When the car was well on its way back to the city, Burns returned to the mare, replaced the rifle in the scabbard, coiled his rope and tied it to the swell, stowed the picket in the bedroll, had one more drink at the spring and climbed at last into the saddle, a very considerable pleasure which he had been anticipating for the last two or three hours; he forbore to think of the canyon ahead, where he would have to walk and lead over at least half the distance.

“Hup, girl,” he said, and touched the mare with his heels. Fresh and eager, she started off as though bent on a free run through woods and green fields, and he had to rein her in at once to keep her to a walk. He rode up and around the ledge behind the spring, recovered his spurs, rode on up to the head of the arroyo and up the bank there, and over the saddle of the hill and into the canyon. Above him leaned the canyon walls, and above them the mountain with its granite cliffs; far above and beyond the mountain the stars began to appear, one by one, the chill blue glittering stars of the autumn.

Burns felt tired, very tired, and cold.

Manhattan Twilight, Hoboken Night

HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY, is not one of the five boroughs of New York City. But it should be, for it’s closer and quicker to the center of Manhattan from Hoboken than from any point in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens or Staten Island. Fifteen minutes by bus, via the Lincoln Tunnel, takes you from Washington Street in Hoboken to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Forty-first Street; ten minutes by train via the Hudson Tubes takes you from the Erie-Lackawanna Terminal to Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue—the Village. A dash under the river, a roar of iron, and you’re there: in Glitter Gulch, U.S.A.—Times Square, the Big Midway, the hanging gardens of electricity. Or down yonder in Green Witch Village. What more could you want? And if New York is not Manhattan, it is nothing. A little worse than nothing. Meanwhile the insane, medieval burgs of New Jersey—Union City, West New York, Jersey City—lie divorced from Hoboken by a wall older than the Great Wall of China. I mean the Palisades, that sill of diabase left over from the Triassic period.

I make this effort to incorporate Hoboken into New York City (where it belongs) rather than allowing it to remain in New Jersey (for which it is much too sweet, pure, romantic) because it is from the Hoboken point of view, the Hoboken mystique, the Hoboken metaphysic, that I must describe what I remember and what I know of New York. Meaning Manhattan. Of the rest I know nothing. The other four boroughs are as remote to my imagination as the Malebolges of the Eighth Circle of Hell. Perhaps only Dante could tell us the truth about them. Perhaps only Dante—and Dostoevski—could tell us the truth about New York.