As a younger and more headstrong man – as in, when I was very annoying – I arranged much of my life around a sentiment expressed most clearly by the poet Frank O’Hara. “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes,” he wrote. “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
In those early years, I’m sure I noticed that nature existed, on occasion. But for the most part I treated it like a kindly but fatally boring uncle at a Christmas gathering: to be indulged briefly as an act of charity, and then abandoned as soon as it was polite. I thought the things I was concerned with – art, music, cinema – were inherently urban, and that people who concerned themselves too much with the environment were uniformly boring, out of touch, and perhaps worst of all, daggy.
