ABSTRACT
In the wildest of circumstances, we are exposed to snow and hail, excessive heat and excessive cold. One is psychologically exposed to the magnitude of nature, its amazing, sometimes terrifying abundance, multifariousness and age, a profligacy from which we—who like to think of ourselves as refined singularities—have inexplicably emerged. It is an exposure without which human experience would be incomplete, but it is exposure that most of us crave only in measured doses. Cities, long-established ones at least, are our most dramatic manifestations of the age of civilization, which, for humans, is likely to be much more poignant than the age of the universe. In a city like Rome or Istanbul, Cairo or Bangkok, we trace the progress of man in the erected obelisks, the outgrown city walls, the crumbling forts, the canals that have become roadbeds. Between the extremes of wild nature and urbanity are all those circumstances where the efforts of man and nature combine.
