A Minute in New York
As soon as you arrive in Manhattan, you consume a drug so potent and numbing you scarcely notice it.
By all rights, New York should not function: its foundations are chaos and concrete built atop soft rock, its people speak more languages and endure the shadows of more numerous high towers than Babel. In the summer it is a manmade furnace with little of the providential oceanic relief the agnostic San Franciscan takes for granted; in winter, misery from both parties once again. There is none of that natural beauty so common in the rest of New England. And yet, it works sublimely, entirely manmade and yet entirely human (contrast with Dubai; entirely manmade, entirely inhuman). New York is a miracle, but it is a mundane one. God may know how His miracles are achieved, but I suspect no one knows how or why New York is; it is a phantasmagoric hallucination of many generations. It is a bit like AI, in that way.
The only explanation for the fact that New York continues to exist is an intoxicating drug, imported into the city in equal measure with its coffee, mountain water and dreams. The air is dirty, hazy with smog and disinfectant belched out alongside stale air from the subway entrances and yet you catch yourself gulping in great breaths — more of this, this place, this marvelously tangled forest of Manhattan.
I think that to love and live in New York City, the romance must be started at a young age. I do not think I could move there, now, even in wealth, whereas I would be content to be moderately poor in San Francisco. Indeed, I am writing all this within New York City, while the drug still fills my veins; upon reading this someplace more sane, I will doubt myself in disgust, that I could have ever enjoyed New York City. But now, here, I see it, I see the place E. B. White loved, that comprised the simultaneously cozy and vast world of How I Met Your Mother. I can imagine being young and trying anything here; it is that sort of place. San Francisco is that sort of place, too, but only during the day. At night, the fog rolls in and sedates ambition with contentment; and this is a different sort of drug. Not many places make San Francisco seem sane, but New York does.
And for those who can take the medicine for a prolonged period, who can bear the mass of humanity around them like Atlas bears his globe at Rockefeller Plaza, there is something here which you will not find in any other point of the earth. A city that to much of mankind would have seemed like a city of the gods, even if it is more a city of the hipster. A city where every building seems a temple even if there is a Walgreens at its base. A city where you can spend a million dollars and feel destitute, or spend ten dollars and feel every bit a Rockefeller for an hour.
A city which a part of me almost wishes that I had fallen in love with first. But one's cities choose us.
