As I have become older, I have begun to think that the problem of color is primarily a linguistic one.

Color a problem? It seems like one of the clearest, most obvious of phenomena. We all see it: At least, we all stop at stop signs. We know red.

Or think we do.

Artists know about color, certainly. They know the primary colors of red, blue and yellow, and the secondary and tertiary colors they can mix.

Physicists know about color, too. They know about wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum and how one tiny segment of this huge megaband of waves can be perceived visually, from the longer wavelengths of red to the shorter, buzzier ones of blue.

But these two knowledges don’t agree. They are relativity and quantum mechanics.

Further, a printer will tell you that the primary colors are not red, blue and yellow, but cyan, magenta and yellow. And a television technician will tell you that the primary colors are blue, green and red.

What gives?

Perceptual psychologists and neuroscientists are still working on the problem of color. The first and most significant problem is that, realistically speaking, color does not exist. That is, what we see when we look at a tomato or an apple, that sensuous red we ascribe to the object, does not have an objective reality. It is a subjective additive that our brains give it so we may make sense of what we see. In evolutionary terms, we use color to know when fruit is ripe.

(Interestingly, it seems as if evolution continues to work in the human species and, as most people now buy food from markets rather than foraging for them, we may be losing our ability to distinguish reds and greens. The incidence of red-green color blindness is growing, and eventually, we may all share it.)

A simple view of how color vision works would seem to make sense of it all. In our eyes, on our retinas, are light-sensitive cells — we call them cones — that are alternately triggered by red, green and blue wavelengths of light, and those signals are transmitted to our brains, where they are synthesized into little color pictures of what we are looking at.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an accurate version of what happens.

First problem is that the cones are not discretely sensitive to red, green and blue. There is considerable overlap, as seen in this graph.

Second, the color we perceive is not always related to wavelength. Consider yellow. There is, of course, a yellow wavelength of light, and we see that wavelength because yellow light tickles both the green and red sensors in our eyes, and we blend them together in our brain to make yellow. The problem is that if something has no yellow wavelengths at all, but manages to tickle both the red and green sensors, we still see yellow. No yellow light at all, but still, we see yellow.

And consider magenta. It is a color that does not exist in the natural spectrum. There is no magenta wavelength of light. But if an object reflects both red and blue wavelengths of light, we are rewarded by the mental sensation of the hue we call magenta. No wavelength at all, but still, there is color.

So, color cannot simply be a mental recording of wavelength. Most of the colors we perceive are mixtures of other wavelengths according us the pleasant and often useful sensation of color, but without any strict accordance to the laws of physics.

What is more, current research on vision tells us that what we synthesize in our brains is not a twining of the three signals from the three types of cone, but rather a group of oppositions worked out by the brain.

Along with cones in the retina are the rods, which are tasked with the registration of light and dark — commonly called black and white. The electrical signals that are sent to our brain to be analyzed are first, the opposition of lights and darks, second the opposition of blues and yellows — which are the colors most other mammals work with — and thirdly, the addition we got from our primate ancestors, the ability to analyze the opposition of red and green.

So, as we now think it to be, the signals sent to our brains give us black-white, blue-yellow, and red-green.

Perhaps, then, what we call primary colors should be black, white, blue, yellow, red and green. That would make sense.

They are all simple names for colors that have clear identities. Everyone knows what green is, or blue.

Or do they? Here’s where the linguistic part comes in.

In English, for instance, there are other color names that have a similar direct and clear determination of hue. Orange and pink, for instance. Brown and purple. Simple names for hues we recognize has having distinct identities. And just because we speak English, we take our name-markers for a simple one-to-one description of reality.

But hold on: Other languages organize colors differently.

Consider Russian, where what we call light blue has one name and what we call simply a darker shade of blue, has another name. Siniy and Goluboy. The distinction is the same as we make between red and pink. We hold them to be distinct colors, not merely shades of the same color. In Russian, that distinction is accorded to the blues.

Or take Japanese, where all of blues and greens are covered by the single word, ai. There is the ai of the sky and the ai of the trees below it. It is all ai.

There are languages in which the surface reflectivity of an object changes its color name. We have that in English, where a metallic version of grey is called silver, and a version of yellow that maintains specular reflections is called gold.

“In certain languages there are names for colors that are descriptive in terms of surface, as a wet black or a dry black,” says painter Henry Leo Schoebel, whose paintings are all about the sheen of their surface.

“There is a big difference between a box merely painted black with glossy house paint, and a Japanese lacquer box. The lacquer is a blacker black.”

There are academic arguments going on all the time over whether the names of colors are universal or are culturally distinct. I’m not getting into that, except to say that both seem to be true. But colors are universal in the sense that everyone knows red is red and would not be confused with, say, blue. But when we say red, we don’t always mean the same thing.

“If one says ‘red’ and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 different reds in their minds,” painter and color theorist Josef Albers once wrote.

The Zuni language classes yellow and orange together, which means that once they have coded it in language, say, as if to tell a friend what they have seen, the friend decodes the word into his trove of experience and comes up with something quite different. It may be orange; it may be yellow. That is a distinction that our language makes, but his does not.

The same as Russian separates siniy and goluboy and ours does not.

The tomato is a whole lot more close to the orange end of the red spectrum and the stop sign is closer to the magenta end of the red spectrum. Yet we call both red, and if we tell a friend about something we have seen and say it is red, the friend will decode the term the same inexact way the Zuni friend decodes orange-yellow.

And outside the limits of language, color is something we know from its embodiment, not from its abstraction. That is why so many secondary names for tints and hues are actually the names of those items who bear those colors, such as lavender, fuchsia, turquoise, teal, olive, coral, puce, salmon.

And it’s why painters cannot use tubes of paint called “red,” “green,” or “blue,” but instead rely on vermilion, phalo green or ultramarine. Pigments are not abstractions, but physical substances, and they differ in effect, hue and their properties of admixture. Mix blue and yellow to get green? Which blue? Which yellow?

This physicality of pigment also means that an artist’s colors don’t behave according to a neat color theory. Each pigment has its own idiosyncrasies and personality.

“For reds, I use acra violet, cadmium-red light, red oxide,” painter Anne Coe says. “Phthalo blue, ultramarine and cobalt for blues, cadmium-yellow light and medium and then yellow ocher.

“You do have to have a violet. It’s hard to mix a violet.

“And you can’t put black into a cadmium-yellow light: It turns green.”

So much for color theory.

In the end, colors are as individual as people, and any color theory is a compromise, fudging this or that for coherence. There is no theoretical certainty in color, and in the end, we have to admit that each of dozens — even thousands — of colors has its distinct identity and each pigment its distinct properties.

And so, I have given up on color theory.

What is the single greatest enemy of art?

What one thing more than any other manages to sabotage the efforts of the artist?

It’s not lack of money; it’s not the bourgeois tastes of the masses; it’s not cultural victimization.

The one great enemy of art is talent.

Well, maybe not talent, exactly, but the satisfaction of having talent and the willingness to settle for what talent gives you.

Being self-satisfied always makes the artist willing to settle for less.

I remember artist Frederick Sommer stating his case quite clearly: “Why would you ever do anything less well than you can?”

If you are going to attempt something, he says, you had better give it everything you have.

And talent simply isn’t everything you have.

Talent is like beauty; it comes with the genes. To rely on beauty to get you through the world is a shallow and unworthy existence. To rely on talent is equally unworthy.

Not that great artists aren’t talented. Talent is a gift, surely. But no artist ever produced anything great BECAUSE he had talent. In fact, many artists have had to work extremely hard to rise above their talent.

Talent, as I am using the word, is facility. It is the ease with which an artist — or poet or playwright or composer — can create something that looks like what society approves of as good art.

In the visual arts, this is often seen first in the ability to draw.

We think of Degas or Ingres or Picasso as great draftsmen, able to capture reality with the quick flick of a pencil, clean and unfussy.

But there are two things I want to say about that:

First, much of what passes for realistic drawing is in fact not realistic but conventional. We, the inheritors of the European traditions of art, have come to expect our art to LOOK a certain way, and when someone can produce that look, we mistake it for verisimilitude.

I don’t want to go into this too deeply here, because it will get me off the track.

But Suffice it to say, good draftsmanship, of this variety, says more about the acculturation of the artist than the artist’s engagement with the world.

And second, and more important, there have been great artists with little talent, at least, little of what we conventionally call talent.

I think of two in particular:

Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh.

Both are among the greatest achievers Western art has ever known, and both did it despite having only middling talent. Consider Vincent’s drawing of a carpenter (above), from 1880. Almost childish.

One looks through van Gogh’s notebooks and looks in vain for facility. Nothing came easy for the Dutchman. The books are full of false starts and erasures. The pencil lines pile up on themselves in corrections and rethinkings.

One looks at Cezanne’s drawings and sees the work any moderately talented high school student could match, even exceed.

But the genius of both — indeed the genius of all great artists, even those like Degas who possessed talent out the wazoo — is their sense of commitment. They are committed unto death each time they essay a drawing.

It is always the depth of commitment that makes the artist. Talent helps, but talent is only a tool.

What do I mean by commitment?

I am talking about the ability to concentrate as if your life depended on it: To look at the world and steer your pencil as if you were defusing a bomb.

If the world falls away and only your task is real, you have made it to the first level.

But even that is only the first level.

Hey, we’re still only talking about drawing here. Drawings are wonderful — in many ways, I enjoy drawings more than I do paintings, just as I often enjoy symphony rehearsals more than concerts or dance rehearsals more than recitals.

What, then, takes us beyond the “preparatory drawing” and into the bigger, more important form.

AMBITION.

I don’t mean the worldly ambition of making money or reputation. Those are altogether unworthy ambitions, and rather small ambitions at that. Anyone with TALENT can achieve those ends.

No, by ambition, I mean the grand biting off more than you can chew. I mean always working at the outer edges of your talent, attempting to take off into the stratosphere.

When one looks at the artists who were truly great, and let’s name a few:

Besides van Gogh and Cezanne, there is Manet, Goya, Michelangelo, Raphael, Poussin, Picasso, Matisse, Rembrandt, Durer, Turner, Botticelli, Titian.

Each one of these had ambition to paint more than pretty pictures. Each attempted to wrestle with some aspect of reality and bring it into submission so we could see it, test it and comprehend it.

Art that does less, I have said before, is wallpaper.

So where does that leave talent?

Well, the same place as that other great bugaboo of art, “creativity.”

You have no idea how ill I get when I hear someone talking about creativity as if it were a good thing.

Creativity is, like talent, an excuse for laziness. An excuse to accept easy, slovenly or simple-minded art as “good enough”; It is not.

Creativity is almost always used as such an excuse when we hear it. It is one of those words that should immediately make you suspicious. People who really understand what is going on in art don’t rely on such a word. It is only for poseurs and dilettantes.

Creativity is the merest baby steps of art. It is sure nothing to be proud of. Anyone is capable of creativity. It is just looking for a new way to join two sticks.

If it isn’t joined to a critical mind that can then judge whether the new way these sticks are joined is or is not a BETTER way, it is worthless.

Sure, it can be fun. So can a cross-word puzzle. But that don’t make it art.

Art is hard. If it isn’t, it isn’t worth doing.

If you are comfortable with what you are doing, it isn’t worth doing.

If you know HOW to do what you are doing, it isn’t worth doing.

That reminds me of another thing Frederick Sommer says: “I never read a book I understand,” he says. “If I already understand it, why am I wasting my time chewing this stuff twice.”

We need to dive into those things we don’t understand and think and feel as hard as we can, making sense of it. Then we have accomplished something.

Creativity: I leave that to new-age wannabes, where nothing of real worth is possible.

Shall we find yet another popular bugaboo? How about spontaneity?

Did Milton create “Paradise Lost” spontaneously?

Real art comes as the result of great labor.

It is the highly polished and refined gem that is worked and reworked, thought through and re-thought through.

No great art comes spontaneously.

Think of the great Sumi paintings of Japan, that are made with a few deft strokes of brush and ink, with no erasings possible, no “redos.”

A great Zen painter can only produce such work after years of great labor. It doesn’t come without effort.

But go downtown to any poetry slam: You will find piles of really wretched poetry written by young people who think that every word they utter is sacred. That spontaneity is somehow Holy.

Jack Kerouac espoused this view. But his best books, and especially “On the Road,” were rewritten heavily. It is later in his career that he started writing genuinely “spontaneous prose,” as he called it. And those books are awful.

His friend, Allen Ginsberg, likewise liked to say, “First thought, best thought.” But all his best writing, from “Howl” to “Kaddish” exists in variorum editions that show how much they were reworked and rewritten.

“First thought, best thought,”my ass.

The secret of great writing is rewriting, someone once said. And that is certainly correct. The really proper word doesn’t always come the first time round, and then the greater structure of a piece must often be carpented and finessed.

Ask James Joyce, who spent 11 years writing “Ulysses.”

I see it all around me in art galleries. Artists want a pat on the back, as they got when they were children and their mothers patted them for drawing such a nice doggie and horsie.

That is good for children. It is insufficient for working artists.

It is a struggle, and should be a struggle.

Art isn’t easy and it wasn’t meant to be. No human endeavor worth pursuing is easy.

Finding directions is a trial for some. My wife — and no, this isn’t a wife joke — has trouble understanding the compass points. We lived just a few blocks south of Northern Avenue.

“How can it be south?” she asked. “If it’s Northern Avenue, it must be north.”

Another time I asked her, “Which is further west, California or Hawaii?”

“From here?” she asked.

Such answers dazzle me, because I have a preternatural sense of direction. I don’t take credit for this; I was born this way, the same way some people are born with a talent for music or with a photogenic face. When  such things were handed out, what I got was a sense of direction.

I have surprised even myself at times. When I was in third grade, the class took a bus trip to visit a nature preserve in northern New Jersey. Some 30 years later, revisiting my old haunts, I decided to find the nature preserve and drove right to it, no false turns or missed clues.

A few years ago, driving through Ontario, I saw a side street that looked as if it might lead to the motel my family had stayed at during a vacation we had made when I was in the 10th grade. I turned and found the motel, very distinct because in addition to the usual motel units, it had a two story stucco house attached to it.

I have wondered many a time about this sense of direction and tried to figure out its mechanism. For many, when they take or give directions, they use a kind of linear description: Go three blocks, turn left at the church, go another two blocks and turn right at the gas station, continue for four miles and look for a house with a red SUV in the driveway.

For those people, they are always traveling in a straight line forward. They may take a turn at a landmark, but they think of themselves as continuing to face forward and move in that conceptual straight line.

For me, and those like me, however, there is a starting point and an ending point and they remain aligned, as with the stars, or on a map, and I can negotiate any number of turns or diversions and never lose track of that map pin stuck into that place. It is as if I can always “see” them there, no matter how many buildings or miles intervene.

The mechanism for this I have not previously much thought about, but now, I have come across at least one aspect of what makes a sense of direction. It begins with one’s autonomic nervous system.

With eyes closed, I can touch my fingertips together. This is no great act; most anyone can do it. But doing it requires that I rely on my inner sense of where my body is. I know, spatially, where I extend to — i.e. the limits of my palpable being. Even without seeing, I can sense where my skin is and where I fill that sack of skin. We all, to greater and lesser extent, have that sense.

It is true that our “sense of ourselves” isn’t always accurate, in fact, it is grossly distorted — hands, tongue and head feel much bigger than they actually are — at least by the measuring tape.

It is not really the body which is distorted, but the “space” which our body fills. We move more precisely concerning those areas which seem large out of proportion. We can distinguish two very close points on our tongue yet cannot tell a much greater distance on our backs. It is as though we occupy, psychologically, a relativistic space — an Einsteinian universe with warps and curves in its substance. It is not just that my head feels larger than my back, it is that the space occupied by my head is larger — the increments of that space feel evenly distributed across my body and since there are more of those increments in my head or hands, they feel correspondingly bigger. The squares in the graph paper I might use to chart my body are drawn with warped lines.

A similar sense of position is felt in a room. The space of the room exists almost as a solid or “anti-solid” in which I determine my latitude and longitude. I feel closer to one wall than another. This is not merely a measurable phenomenon — I feel it.

In fact, my “felt being” includes not only my autonomic sense of myself, but also my sense of the walls almost as a projection of my skin. I can feel everything that goes on inside the room — accurately place proportions (is it 2/3 of the way across the room? 4/5? 5/6?) But what is outside the room is normally beyond thought, and unless actively thought about, does not exist.

Of course, I can go outside and look — but then I only change one room for a larger — the outdoors.

Sitting at my desk, I can throw a wadded up first-draft over my shoulder and have it land at the base of the far wall without looking — my autonomic sense of my position in the room tells me just how far to throw it.

The room, in a real sense, is just a part of me.

If I close my eyes and turn my head, I still know my orientation in the room; I still know the directions of the four walls.

This same sense of orientation exists when driving or parking a car. I know by pure feel how far behind me the car extends. Even though I cannot see the back bumper, I nevertheless don’t crunch into the car behind me when backing into a parking spot.

In my car, I have become a centaur, and my automotive rump is just as real as my carnal one.

I believe that this same autonomic sense, projected to a vaster landscape, is the root of a good sense of direction.

A person with a good sense of direction translates these instructions into spatial understanding. If he forgets the written instructions at home, he may still find the house with the red van.

The person without this sense of spatial orientation is lost without the step-by-step.

My brother has told me that when he is a passenger in a car, it is as though he entered an elevator and when the car finally stops, the door opens and he gets out. For me, with the spatial sense, I always feel, not only when the car turns right or left, not only how much off “straight” my internal gyroscope has been turned, but also how the space — the very large space — I am driving through has been altered, much the same way as I know — feel — my changed orientation in a room when I walk from one side to the other.

As your projected body limits change as you move from small room to larger, so the land I feel oriented to changes as I enter different kinds of terrain. And as I leave territory I am familiar with and enter that which is new. In a new city, my territory — my personal space — can be very small indeed: a few square blocks. But at home, my personal orientation easily covers 30 miles or more. And accurately.

At times, traveling through Montana or Nebraska, I feel secure in a “felt space” of hundreds of miles.

This space that I feel can be just as distorted as my simple body sense. Often the nearest 200 yards seem the biggest, like my tongue. The direction I am going in seems larger and more clearly defined than the space at 10 o’clock or 2 o’clock — which space is useless for my travels.

At any given moment, I can point to New York or Lake Superior. I don’t usually have to think first, which direction is North and then imagine in my head a map of the U.S. and figure from that where the Big Apple is. I am always aware of where north is, and east or south or northwest. I point as quickly to Los Angeles — thousands of miles away — as automatically as if asked to point to the front yard of my home from its living room.

In a sense, the map of the U.S. exists constantly inside my head and I know, without actively concerning myself with it, where on that map I am, where that little arrow is with the tag: “You are here.”

That map is, as in Steven Wright’s joke, “life size.”

I can visualize it spreading out and covering the actual land. In a sense, I drive on that life-size map, and never have to fold it up and stuff it in the glove compartment.

Envoi: When European mapmakers first began orienting their maps with north at the top, it was a new convention. And they found a neat little glyph to designate the directions. For them, there was a four-way divide: North, East, South and West. It could be subdivided into northeast or southwest, and further turned into such arcane weather forecast terms as east-northeast or south-southwest. A good glyph can include all these.

But I am reminded that not all cultures thought in terms of the four cardinal compass points. Many American Indian cultures had six directions, not four. They included North, East, South and West, but also Up and Down. Surely up and down deserve as much respect as north and south. They are as real, and work the same way as a directional framework, with ourselves always at the crossing of the moveable axes.

I am now in the habit of considering that there are really seven cardinal points, because while the original six compass points extend outward from the axis mundi of ourselves, there is the seventh, which is Inward. If, as I believe, all directions must needs reference our individual positions on the grid of the planet, the central point inward is as meaningful as those star rays outward from us. It is a two-way street.

So: North; South; East; West; Up; Down; and In — where it all happens.

No one who has seen a steam locomotive in action can fail to be moved. The massive iron comes to life and breathes clouds of hissing steam and dribbles condensation like sweat. It is 200 tons of steel muscle and tendon grunting into motion with first one shoulder and then the other.

They were living, breathing beings in a way modern diesels can never approximate. Diesels just begin moving, dragging their mile of boxcars behind them. Steam showed the labor involved. You could empathize.

When I consider why trains fascinate so many people, I have to begin with that power. All trains are brawny. You can feel the earth hum under your shoe leather as a hundred coal-heavy hopper cars clank past a grade crossing. They are like thunder. They are like gods.

I am just old enough to recall steam. When I was an infant, trains spewed soot through the neighborhood along the New York Central line. Hanging laundry out to dry was an iffy affair. If the winds were wrong, my mother’s linens grayed.

As I grew up, the steam disappeared, replaced by bulbous but beautifully painted diesels: purple Erie-Lackawanna, Tuscan red Pennsy. We saw pictures of the red, yellow and silver Santa Fe and green and gold Southern railways.

Those wonderful, old Electromotive F-7s and E-9s, with their round fronts and Packard windshields also have disappeared, replaced by the box-on-a-raft road switchers that most railroads currently are painting soot-black.

Yet the fascination remains.

What is there about trains that keeps us hypnotized?

As best as I can parse it out, there are two important elements: The power is only the first. There are other powerful machines, and although they maintain their own hold on our imaginations – 18-wheelers and bulldozers, for instance – they don’t quite capture us like railroads.

The second element is the rails themselves. The raw power of a locomotive is channeled by the iron parameters it rides.

Unchained power is potentially destructive: Godzilla terrorizing the city. But the train is a dragon with a single-minded purpose. It has to move where the tracks will take it.

Perhaps it is mainly men who respond thus. We look to our fathers for strength when we are young and proudly declare our old man can beat up your old man. When we are young, the power alone is enough.

But as we grow older and presumably wiser, we come to suspect power. We see the destruction it can cause. Gang violence, battered wives, war and oppression.

And as we grow into our own adult bodies, we are both excited by the muscular potential and worried by the havoc we can cause.

The train then speaks to us on a mythic level. Its wheels grind the iron like geology, yet there is a course for it to take, a goal at the end, a purpose for such power.

Human beings can stray. The train’s every temptation is yanked back by steel to the straight and narrow.

We begin our lives with some idea of where we are going but soon are distracted by the happenstances of life. We have need of something track-like to wrench us back into focus and concentration.

The train’s life has purpose, defined by the twin iron lines coming to a point on the horizon. We gaze off and see where we are headed and know that we can use all the force we have, knowing it will be channeled and not dissipated.

There are other sources of this sense of enforced direction: It is one of the attractions of the playground slide or roller coaster. It is the emotion of driving through a tunnel. It is the river flowing inevitably in its bed.

I have ridden trains most of my life, from commuter trains going daily into Manhattan to transcontinental luxury trains – with panoramic domes cut into their roofs – curling past the Rocky Mountains. There have been subways and, lately, excursion trains that attempt to replicate the romance of the passenger trains that have disappeared as surely as brontosaurs and 5-cent hamburgers.

There is other poetry of the rails: the low decaying horn call of a distant train in the night, the sense of hundreds of people gathered in temporary community with common destination, the slow rocking clicketyclack that eases you to sleep in your compartment.

There are lights that scream past your window at midnight and clanging crossing-gate bells that change tone as you pass them.

There is scenery that morphs from flatland to mountain in a matter of hours.

But mostly there is the sense of immense, machine-thick metal power, heavy and headlong, hurling through the landscape along a course preset and immutable.

When I lived in Seattle, I often went to the Pike Place Market to buy bread. There was a small bakery whose only access to the public was a small sliding window behind which a wiry old woman with curly gray hair and skin an alligator would be proud of. She sat on a stool and would reach behind her to get what you asked for.

They had great rye bread, dark, yeasty, with a crust like a crustacean. We ate it with butter and chewed on it with gusto.

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for the nastiest, darkest, heaviest, sourest, thing you’ve got.”

“You’re lookin’ at her,” she said.

I mention it because when I was growing up in New Jersey, the standard bread came wrapped in cellophane and had as much character as mattress stuffing.

Wretched stuff. Wonder Bread, Silvercup Bread, Merita Bread. “Builds strong bodies 12 ways.” I could never understand, as a kid, why people would call bread the “staff of life.”

And food writers wrote panegyrics to the stuff. But the bread I knew — and the only bread I had any experience of — was banal, pasty, tasteless, or when not completely devoid of flavor, redolent of the stale air of the grocery store.

I hated bread as a kid. I hated sandwiches, which only wasted good filling between insipid slices of inanity.

The greatest thing since sliced bread? I had to scratch my head. Bread wasn’t great; bread was boring.

Our neighbor, who was Italian, often praised bread. It was his favorite part of the meal.

“I always have to get another slice to wipe up the last of the spaghetti sauce,” he would say. “But then, I have to get some more sauce for the last bites of bread. It never comes out even.”

It was an idealistic quest for a universal balance to the universe.

But of course, it wasn’t Wonder Bread he was eating. Ethnic breads have always been available, to those who required them.

Things have gotten better in America. Baguettes – or something very like them – are available in many grocery stores, along with various ciabattas and focaccias, but the standard issue loaf of boredom is still the upholstery of the bread shelves in all the supermarkets of America. Bread with no crumb. How can you have bread with no crumb?

How different it was when I first went to France, a nation where the lack of decent bread could cause a revolution. Here was a people who valued the real thing. Whether it was a boule or a demi-baguette, a croissant or a brioche, the bread was full of character and taste.

But the real champ was the baguette. Who knew bread could taste this good. With a shattering crust and a light interior, it had a browned, crusty flavor.

Now, I’m not a complete tyro. Certainly in my adult years I got over my childish hate of bread. As a grown-up, I discovered New York bagels and bialys, and the real Kaiser roll, the kind that if you drop it, it can dent linoleum, and the perfect foil for piles of thin-sliced rare roast beef. And sour rye breads piled with pastrami.

America has its excellent breads.

I bake my own, which is wonderful hot out of the oven, with a melting square of ice-cold butter on it.

But I wasn’t prepared for the difference between even good American bread and plain, ordinary old French French bread. This was bread to give you orgasms. Flavor — no, flavors, plural — that range from lip to pharynx with a medley of sensations much as physical as they were chemical. The initial crunch led to a repertoire of smaller crunches inside the closed mouth, and then the teeth broke through the crust into the heart of the bread and felt the giving elasticity of the gluten. The aroma entered the back of your sinuses like the after-swallow of a good wine.

This was no bread to erase errant pencil lines with. This is bread to build an altar to.

Every morning, and every evening, you could see the lines of acolytes extending outside the boulangeries, waiting for their turn when the counter woman, or priestess, would give them their host.

And nothing in them but flour, water, yeast and salt.

One can float in rapture writing about the patisseries and boulangeries of Paris.

On one side of the door are shelves filled with some of the most scrumptious pastries: tart de framboises, tart de pomme, raisin horns, tiny chocolate tarts with a surface so deep and brown and so smooth you would swear they were varnished.

They pile high, with the more expensive and larger pies and cakes at the bottom, the slices of things for sale in the middle, and the individual pastries on the top: croissants, pain au chocolate, raisin pastry.

Behind the counter, baskets stuffed with baguettes, like arrows in a quiver.

You can see the process at the boulangerie at the south end of the Rue de Chaligny on the Right Bank. The bakers work behind glass, where you can see the boulangers themselves, working dough in 20-gallon bowls with industrial dough hooks. One pulls the dough out, cuts off a chunk with a kind of spatula, lifts it into a large plastic bowl on a scale, cutting off chunks or adding new to reach the proper weight, then hoisting the bowls onto a wheeled cart, stacked up, bowl on bowl, to take to the back for the rising.

Behind him another boulanger, a young man about 20, lines up the snakelike baguette dough on a large tray: 24 to a tray, eight snakes across, three lined longways. Then with a deftness of a samurai and the insouciance of a cabbie, he wields his knife and makes exactly eight diagonal cuts in each loaf.

Behind him are three or four flat ovens, rather like pizza ovens, stacked up.

He opened up the lowest door, takes a long peel, slides it into the shimmering heat and pulls out four toasty baguettes at a time, resting the spade end of the peel on a ledge of the oven, and pulling the loaves off by hand, one or two at a time, and dumping them vertically into a large basket beside the oven. He pokes the peel back in, pulling out another load and repeating till the oven is empty. He then moves to the next highest oven and repeats same; then the third oven.

When they were all empty, he takes the large slate of dough snakes and with a single move, slides them all into the oven at once, leaving their palette in the oven with them.

After a few minutes, he opened the door once more and yanks the palette out, the way a performer whips a tablecloth out from under a table setting, without disturbing anything: He leaves the loaves behind to cook, sets the palette back on its stand and immediately begins unloading new raw baguette snakes onto the palette with a flat piece of wood.

It’s an industrial process, perfected through years of repetition, making the perfect baguette. You cannot duplicate it at home.

The finished bread, of course, looked better than any bread an American could possibly imagine.

The staff of life.

I am in love with words. I think anyone who has made a living as a writer must feel something of the same.

But for me, it is not just the filial love one has for the mother tongue, it is the Tristram and Isolt, Abelard and Heloise sort of thing. I feel passion for some words — words that break my tongue across them, fill my cheeks as I say them — like “a strenuous tongue bursting Joy’s grape against its palate fine.” Talking, like eating, can be an erotic experience.

English is so rich, with its multiple inheritance from Celtic, Germanic and Romance languages, it might as well be chocolate.

“Chocolate,” by the way, was originally an Aztec word. English picks up its sexiness partly through its exoticisms.

Take “sexagesimal” from the Latin, “ketchup” from Chinese, “pajama” from the Hindi, “kiosk” from Turkish, “yam” from Africa, “alcohol” from Arabic, “berserk” from Old Norse. The language is nothing if not promiscuous.

French is called the language of love, but I cannot warm up to the sound of it. It is too smooth, all its edges are worn off. Italian and Spanish come forth in a torrent. Some languages flow out of the mouth like spring water, but English is chunky style; its consonants give texture.

Inconsequential coruscations

I think you can tell the true word lover from the showoff by which kind of word he chooses.

Take the late William Buckley. His vocabulary was immense, but I cannot take him for a genuine lover of English. He larded his prose with sesquipedalian hendecasyllables — a propensity for latinate neologisms and lexicographic arcana so impenetrable you would swear you were translating Vergil.

He was pure showoff. He abused the language, even when his words were ineluctably precise. There were times you have to sit back and admire his hot-dogging, but I no more believe it is love of his art that moves him than the bravura virtuoso who can bang out all the notes of a Liszt concerto without ever finding the music in it.

Another showoff is Lawrence Durrell. His Alexandria Quartet is a great piece of fiction, but I have always been unsettled by his insistence on dredging up tenpenny words.

In the first chapter of Justine, you can find “aniline,” “etiolated,” “pegamoid,” “adventive,” “lambence,” “ululations,” “exiguous” and “exigent.” To this day, I have never found “pegamoid” — or anything close — in any dictionary, no matter how unabridged.

You get the feeling he expended many hours of lucubration in the accumulation and exhibition of his erudition.

Words full of bone and bite 

But take Shakespeare. He uses more words than any other English writer. His vocabulary is huge — more than 22,000 words — yet, even when he is showing off, he is likely to stick to short ones.

The “To be or not to be” soliloquy from “Hamlet,” for instance, is 275 words long, out of which 222 are one-syllable. Whole lines go by with nothing but popping monosyllables:

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . .”

“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time . . .”

In the whole speech, only 18 words are more than two syllables long, and only five are four syllables. Nothing longer.

Certainly, the Bard can sling out a “multitudinous seas incarnadine” when he wants, but the power of his speech comes not from Rome, but from English soil, where the short word has deep roots in Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Celtic antiquity.

The language offers such baroque concretions as “borborygmus,” “tintinnabulation” and “hemidemisemiquaver,” but what greater effect have “gurgle,” “clang” and “blip.” The crunch of such words on the teeth is sybaritic, more sensuous than their length in flat ink on a flat page.

Perhaps that is what I am most excited about: that language be recited aloud, that its physical reality in the mouth be remembered. That is hard to do when storing your prose on a thumb drive.

Perhaps if more people read their words aloud — and had the ear to hear them — there would be less bad writing published, and less bilge spoken by public figures.

My wife and I suffered a near-bear experience while camping in New Mexico.

Actually, I’ve had several near-bear experiences in my travel life.

The first was in Tennessee, when I was camping with a college buddy in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. We were staying at Ice Water Springs on the crest line of the mountain range when a bear charged me. It was a young bear and I was photographing it and I guess it wanted to let me know I was too close.

In my defense, I must say, I did not approach the bear; he approached me.

But I was too close for his comfort nevertheless, so he turned and ran straight at me, loping from side to side as he did. You read about people saying their hair stood on end and I had always thought it was just a metaphor. No, it’s real. My hair stood on end. At the last moment, no more than two or three feet from me, the bear veered off and ran away.

I was so dumb, I actually stood there and snapped the picture.

My buddy, an old hand at camping, told me his secret for dealing with bears. “Just treat’em like a big dumb dog,” he said.

Years later, in Seattle, I got to know the bear-keeper at the zoo and I sometimes went with him to the back side of the bear cage at feeding time. The female grizzly bear loved to sock down a dozen or so hot dogs for a treat. I would toss them down her gullet, where they disappeared like raindrops in the ocean. A grizzly bear’s gullet is a prodigious thing.

Well, my wife has a thing for bears. She loves them. Every time PBS runs a nature program on bears, I have to videotape it. I don’t know how many times we’ve see the feature film The Bear.

And when we go camping, she is likely to walk to the edge of the camp ground and yell into the woods, “Here, Mr. Bear! Here, Mr. Bear!”

It actually worked once in the Canadian Rockies. Fortunately, we were driving at the time. We were in Jasper National Park and she had the window down, yelling for Mr. Bear. A grizzly showed up along the roadside and we stopped to enjoy his company for a while from the safety of our Chevrolet.

I’ve tried to discourage this practice in campgrounds, though, but she just suggests that maybe if she tied a string to a peanut butter sandwich and trailed it along behind her, she might attract one.

Visiting our friends in Maine once, my wife baked two coconut cream pies. A bear smelled them and came up to the house. He couldn’t get the pies, so he raided the bird feeder outside the kitchen window.

We named the bear Tupai for the two pies. Later, Tupai came back with another bear, looking for pie. My wife, who is an artist, made a paper cut of the event (see above).

Well, we were camping near Cloudcroft, N.M., in the Lincoln National Forest and in the middle of the night I was awakened by a noise outside the tent. There was a slow rummaging through whatever items we had left outside the tent. I looked over and saw my wife still asleep. My hair was standing up again.

My first thought was how I would protect my wife if the noise turned out to be a bear, and if the bear wasn’t satisfied with turning over the Coleman stove and water bucket.

The only weapon I had was a Swiss Army knife and I found it in the darkness and opened it in my sleeping bag. My plan was to attack the bears belly and try to find his heart with the blade. I knew it was a long shot, but I also believed it was my only shot. Big dumb dog, indeed.

Luckily, what really happened was that the sound went away and it was spookily quiet in the woods. I didn’t get much sleep that night and by morning I finally relaxed my grip on the knife.

Over breakfast, I told her the story and she broke out laughing. She had been awakened by the same noise and thought I was asleep. She went through the same reaction I had had and armed herself with a fingernail clippers, planning to save me from the beast.

It all reminded me of the old joke about two guys camping when a bear comes into camp.

“What should we do?” asks the one.

“Run for it,” says the other.

“You can’t outrun the bear,” says the first.

“No, but I can outrun you.

When you think of Los Angeles, the word “nature” comes to mind about as often as the combination of Genghis Khan and the word “delicate.”

LA is one of the world’s great cities, and one of the most artificial. It is all pavement and minimal, parking garage and chain store. I will cede LA no quarter when it comes to magnificence, but when it comes to nature, you’re barking up the wrong stop sign.

Or are you?

There is actually a lot of nature in LA, but like so much else in this sprawling, hazy, energetic city, it is sui generis — in a class of its own. And if you love LA and its artifice and unreality, then you may love its nature, too.

That includes the La Brea Tar Pits, the stuffed animals at the Natural History Museum, the concrete-lined Los Angeles River.

This isn’t nature all cute and cuddly like the nature films show. It is nature covered with graffiti, smelly with escaping gas, and turned into a simulacrum of itself.

But if you are in the right spirit, gravid with irony, there is a lot to love. Like the infamous LA River, a 50-mile-long concrete gutter paralleled by railroad yards, high-tension lines and freeways.

It provided the surreal landscape where giant ants built their nests in “Them!,” the 1954 sci-fi classic about giant ants.

It was also the racetrack for the great chase in “Terminator 2.” It can be seen as an integral part of the anomie in “Repo Man,” “To Live and Die in L.A.” and “Escape From New York.”

It is hard to imagine, but the river is the reason the City of Angels is where it is.

In 1781, the pueblo of “Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula” was founded on the banks of the free-flowing sweet-water river by Spanish settlers moving up from Mexico. That lasted 157 years, until the Army Corps of Engineers, reacting to a series of devastating floods, turned the river into a sluice, beginning in 1938. The river as we know it dates from then.

And what had been a common, nondescript — if pleasant — Western river became an icon for the city.

There are activists trying very hard to return the river to its natural state, and there are a few short sections — called “soft bottomed” — where the river is free from cement. One of the most pleasant borders the eastern edge of Griffith Park, paralleling Interstate 5 and its screaming-banshee traffic.

One has to admire the pluck of such civic-minded groups as Friends of the Los Angeles River, founded in 1986, but one also worries that all over the country, good-intentioned people try to change exactly those things that make their cities unique.

Like the tar pits.

Now part of the city’s Hancock Park, the remaining sticky-holes are surrounded by grass, trees and cute animal statuary. But the heart of the La Brea Tar Pits is the black asphalt, where countless Pleistocene mammals met their gummy end.

The pond at the entrance to the park, with its bronze elephants, is filled with water covered in a film of petroleum. In places a layer of tarry foam collects, and great bubbles of methane blub up like boiling oatmeal, filling the air with stink.

Researchers still are digging prehistoric bones out of the pits. There are more than 100 tar pits in Hancock Park, and Pit 91 is worked every summer, with an observation deck for visitors to watch the volunteers as they scrape goo from their findings.

You can see them below, tarred black and brown, with their shoes glued to the boards thrown across the excavation.

“The stickiness is part of the fun,” one of them says. “We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t enjoy getting sticky.”

The bones dug from the tar are stored and exhibited at the George C. Page Museum on-site, where you can see hundreds of dire wolf skulls, a reconstructed mammoth skeleton and the whole panoply of Cenozoic life from the LA area.

Farther south, you can see more animals at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, one of those old, dusty antiquarian museums with high ceilings and marble floors.

The Hall of North American Mammals is a series of dioramas with the gems of the taxidermic art in situ: There are grizzly bears, bison, elk, weasels and Dahl sheep, all in amazing lifelike poses.

Ah, wilderness!

At the other end of the building is the Hall of African Mammals and a giant elephant at the watering hole.

This is show business.

There is also “megamouth,” a 14.5-foot male shark pickled in a bathtub of formaldehyde, which is always a favorite with schoolkids.

Nature lovers often are horrified by Los Angeles. The blue-white haze that leaves Angelenos wheezing and their eyes stinging. The pavement where chaparral should be. The ubiquitous power lines blocking the greenish skies.

But perhaps we simply have the wrong idea about nature.

If you want cute furry animals and fields of wildflowers, you’ve come to the wrong place. Try Maine, at the opposite corner of the continent.

But the Bambi vision is only one version of nature, and it is a conventional version, and LA is anything but conventional.

We should think of nature as anything that reminds us we live on a planet. That includes geology, climate, hydrology.

LA is a city inescapably bound up with the real effects of nature. LA is the city of earthquakes, mudslides, ozone and haze, the city of Santa Ana winds and wildfires, of mountain lions attacking joggers.

Despite its reputation, LA is all nature all the time.

That’s why I love the Baldwin Hills, a geologic bump south of Rodeo Road and north of Slauson Avenue. It is covered with pendulating oil rigs, like giant iron birds dipping their beaks to the ground for worms. Los Angeles is built over several oil fields, and these gritty iron industrial monsters are almost all that is left of what was once LA’s other great moneymaker.

You can see the landscape in the photos of Hollywood from the 1920s: It was a landscape prickly with stickleback oil derricks. It was a hell of industrial devastation.

But the oil under the rocks is also the source of the tar for the tar pits. And the geology that gives the oil also gives us the San Andreas Fault and the frequent earthquakes in the city. Small ones don’t even warrant a mention in the newspaper.

You look at the geology and you see the city built in a basin spreading like spilled ink on every flat surface south of the mountains.

There are the Santa Monica Mountains and Mulholland Drive, with its many turnoffs and vistas — smog depending.

And when the weather is clear enough, you can see the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, with peaks rising as high as Mount Baldy’s 10,064 feet and covered in snow as late as July.

If you take the Angeles Crest Highway north from La Canada Flintridge, you can drive the 20 miles or so to the Mount Wilson Observatory, where so much of the astronomy of the 20th century took place. It is at Mount Wilson that Fred Hubble first discovered the expansion of the universe, that the distance to the stars first was measured accurately, that the new science of astrophysics was developed.

The 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson was the largest in the world from 1917, when it opened, to 1948, when the 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar was finished. Some of the most aesthetically satisfying photographs of distant galaxies were taken at Mount Wilson.

If nature is about reminding us we live on a planet, Mount Wilson is a great place to start.

Or you could take a longitudinal section starting in San Pedro at the ocean.

The city begins in the sea, and at the

(1) Cabrillo Marine Aquarium you can see not only tanks of fish and invertebrates, you can walk out into the tide pools at the edge of Point Fermin.

Travel north on Hawthorne Boulevard and it becomes La Brea Avenue and takes you up over the Baldwin Hills, where you see the result of eons of squeezing and distillation on the ancient sea creatures that lived where LA now sits: the pumps that extract the oil from under the ground. The Baldwin Hills also are the home of the

(2) Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area, where, in 1963, subsidence caused by the extraction of oil triggered an earthquake that breached the dam of the Baldwin Hills Reservoir and sent about 250 million gallons of water down on the city, destroying 277 homes.

Nature is always an instructive teacher; we are not always such attentive students.

A side trip to the east takes us to the

(3) Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where the exhibits range from pickled fish to dinosaur fossils.

Back on track, headed north, there are the

(4) La Brea Tar Pits in Hancock Park, with its

(5) George C. Page Museum of prehistoric finds, one of the uniquely LA natural landmarks.

Further north, there is LA’s

(6) Griffith Park, with golf courses, riding stables and picnic tables and the famous Griffith Park Observatory and the LA Zoo. The LA River shoulders the edge of the park, with one of its more attractive stretches.

(7) Mulholland Drive heads west atop the Santa Monica Mountains, affording views of Los Angeles to the south and the San Fernando Valley to the north, with frequent vista stops along the way.

If you stop at

(8) Laurel Canyon Park, along Mulholland Drive, you can get out and hike along hillside trails and enjoy all of the other hikers with their dogs. But starting at the park, you also can drive down the little-traveled Laurel Canyon Drive back to Hollywood Boulevard and get an intimate look, among the homes, at the city’s geology.

Take the Glendale Highway north to La Canada Flintridge and visit the beautiful

(9) Descanso Gardens, with its forests of camellias, lush rose plantings, California chaparral section and Japanese Gardens. This is nature the way we usually think of it.

Then continue north on the Angeles Crest Highway for 16 miles to the

(10) Mount Wilson turnoff, and another five miles up mountain roads to the great observatory, where you can look north into the wilderness of the San Gabriel Mountains and contemplate how the city sits at the feet of such glory.

Or you can look south and see the smog.