City thoughts

Today I drove through a great American city -- Washington, D.C. I rolled down roller-coaster overpasses and through a great shining sea of traffic.

The prognosticators say that a majority of human beings will live in cities by the end of this century -- and that we need to do a better job of making them livable.

The temperament of a nation is told by its cities. In your mind, picture the difference between Athens and Moscow, Boston and Beijing, Montreal and Manila.

Some cities have been loved -- or loathed -- for centuries -- and everyone has a picture in their head of them. I think of London and Rome, Berlin, Paris and New York. Others are not so famous -- yet whisper the word and the expatriate and the exile sigh ... Dublin, Budapest.

There are cities almost as old as humanity itself, it seems -- Mexico City, built upon the ancient Aztec original; Memphis (in Egypt, not Tennessee!);Jerusalem, the holy city of Monotheism -- and brash new cities where swamp, desert or jungle has only been supplanted in living memory.

Cities fascinate me.