I took a walk from forty-fifth and Vanderbilt to seventy-seventh and Madison. Take a walk differs from walk. We walk to get from here to there. We take a walk because it pleases us, body and mind.

Manhattan may be the most changeable location on earth. Our home in Poughquag hasn’t altered noticeably in twenty years; we repair, prune, the seasons change, but we know where things are. Rome, where Jane and I spent four blessed years, hasn’t changed much in millennia. Yes, noisy cars and bikes, Mussolini’s slashing roads, but Marcus Aurelius, we sense, could still find his way around, or Michelangelo.

Midtown Manhattan one may not recall after a month. Seven decades I’ve frequented these precincts yet still must check street signs for my bearings. Familiar blocks have been replaced by monstrous monoliths, their vastness proudly demeaning humanity’s mereness. Familiar shops have been supplanted or redecorated unrecognizably. Bouncy Brobdingnagian billboards make one feel Lilliputian.

I window-shop. Displays compete in glitzy splendor. Jewels, pricey apparel, bon-bons, swank vehicles, galleries, handbags, bedizened watches, at exorbitant prices to support exorbitant rents: Ali Baba’s cave: nothing of use. Once my ambition panted to impress with such gewgaws, but the years have bleached my soul as the sea whitens bones. My reflection in gleaming glass shocks like a grotesque – wrinkled, thick-necked, gray.

Today’s headlines contain news of a fight over providing millions of Americans the food they need not to starve and of an employment package for Elon Musk worth a trillion dollars. No ascetic or Puritan I – much of the beauty I revere has been purchased with excess wealth – yet this disparity disturbs. Do the haves need so much more? How can humanity – all of us – be improved by the impoverishment of the poor to enrich the rich?

My walk gives me time to growl. Tens and hundreds of thousands have been spent beautifying the shoppers on this avenue, often to hideous effect. Too much cosmetic surgery has mummified faces. Clothes too swish often look gawdy, awkward. Powdering and pampering turn expressions sniffy with disdain. I hate fancy trappings myself. They’re troublesome to maintain, secure, explain; one must beware the attention they attract.

This is wrong, I begin to think, not just distasteful but disgusting. A people so privileged and selfish deserve the wrath they incite. The oppressed will rise – from fury, not policy – as spontaneous combustion erupts – less to grasp than to punish – to trash the joint. How can any observer see this affluent, overweening avenue as a just or commendable result!

I too reek with privilege. No cosmetic surgery – yet or ever; my mufti’s humdrum more from indolence than principle. No hirsute saint with his begging bowl, I prefer a forty-dollar to a four-dollar dinner, a twelve to a two-dollar bottle of wine. I spend ninety dollars a month on Henry’s grooming – and thirty on my own. I applaud the idea of Thoreau’s stark cabin more than the fact of it.

I could do with less – much – but at least I respect moderation, wince when fellow citizens starve, recite the Golden Rule if I don’t always heed it, reread the Sermon on the Mount now and then for a moral checkup. You don’t have to be a saint or socialist to be appalled by trillion-dollar paychecks or (also in today’s news) a twenty-four-carat gold toilet that flushes!

Humans are the only species that consistently consume more than we need. We gorge, we can’t help ourselves; steal sustenance from others to fatten ourselves, then remedy the self-harm with expensive pills. I return from my walk chastened, saddened. We are such a disappointment.