STEVEN
J.
ZIPPERSTEIN
117
thing essential about one singularly self-aware life spent in intimacy
with books. I hoped this would provide a clue as to how such a life
starts, how it is sustained (or not), how it comes
to
an end, how it is
later recalled, forgotten, perhaps revived. Rosenfeld himself summed up
well this quest in the last lines of his last essay on Chicago, seeking
to
define what he called the principle of a ll great cities:
As I see it, this principle is very simple (but I am a luftmensch: with
a thirst for water).
It
is to give the city something to lose. And this
is done by producing without manufacturing, consuming without
eating...and finding the everlasting in ephemeral things: not in
iron, stone, brick, concrete, steel, and chrome, but in paper, ink,
pigment, sound, voice, gesture, and graceful leaping, for it is of
such things that the ultimate realities, of mind and heart, are made.
