in which: New York
I have just returned from a trip to New York; my third trip this year, to see some close friends and gently marinate in my love for that city.
A lot of people have written a lot of things about New York, and I am not clever or insightful enough to say anything new about it. I read Joan Didion’s Good-bye to All That at about the age she is at the beginning of the essay, twenty-one or maybe twenty-two. It is one of the single most beautiful and most personally important pieces of writing I have ever read, and it altered my emotional chemistry down to a molecular level. But her New York is not my New York. Hers is a melancholic city of intimacy gained and then lost, or perhaps surrendered. I, not generally the wisest of humans, very wisely have kept New York at a distance from myself, a distance at which I have never fallen out of love.
I did a loose calculation, and it seems I’ve spent a total of more than nine weeks in New York City in the past fifteen years, since my first multi-day trip with a friend in college to run through the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking for Caravaggio. That, I think, is the core of my experience in the city: I have spent most of the waking portions of those nine weeks in the Met or the Brooklyn Museum or MoMA or the Whitney or the Guggenheim or the Cloisters or the Cooper Union Museum of Design; but mostly in the Met, hours upon hours of walking its galleries, getting lost and finding new rooms (which I would swear up and down I’ve never set foot in before) every single time I visit.
This time, I wandered through a chain of contemporary rooms I don’t recall ever seeing before, after visiting the Oceania collection for the first time in a decade. After, I stopped into a slightly upscale Italian restaurant and ordered a meal that is a step to the left of anything I normally eat: a shaved fennel salad with orange slices and green olives, followed by ruffled pasta in a minty pesto with pistachios. I spent a long time considering the confident homoeroticism of mainstream art in the 1950s in a display curated around the human butt. I got lost in Central Park (I always get lost in Central Park).
Though she might have come to different conclusions, Didion understood me perfectly well, as she writes:
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never seen or done or known about.
That is how I felt arriving in Boston at age eighteen; in Tokyo at age twenty-one; in Madrid at age twenty-two; in Paris at age twenty-three. I had stopped feeling like anything, let alone everything, was within my reach by the year after Paris, and now getting off the train in New York is the perhaps the only place I feel that old whisper of optimism, the idea that joy and beauty might be something I could wander into, a reward for a foolhardy adventurer, instead of the result of thousands of hours of emotionally draining labor.
If I had ever actually moved to New York, the lack of soundproofing and constant threat of bedbugs would have eaten away at my delight (though perhaps not; I have lived in a Boston suburb for nearly eight years, and turning the corner from Mass Ave onto Huntington on my way to the MFA still sends a frisson of numinous joy down my spine.) More soberly, I think in New York I would have become lost in the constant flow of people in and out, and crushed among the hard shells of all the people desperate to find or make themselves.
But I have never wanted to move to New York. I have perhaps always wanted to be close to New York, in the same peculiar way I have always wanted to be close to the ocean, despite the fact that I am a poor swimmer and antagonistic toward cruise ships. Both the ocean and New York are inextricably linked with the very concept of freedom for me. Freedom, meaning: a lack of expectations, a lack of expecting to know (and a lack of other people expecting to know about you.) The freedom to be relentlessly surprised by the unknown depths of this world.
I lead a very small life, a life which, by choice, hews pretty closely to my home and my job and my friends and my books. I used to travel and now do not, for boring financial and emotional reasons.
But even so: I have not given up New York.
Somewhere north of 40% of New York City’s residents were born in another country, though the exact number is impossible to pin down, given how fast people move and how many people are undocumented.
This enormous diversity of human beings is likely not unlinked to why the city means freedom to me and many others.
A couple weeks ago New York elected their first immigrant mayor in many decades, who is also their first South Asian and first Muslim mayor: someone who has spoken clearly and repeatedly about using the power of the mayor’s office to resist ICE deportations. We will see what Zohran Mamdani is able to accomplish: but, in spite of myself, I am the tiniest bit encouraged.
It seems likely that resistance to federal overreach will continue to happen largely on a city-by-city basis, because the depredations of this administration are so sharply targeted at individual cities. Charlotte, the city most recently victim to intensive federal immigration raids, saw three times as many student absences in the week after the raids started, though whether these children stayed home from fear or in protest is not clear. This drop in attendance is mirrored by a drop in enrollment in school districts around Massachusetts with large immigrant populations.
The Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network has spoken about how increased detentions and need for legal representation have significantly diminished their available funds. I feel pretty confident that your local immigrant rights organizations are being pinched in similar ways. If this is a moment when you have some spare money, that would be an excellent place to use it.
I am biochemically disinclined to optimism, and indeed the national picture remains quite grim.
And yet! And yet.
New York — the most heavily-populated city in the U.S. by a factor or more than two, a city with a GDP larger than all but a tiny handful of the world’s countries — is an extremely specific place, and there is no other municipality or region in the United States like it. But it is important that, in this year of institutionalized racist and xenophobic violence, this group of extremely visible people very loudly chose an immigrant who has demanded justice for other immigrants to speak for them.
There are many, many people in this country who continue to show up for their neighbors in ways both large and small.
There are many, many people who have not given up Chicago, or Charlotte, or Boston, or New York.
Questions of the week: What’s your favorite city? What’s your favorite place in that city? Who is your favorite writer who writes with great love about your city?