The Beginning

“…the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece- millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work….” –Ian McEwan, Saturday

How bizarrely it seems to us now that the city would not work, that it might fail. In light of tragedy, upheavals and disasters, the city still stands as the dominant social system of the early twenty-first century. While nations are eclipsed by corporations, cities are enmeshed in the convulsions of globalization and a tug of war as to which identity to adopt- native or immigrant. In a city that has always been a hallmark for immigrants, I find myself at a loss, as a relatively recently minted New Yorker, to describe the cacophonous sounds of Chinatown (where I live) as they glide into the easy and quiet sophistication of Tribeca, then back out again into the noise and tumult of the West Side Highway. The city seems to be a nation unto itself, where we might lose ourselves in a grid of mire and bliss that is so much larger than ourselves that we are willing to suspend briefly (and for some over a lifetime) the belief that we might somehow as a single entity matter more than the great, hurling masses that stream down Fifth Avenue. If each of us is but a wave, then together we are a great sea whose hidden depths are forever unexplored, waiting to reveal secrets we have never dared to imagine possible. The city becomes the repository of all our dreams, hidden desires, nightmares and private affairs- each dissembled in the crafty and trendy appearance of the apartments for which we so desperately hunt. From our windows, whether looking directly into the next building, out across a park, or into the deep and unknowable web of high-rises, we imagine that across from us are the lives we never lived, enacted and humbly executed by those who made the choices we did not. We take comfort in the fact that each choice, however small, has led to this city, where all roads seem to cross. Wait here long enough, and everyone you know (and to a New Yorker, anyone who matters) will come through. It is the thoroughfare of the world, and as we leave our own imprints on these haggard, lonely, exhilarating streets, we take pleasure in the outlines of those who have gone before, those who walk beside, and those who will walk over us after we have passed. This blog then is one imprint among many, destined to be forgotten and copied and salvaged and withdrawn, as all New York lives. May it tread lightly but perceptively until it is erased, burn brightly until it is extinguished.