Menswear is all about these little details and slight changes in proportion, but for women’s wear you have to turn up the volume. And that somehow makes it less interesting: a change of a centimeter in menswear can be very powerful; in women’s wear it’s usually meaningless.

Used as a verb, “remixing” has been possible (and practiced) ever since the existence of multi-track recording. At the dawn of sound recording, a song had to be recorded directly to the form it would eventually be heard, and there was no way of extracting just the bass or guitar part without taking all the other parts with it. But once sound could be recorded to 4 or more tracks (from which it’s then “mixed down” into the final, combined form you hear), engineers could return to the working versions of songs and “remix” them: make the guitar louder, take out all of the vocals, even make the track shorter or longer.

This isn’t to say that recorded sound couldn’t be manipulated prior to the advent of multi-tracking. Most notable here is William Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique, which took a Dadaist trick of cutting up words to rearrange text and then applied it to the magnetic tape on which recordings used to reside. Musicians like Brian Eno and Genesis P-Orridge used the technique to clip sections, rearrange them and place them in a new sequence—Burroughs characterized this as a “method for altering reality.” Recording engineers did this too, but they called it an “edit,” and they used it not to alter reality, but as a way to, for instance, shorten a long track for radio play by removing an instrumental section or extra verse.

THE artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists — as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist — and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York.

The first story takes place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where several years ago Mr. Wheeler created a complex installation he calls an “infinity environment,” featuring a light-saturated, all-white, rounded room with no corners or sharp angles, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. It invokes an experience of light itself as an almost tactile presence. As Mr. Wheeler continued to tweak the piece, a small boy walked up to the room and hesitated before entering, putting his hands in front of him because his senses told him that the square entrance was a wall, not simply a wall of light flooding his vision.

“I thought, ‘O.K., I can stop worrying so much and being mad about them letting people in too early,’ ” Mr. Wheeler said recently over coffee at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, where he has just opened his first solo New York gallery show at the age of 72, remaking a cavernous interior into a kind of immaculate white vacuum tube — the city’s first infinity environment.

The second story he tells happened in the late 1960s, in a former dime store in Venice, Calif., the studio where he first began creating the ethereal, experiential work that made him a founder of the so-called Light and Space movement, along with fellow West Coast artists like Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Mary Corse. One afternoon Mr. Wheeler welcomed a couple of prominent dealers from a New York gallery — “who shall remain nameless,” he now says tersely — to show off a new work using phosphorus paint and lights to create the sensation of a mistlike plane bisecting part of the studio.

The dealers walked right past the piece without noticing it, making a beeline to some earlier, popular light works that hung on the walls like paintings.

“I just thought what idiots they were for not seeing it,” he said. “Now maybe it wasn’t powerful enough. Maybe it was just my arrogance. But at that time I didn’t think of it that way.”

“What they expected to see, they saw,” he added, “and then they left.”

He bid them a friendly goodbye and never did business with the gallery again.

ONE cold, misty autumn morning, I slipped and fell. I was on my way out to do errands, the mossy wooden deck on the north side of my house was slick with dew, I was in a hurry, I skidded, and both feet flew out from under me.

As I fell — danger signs flashing in my brain: falling! falling! — I curled up to protect my head, landing squarely on my tailbone. Pain lighted up my spinal cord. My brain joggled in its cradle. Bright lights dazzled my eyes.

I lay there for a minute or three, gasping in pain. Then the old control center kicked in: “Move.”

Like a computer running through settings during start-up, I wiggled my legs and my arms and moved my neck. Everything was working. Still, the pain in my tailbone was intense.

“You must get up,” I said to myself. But there was another voice in my head, the one cowering behind the control center.

That voice was whimpering and scolding. “This is what happens when you live alone,” it said. “You fall, and there is no one to help you up. If you don’t pick yourself up, you could lie here for three days, maybe even two weeks, before anyone finds you. Lucky you aren’t paralyzed.

“It is not good to live alone.”

Just the evening before, I had driven down my lane thinking about how many of my neighbors were single women, of all ages.

They — we! — have been single for years. They — we! — aren’t showing any inclination to change our status, though I think I can speak for them — us! And, for that matter, everyone in the world! — when I say that, of course, if we were lucky enough to fall madly in love with someone again, we would gladly trade in our single ways and hitch up.

But the key word is “madly.”

Because many women, once released from marriage, seem to feel that it would take an act of madness to move back into a setup that involves not only housekeeping in all its manifold time-sucking beauty but also husband-keeping.

As I lay on the deck aching, another light blinked on in my brain, shining a halo around a question that has been vexing me for years: Why do men hate to be alone?

Maybe it was my joggled brain, but I was no longer capable of subtle thought. Instead, I was overcome by sweeping generalities.

The world divides into two groups: one (men), who think you can fall at any moment, and when you’re down, you’re out, and you need help; the other (women), who pick themselves up and move on.

Judging by statistics, to say nothing of the glaring evidence around me, men do not have any problem remarrying. In fact, most men seem unable to live alone for longer than, say, at the outside … three months.

Most single women I know really love their lives.

Sometimes we suffer pangs of loneliness, sometimes we ache for the companionship of that mythic soul mate, but mostly we cherish our independence. We love doing whatever we want to do, when we want to do it.

Women alone eat breakfast at 11 if we feel like it, lunch at 3 and dinner never if that’s the way the day is winding down. Single women do not worry about cooking unless we want to. And we don’t want to unless we like to.

Single women love not having to get permission to spend our own money on a 10th pair of black boots or a painting or a wood stove.

We love not being judged, not being criticized, not being hemmed in. We love the give and take of making our own decisions. We love putting things down on a table knowing they will be there when we return. And eventually, we come to understand that there is no reason to curl up on “our” side of the bed while we sleep. We no longer have to take sides. We can sprawl across the expansive middle.

Single men could not care less about any of the above lifestyle features.

A marriage is a lot of work. Strike that. A man is a lot of work. Anyone who has been in a bad marriage knows that its defining characteristic is the unspeakable loneliness in which one feels shrouded, a sense of isolation amplified by not being alone.

Until I fell, I never understood exactly why men were so loath to remain alone. Surely it wasn’t just a sexist reliance on having a mate who did the shopping, cooking, nesting, scheduling and child-rearing? All around me were plenty of men who pitched in at least a little on all those things, men entirely capable of taking care of themselves.

After I hit my tailbone and joggled my brain, I lay there, thinking that, by the time everyone compared notes about when exactly was the last time they had heard from me, I could be moldering on the floor. This is, indeed, dangerous.

Home is where I am supposed to be safe.

And that’s when the circuit breaker tripped. Men are hard-wired to feel danger all the time. I know there must be science around somewhere to back up this assertion, but seriously, that’s what makes a man a man. A man is on guard because that is his job.

He hunts and tangles with wild beasts. He does not nest. He gets in the way of nesting. And above all a man does not willingly venture near that snake pit called “feelings.” He avoids danger, aware that only so many arrows are granted to him in a lifetime, so he should husband his resources.

Being alone feels dangerous to a man. No one has your back. No one feeds you. No one nurses you in your sickbed. No one takes up a watch if you vanish or sends out a search party if you wander off the trail.

The world is dangerous enough without adding the dangers that come of being alone.

Women do not walk around alert for danger. Nor do we feel that being alone is dangerous, except in the rare instances when we fall and crack our tailbones. Women are hard-wired to read the signals that keep us from danger, and, when confronted by trouble, we escape, fleeing into our homes. In fact, I have observed that women who have escaped loudly troubled marriages often feel safer when they are alone.

To a woman, being home feels safe.

We love our nests. We tend them, and in exchange we expect them to keep us snug and warm and serene and safe. Which, generally, they do. Because nests are reliable.

As I said, my brain was joggled. Suddenly, everything I learned in the ’70s seemed refreshingly clear-eyed. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Now I understand why a man needs marriage like a fish needs water.

I may be alone down here in this snake pit of feelings, wrestling with questions that slither into the dark recesses of the human soul faster than you can shine a moonbeam at them.

At least, alone, it is quiet enough to hear myself think. But the guys may have a point.

One of the unspoken laws that governs the way New York City works is the truly amazing “Pizza Principle.”

Derived in the eighties through a series of (now archived) articles in The New York Times, the Pizza Principle — also known as the “New York City Pizza Connection” — maintains that since 1960, inflation and other factors have caused the the price of both a slice of pizza and a single ride on the subway to rise at a nearly identical rate. A Times piece from 1980 cites Bronx patent lawyer Eric Bram as an authority on the matter, and the paper wrote about the phenomenon again in 1985.

In 2002, Clyde Haberman charted The Times coverage from the two decades previous, and offered this retort to anyone seeking empirical scientific evidence to justify this somewhat baffling synchronicity of price: “Don’t ask why. It simply is so, and has been for decades.”

Seeing as it’s endured for this long, the Pizza Principle will soon force pizza-minded lunch-seekers to pony up another quarter at their neighborhood Famous Ray’s or whatever: the MTA announced that it has approved higher subway, bus, and commuter train fares earlier today, the New York Daily News reports. The price of a single subway ride will now set New Yorkers back $2.50, and it can only be assumed that the price of by-the-slice pizza will increase accordingly.

Though there is one more option. Haberman wrote about the Pizza Principle in The Times most recently in 2007, when subway fares were on the cusp of the $2.25 precipice. In the piece, he cited a letter to the editor written by a local school psychologist, who recommended that the city finally honor the majesty of its subway-pizza connection by simply adjusting the train fare at each station in accordance with the price of the pizza nearby. This might work, right?

OK, maybe not. Instead, it will totally suck to cough up the extra dollar or two spent daily on pie and rides. But this annoyance notwithstanding, how can you root against the mysterious voodoo of the Pizza Principle? The intrinsic connection between two completely desperate — but completely essential — New York institutions is one of those invisible forces that sews the city together. And if history is to be believed, it’s here to stay.

Plus, our local pizza place knew this was coming: the slice of cheese there has already been upped to that wallet-rocking price of $2.50. That’s right, Rosario’s on the Lower East Side. We’re looking at you.