For laughs: Walt Whitman on NYC....
From The Economist Magazine. (My husband reads me articles such as these!)
"Dr Johnson famously said that when man is tired of London, he is tired of life. Whether true or not for London, the same cannot be said of New York, because New York is larger than life. It is faster, busier, more enthralling and, for many, eventually too exhausting. Recall Walt Whitman as he sang the praises of New York, "My city!" as enthusiastically as anyone. Give me the streets of Manhattan, eh wrote, "O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!" And then he moved to New Jersey.
"Dr Johnson famously said that when man is tired of London, he is tired of life. Whether true or not for London, the same cannot be said of New York, because New York is larger than life. It is faster, busier, more enthralling and, for many, eventually too exhausting. Recall Walt Whitman as he sang the praises of New York, "My city!" as enthusiastically as anyone. Give me the streets of Manhattan, eh wrote, "O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!" And then he moved to New Jersey.
posted by Emily Hanlon at
2/24/2005 12:48:00 PM
1 Comments:
Whitman so very right. Manhattan can be a seductive high. Open-armed to all of us- the seekers, pushers, movers. The angry and indignant. . We artists; tight -faced financiers; the ballet students on sixth avenue; still the entry point for immigrants. Ghosts of people who made the city- Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thomas Wolfe, the multitude of eccentrics at the New Yorker. Unionists. Activists. Communists. Leonard Bernstein. Lenny Bruce. Kosher restaurants with white coated waiters in the Lower East Side. Tompkins Park, moms and children; drug pushers, rallys... Greenwich Village and off off Bway. Our sixties peace movement. Jackie Oh. Alan Ginsberg. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The 94th Street Y. Cooper Union. Bead stores head shops, easy drugs. OK to curl anywhere and read your book, write your novel, another page in your journal. The Bowery and men washing your windshield for a bottle of wine. Home for everyone.
A seven floor walk-up or a 35 floor fast elevator and the hubris view of the very affluent. We buy the same corner hotdogs and winter chestnuts. Well, maybe Trump has his delivered.
Today, like Whitman, my house is in NJ. I live in MD. And I call no place home as I did NY.
Home is inside me as I cross state lines go urban and rural. Even suburban- me the beatnick.
NY too much for me now. But I am homesick for her. On a short visit I bought things in a frenzy of memory. Glitzy earrings, silk scarfs in Penn Station, a piece of jade in Chinatown, a Reuben at Wolfes. Driving past my analyst's office in the sixties. Jewelry at the Met on Fifth. Cards at MOMA.
I always thought I'd be old and content in a rent-controlled apartment and going out early to get the Times and a fresh baegel.
Still going to Loeman's to shop and hoping the lower lower East Side markets survived.
The subway out to Coney Island and up to 34th Street- Macys, Lord and Taylor, Saxs, Bloomingdales before she went young and mad.The New School and The Times. A chronic mental patient loading papers at the Times- good wages-union scale. Big rats and bully cats to fight them. Effete dogs and our ubiquitious pigions. The echo of carriages on coblestones, and suffragettes . Homeless used to sleep in subway stations. Where Rudy sent them I do not know.The Hamptons in the late fall when I could afford the rates.
New York pushes the envelope.
Saturday Night Live to Howard Stern.
How lucky I was to teeth on adulthood in that teeming city.
Claire, often homesick for my mother city
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