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Romance tends to become lost in the cracks and crevices, noise and turmoil, of New York City. The steel and concrete of overwhelming edifices and crowded streets seem to swallow-up the "best laid plans" of our emotional artistry and transcendental intellect; these are flimsy and are subject to the whims of immutable reality.

Summers have a way of adding insult to an already existing injury. The romantic mystique is scorched in the heat and drowned in the humidity, dissolving into pools of delusion and flowing through the insidious haze of grimy streets and subways. The deceptive allure of New York City legend is exposed in the glare of a pitiless and unfeeling sun which exposes all.

I usually suspend my love for the Romantics when summer arrives in this city; they seem tired and worn by antiquity in the torrid modernity of the present. Wordsworth's idyllic fields, Coleridge's impassioned dreams, and Byron and Shelley's majestic passions are reduced to feeble singing in a wilderness of confusion. My oftentimes misplaced and mistimed sympathy with Romance is usually repaid with indifference and contempt, and goes unanswered in the heat and distraction of summer.

The next few days promise to be exceptionally hot and dampen my plans for imagined and proposed masterpieces in sweat. Writing becomes difficult and even sitting down to the piano becomes a chore. My expected attendance at season-purchased beloved ballets and operas will also include cases of underarm wetness and brow-drenched discomfort, mocking my efforts at well-dressed romantic appeal. So it goes.

Of course, summer will inevitably and once again fade into winter, with accompanying freezing temperatures and snow-blanketed streets. I'll once again look forward to summer in my artistic introspection and expression on winter's thin ice. The heat I'll long for and hopefully find will be the passion of the soul and the illusions of dreams: the cracks and crevices, noise and turmoil, of New York City will still be here...but a little less bothersome, with the Beauty which is Romance a little easier to find.