April 28, 1996

Its construction has been likened by people here to that of the Pyramids, the Hoover Dam and the Panama Canal. It has been called "a wonder of the world," by the United States Transportation Secretary. The Big Dig, as everyone here calls the eight miles of tunnels and highways being built through the heart of Boston, is the largest public works project in America and the most expensive stretch of highway.

I was less depressed during the Depression," said Ruth K. Goldberg, who is 84. "Maybe it's because I was younger then. Old age is not so wonderful. I keep crossing out names of friends in my address book. But there's something else, too. "There was hope then. We were marching and organizing. There seemed to be a future, that life would get better for everyone. Nowadays, you have to be a moron or a right winger not to be depressed.

FINALLY there is a car in my driveway that no one really needs. For some time now, I have bemoaned the trend toward sport utility vehicles, to pickup trucks and all-wheel-drive wagons; to, well, automotive plebianism.

BILL CLINTON wrote the book on how to run against the economy in 1992, when the country was in a recessionary funk and the now-famous "It's the Economy, Stupid" sign hung in his campaign headquarters. Four years later, he is discovering that it is far harder to take credit for an essentially well-paved economy -- 8.5 million jobs created, exports surging -- that is cratered by one large pothole: the much-documented if inchoate anxiety that jobs are less secure than ever and that wages are going nowhere, unless you're in the loftiest executive suite.

IF REPRESSION CAN BE HEARD TO CRUMBLE, it is in the brittle peal and cascading play of Russian church bells. More, it is in the sinuous, subtle lines, the rooted, resonant tones and the close, colliding harmonies spun out in majesty by the church choir; in the sturdy syllables of Old Slavonic, a language kept alive by the Russian Orthodox Church. These are sounds now rising throughout Russia on the crest of a religious resurgence since the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. They are also heard in a steady stream of recordings of Russian liturgical music making its way to the West: something new under the sun, since the faith was driven underground in the Soviet Union in the 1920's, at the dawn of the recording era.