North End Avenue and Murray Street

This sentence from William James smack in the middle of the sidewalk struck me as I walked on top of it because I had just finished reading a (fantastic) biography of the man. This quote, about New York City, reads: “The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the lightness withal, as if there was nothing that was not easy, and the great pulses and bounds of progress, so many in directions all simultaneous that the coordination is indefinitely future, give a kind of drumming background of life that I have never felt before.” (I am impressed that the italics are maintained in the cement.) James goes on to say in the original text, a letter to his brother, “I'm sure that once in that movement, and at home, all other places would seem insipid.”