Manhattan is dying – of gigantism.

Several times each month, when we’re home, Jane and I visit the poor patient. We drive in from our right-sized two-story (and many-storied) home, park the car midtown, park our bags at the Yale Club if we’re overnighting, and gawk with piteous wonder at the disease’s progression. We have loved Manhattan, spent our adult lives working and living in its center or periphery, devoured its lavish bounty. (For culture vultures, there’s no more munificent nest.) We pray for the crammed little island to thrive forever. But it is not to be. Gigantism imposes abnormal demands on bodies not constructed to endure such height and weight, dooming the sufferer to peculiarity, loneliness, early death.

Denizens of Manhattan tend not to notice their condition, naturally enough. Manhattan is big, they agree, but not too big – not morbidly, perilously, repugnantly, oversized. That crop of new buildings poking cloud-ward like asparagus stalks? Those new office building atriums bigger than courthouses, which reduce visitors to the invisibility of pepper specks on a napkin? That incessant traffic congestion that clogs the city’s arteries and makes punctual arrival a fantasy? Why, Manhattan has always been big, since its graduation in the late nineteenth century to the world’s omphalos! So might parents call their twice-tall teenager a “big boy,” maybe a basketball prospect if he weren’t so awkward.

The causes of municipal gigantism are debated. Surely greed is one. The more souls you can cram into this desirable acreage, the richer the plutocrats. Hubris is another: if engineers pronounce a crazy-tall building safe, it must be, right? So what if it sways in the wind or tempts foes with its defiant height? (Nine-eleven, take my word, was not the last such toppling.) Vanity, too, deserves some credit. Wealth strains to peacock: my place is grander, taller, snazzier than yours! I’d add historical ignorance to this toxic cocktail: how many ancient megalopolises lie buried nameless beneath earth’s crust?

While the hour of poor old Manhattan’s demise isn’t predictable, its present symptoms are worrisome. The looming indifference of these edifices to their inhabitants corrodes confidence and self-regard. Medieval cathedrals shrank individuals too, but that was to exalt the divine. Every worshipper was enlarged and inspired by God’s glory. What do these ubiquitous huge new buildings glorify? Wealth. The superiority of a few. The comparative insignificance of the rest.

Such derogation occurs less in small communities, where everyone knows their neighbors and all contribute to the social fabric. Humans need respect as plants need sunlight to flower. Manhattan reduces individuals to data points. Not only do individuals not matter here, we’re an inconvenience. Superfluity sours psyches if we soak in it too long.

As there is no clear cause for gigantism, there is no known cure. Cities, like persons, must live until they die. Jane and I will continue invading Manhattan for as long as we have strength, drinking deeply of its music, theater, art, conviviality, intensity, armoring ourselves and plotting each adventure to avoid being crushed. That Manhattan is sick does not mean it’s sickly. Its health has never seemed more exuberant, scaffolding and construction trucks on every block. Only, growth spurts, if you suffer gigantism, aren’t a symptom of health.

I return from our Manhattan expeditions exhausted with repletion and demotion. We have feasted on the world’s most beautiful art, been entertained by the world’s best performers, embraced friends, survived the travails of transport. Humanity is bigger but I’m smaller. Henry’s ebullience at our reappearance restores me. Writing too.