Photo of the Day: View From My Morning Bus

This is the scene I encounter between eight and nine a.m. from Monday through Friday every week, as lines of cars snake their way on the road approaching the Lincoln Tunnel. Sometimes, the scene is every worse, as the highway absolutely chokes with traffic, not moving an inch for stretches at a time. I think of it as my own personal “valley of ashes,” a kind of counterpart to the one so memorably evoked by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby.

With so little beauty in the landscape, I think you can see why I prefer reading from my Kindle (or something more old-fashioned, such as a book or newspaper), or working on a crossword puzzle book—anything to distract me from this scene.