“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.”
- Khalil Gibran
The wind blows cold and the flakes stab at your face. You pull yourself into the glow of a nearby café and bathe in the warmth around you. The cold melts away and gives birth to tingling limbs that gain feeling – that gain life. You’re in love with the warmth.
_ _ It’s the first sunny day in countless weeks. You step outside and the sun hits you like a bucket of water. You can feel your pale skin warm in the light – your eyes are lit up and your smile widens. You walk with longer strides, you say hello to more people.You’re in love with the sun.
You’re sick of your environment – the same people and places everyday. You grab the next taxi and take the voyage to the the streets of a different land. The faces you see are different, the buildings are new, the landscape is breathtaking. You’re in love with the diversity.
If you live in New York City, the city , you're obligated to have these experiences; not because it is an initiation or a requirement, but because New York offers these unique changes – the kind of shifts in life usually reserved for airplanes and long road trips. The city won't be hemmed in – it can't be. It extends its concrete hand and sets before you the kind of unrelenting diversity one sees in natures; different people, places, colors and shapes, from all around the world. You look and you see – it’s intriguing. You’re in love with the city : to each of its citizens, New York is the all-encompassing lover: comforting, invigorating, sometimes dominating and infuriating.
As we grapple with our relationship to New York, we realize that we have come to expect its offerings as much as we expect the sun to rise. Each day becoming more and more subject to the inertia around us: like a child to a parent, like a dog to its owner. Time fritters on like a frenzied taxi ride. Eyes that once shot upwards in aspiration sag downwards, the wide smile runs crooked as the energy begins to draw from us instead of us from it. The city as a chore; we consider leaving Manhattan, leaving the commitment behind.
It's daunting to see our own contingencies. Perhaps those who have come before us – who have looked at their own histories with New York, can offer a perspective?
Upon arrival, you are a foreigner. You are the quintessential jaw-draping, wide-eyed observer. Much like the young man seeking his mate, your eyes follow the city like the curves of a beautiful woman. As Phillip Lopate writes in Manhattan, Floating World , "It pulls your eye straight up the street, to long, unimpeded vistas." (Lopate: 54) Your mind falls prey to the seduction as it unleashed a vanity, he adds.
"There is about this vanity of walking, in cases like mine, the insular smell of maleness unable to break out of itself; solitary, literary, onanistic, cerebral, boastful, defensive, and melancholy (like most flirtations with the infinite)." (Lopate: 57) A seduction, he suggests. You might start walking the streets more – looking for something new – the experience that will define it for you. You keep walking, looking. It becomes fluid and patterned, like the patchwork of a quilt. E.B. White similarity states, "The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines." (White: 3)
That great expectation of a breathing city, of a living city; with it, by it, for it. Even if you found fault in your new companion, your devotion overlooks small transgressions. To the point: EB White comments that for what deficiencies you may find, the sense of belonging in New York is something so unique and mighty that it compensates for such defects; that among it all, it is a “miracle” that New York works at all. (White: 4) You come to believe that your ordinary life isn’t so ordinary any more. The illusion of New York, like a child experiencing their first Christmas, become a grounded truth.
Like all sleights of hand, the illusion does crumble; maybe you run low on money, the phone doesn’t ring, maybe the sky – no matter how bright – hangs on you like an obligation. It would seem Gornick’s conflict isn’t so pleasurable and the uncertainty isn’t so glamorous. Your lover confuses you; what Joan Didion would call the “insistent sentimentalization…the reliance” falls apart. You walk with a scowl. The café is dull, the sun is cold, the crowds alienating.
It’s upsetting. You should have seen this coming: the disenchantment. You lose touch; moments on street become the awkward encounters of ex-lovers. The realization that you’ve been playing with a “dangerous but vital energy." (Didion, SJ: 37) hits you hard. New York can take back what it gives . As the city recoils it’s “intoxicating” energy, it leaves you wondering, just as Didion wondered, why, "...it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there [NYC]." (Didion: 15) Your anger and resentment may rise and fall like the tides, but the fundamental truth of it remains: an illusion hoisted by the wafting peanut vendors, the overheated subways, the curbside garbage. Didion comments, "For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L'air du Temps and now the slightest trace of either can short circuit my connections for the rest of the day." (Didion: 15) L’air du temps – the air of time, where time is motion, motion is energy and energy is New York.
Both Didion and Lopate comment that their bitter relationship with the city was mended by new relationships. However, Lopate demonstrates some fear in having his present and ex-lovers in the same geography when he writes, "Then I fell in love in my late forties, and remarried. I wondered, worried, since the aesthetic response to beauty never die, if the streets of Manhattan might pose a continuous challenge to my fidelity, mentally if not physically." (Lopate: 57) Didion, on the other hand, takes a safer path. She marries and moves to California, leaving her tragic relationship a continent behind her. She underscores, though, that it wasn’t easy:
"I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and I when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a specialist. Instead, I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing..." (Didion: 17)
Living in the city is much like gambling with luck, as E.B. White might suggest. You have to be willing to let go, to change. While at the same time holding fast to that core of who you are.
Despite our struggles, to love New York is to recognize that New York is a different kind of place – a place where everyone is connected by their relationship to the city itself. To consider if you are a New Yorker is not simply a geographic question, it is an inquiry into whom, exactly, you are willing to be.
Works Cited
Didion, Joan. “Goodbye to All That.” Eight Modern Essayists. Ed. William Smart. 6th ed. NY: St. Martin’s, 1995. 165-172.
"Sentimental Journeys.” After Henry. NY: Vintage, 1993.
Gornick, Vivian. “On the Street: Confessions in the company of strangers.” New ssssssssYorker 9 Sept. 1996: 72-77
Lopate, Phillip. “Manhattan, Floating World.” The Place Within. Ed. Jodi Daynard. NY: Norton, 1997. 133-143.
White, E.B. “Here Is New York.” Essays of E.B. White. NY: Harper Collins, 1977.
Great Expectations. Dir. Alfonso Cuaron With Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. Twentieth Century Fox, 1998.