project that has blossomed beyond anyone’s expectations.
What caught my atttention was the description of any idea being “quixotic fantasy” — as if there’s something wrong with that. I think not! I turned to a website called www.quixote-quest.org for some comfort. “Quixotic,” of course, refers to Don Quixote, the much-beloved literary hero whose weak spot is that he “is an idealist seeing things through rose-colored glasses at times. He fights impossible symbolic battles while the rest of the world says it can’t be done and mocks him for trying. It is ironic that a crazy man is showing humanity the ‘right way’ to live.”
Why is it so easy to mock someone for trying?