I saw an article in the New York Times today that made me incredibly bittersweet. The new generation of New Yorkers is taking advantage of the newly evacuated and low-priced city to make New York the city of the young again. Young people are exploding with social energy, and every young person in New York is expecting this summer to be another Summer of Love or Harlem Renaissance - when all the pent up energy of isolation is released in an orgy of nightlife, romance, innovation, artistic movements, and hugs.
It's so heartening to read even as it's so sad. New York is the best place on earth, and the best place on earth should never be lived in for more than a week at a time. New York is the best place because it's the most exciting, the most interesting, the place where you can learn the most and the place where you can forget everything you ever learned. It's a place where smart people go to act stupid: to take the most lethal risks, to lend your names to the stupidest political causes, to pursue fame and fortune before you realize what a poisoned chalice those are, to believe in yourself and express it with the innocence of a twenty-something whom life's disappointments have not yet beaten down. As a city, New York should perpetually remain twenty-five, and for the first time since I was ten, it's a town for the young again. Once you're too old, you can never enjoy that town again with the fresh expectations of what its life can offer you.
Even if the perpetually young centenarian closest to my heart just passed away, I know I'm too old for New York now. Bubbie lived her entire old age as though she were twenty-five, but she knew better than the throw away all that stability to start over in a completely unfamiliar place whose dangers are all too well known. She quit socially smoking while young, she never drank, she used an exercise bike every day, no potential moment for learning was ever spent chasing romance, and she never travelled without a group that planned every activity for her. As you get older, you need to find artificial ways of remaining young, because the life of a twenty-five year old can kill anybody over forty.
New York is lovely because it's dangerous, and so is youth. When I was twenty-five I was two-hundred thirty-five pounds on a 5'4 1/2 frame; eating the diet of two 25 year olds as weight-gaining medication fought against some of the worst mental duress of my life, and then as now, preferring the cultural diet of an eighty-five year old to what even most intellectual 25 year olds loved. Moving to New York was not an option, neither was romance nor even much in the way of creativity. I tried to start a political science degree at Hopkins by enrolling in courses (which, I can assure you, I could only get into through a little known back door), and quickly dropped out because the stress was far too burdensome. I had so very many ambitions that would avenge me for my bad luck of a bad brain, and life quickly disabused me that I could ever rub the world's nose in my achievements while still young.
Then as now, I knew that New York was the place where promising young people looking to blow up the world's mountains went to seek their fortunes, and even if they never so much as climbed one, their experience of New York was something they took with them for the rest of their lives. Whatever they encountered in New York, for good or ill, was the their defining experience.
In my thirties, I spent just about all of my extra cash on visits to New York, saving what little an extremely impractical person knows how to so that I can have those long weekends in New York that remind me of just how much world there is still to meet. Most days might just be me and the city, and that can be terribly lonely at times, but there's always so much music to hear, art to see, food to eat, books to buy, bars to drink at and drunks to talk to. If I ever did it for more than a long weekend, I'd run out of money.
The older I get, the less desire I have to move to New York. Only the young have the nerve for risks that colossal, and moving to New York takes even more nerve than moving to Europe. The city is so big, the potential disappointments of New York so great. It is so obvious how easy it is to get lost in that place. It's so obvious how easily New York spits out anything but its favored children, it's so obvious how fake the friendships are, it's so obvious how obnoxious the people are and how psychopathic its powerful class is.
The fact that life in New York is so dangerous is part of its appeal. If you're a person in a high-risk/high-reward field, be it the arts, or finance, or sports, or food, every person wants to be the one who stepped into the world's largest arena, and won.
But what makes New York go is not the successes but the failures who learn that there's greater happiness and love in failure than success; not the Broadway stars but the chorus members and the techies, not the Yankee shortstops but the gym teachers at high schools in bad neighborhoods, not the investment bankers but the office managers and the financial planners for electricians - the realtors, not the real estate moguls. And beneath even them, a mill machine of immigrants and projects, who sweep your streets and clean your shit, not in the hope that their grandchildren will be masters of the universe but that they can be electricians and realtors who own half an acre in New Jersey.
To me, there's even a very specific kind of art that often comes out of New York. It's extremely glamorous, more than a little brutal, with movements that are very short-lived, and has very little to do with life as it's lived anywhere but New York, where the rules of life are different than anywhere else because they live at the center of modern existence. Fitzgerald could never have written Great Gatsby anywhere but New York, but Theodore Dreiser wrote novel after novel about city life from Terre Haute, Indiana. Jackson Pollock schpritzed canvases in Manhattan while Edward Hopper had to go to Massachussets for inspiration. So many people who create anything lasting in New York can only do it once, and making their one big score happen takes so much out of them that they can never do it again.
New York is a place for romance, it is not a place for love. New York is sublime, literally a thing of awe, but things which are literally awesome can kill you. Like every other generation of young people, most of the young will eventually be in their late thirties. They'll realize they have nothing to show for their great times, and realize that if they want to keep them going they'll be dead by 50. They'll watch as some friends fall victim to addiction and murder and realize that no fun is worth those horrors. Many of them will have children resulting from their fondest memories, and the continued partying of parents comes at children's expense.
New York is a place for a very specific time in your life, and then it's time to get out and pursue safer, more lasting things. New York is still there, and a whole new generation is ready to sing its siren song, only to realize that most of they're not sirens but the sailors torn on the rocks. Oh how I wish I could have been one of those people New York destroyed. Maybe I'd be one of those 1% New York doesn't spit out.
I never had my shot at New York, it's probably for the best. I remember who I was at 25, New York would have literally killed me. I'm almost 40, and no more ready for New York than ever before. The city is a hell where the demons are so beautiful you almost want to become one yourself.
The best of the young people, as ever before, will have so much fun, then end their youths by thirty before the lifelong effects of alcohol set in, raise children in the suburbs, vote Democrat and contribute to liberal causes, attend a progressive church, go into the city for a show or an exhibit once a month, and teach their children that there's a place in life for fun and new experiences, but fun is no substitute for building things for people you love and teaching the generation after them how to do the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/12/style/nyc-summer.html?fbclid=IwAR0tDcbiz9-uS53ZCHIpVPEgLjLMzGTd3aRac8K5pB8QshKPzqppQBNqC2w
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