// essays //
May 18, 2015
Goodbye Revisited
Winston Mann
“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore.”
—Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That
—Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That
A few weeks ago, really late at night and emboldened by a third or fourth gin and tonic, I admitted to someone I barely knew that I hated living in New York City. I had never said this out loud before, not even to myself, because it felt like an almost blasphemous statement for anyone who had ever thought of New York as the Promised Land. In fact I am not unsympathetic to the notion that New York can never live up to the reputation that precedes it. New York retains some abstract glamour on reputation alone, on a history of art and culture that is simply no longer there. The gap between “New York” the idea, or accumulation of ideas, and what we actually experience here, is enough to ruin the experience for even the most optimistic and stalwart of émigrés.
But I can’t really blame New York for this. It has more to do with a history of manic cultural fixation with the city—the countless novels and films and television series set here. Their creations were themselves products of the desire of the artists to close that gap, to experience “New York” in the ecstatic way they had always been promised by the vexed artists before them. In this regard New York is more of a pyramid scheme than an actual city, but this, like most other things, is a matter of opinion.
“That just means you belong here,” had been the peculiar and rather sinister response to my admission. In retrospect, it made perfect sense. To love New York unconditionally requires a certain masochistic impulse that New Yorkers necessarily adopt to survive living here. What I mean is that no one moves to New York to be happy. Instead, what we seek is a challenge, peril, exposure to the very best and the very worst that life has to offer. What we seek is a shot at averting the worst fate imaginable: a mundane life. To be satisfied is to stop trying, to become average, to perish.
No other place offers such extreme juxtapositions of obscene wealth and poverty. It is in this climate that the floodlights come on and we are forced to examine what it is precisely that we want. Outside of New York, we have all the time in the world to realize our most deeply held dreams, but here, everyone is already writing or singing or acting, already in touch with an agent, already editing their first screenplay or auditioning for Broadway shows or no-wave queer indie bands in Williamsburg. Here, I have no fear of failure, because I have met the successful and they are no better off than the rest of us.
Because ultimately we are all trapped in the same labyrinth: the streets and the clothes and the noise are all the same for those of us who have won and those of us who have lost. Here we develop sympathy for the Minotaur. Here we learn what happens to the dream deferred. One realizes that the Minotaur never existed, that the labyrinth, for our purposes, is the Minotaur. In our case the labyrinth offers sunrise views of the pink Hudson from atop blue-glass monuments to the greatest accumulation of wealth and power in the history of mankind, but this does not change the fact that we cannot leave. Eventually it becomes apparent that New York looks so good on film because everything is on the surface here, all attention and effort is paid to maintaining the surface, to the meticulous cultivation of a standard so superhuman that everyone playing the game loses their humanity altogether. All of this represents a kind of conspicuous consumption so severe and dark-hued it becomes aggressive ostentation—the New York knee-jerk to the constant sense of cultural alienation. This alienation becomes palpable late one night in Times Square station coming home from another party when you hear the Eastern minor chords of a violin and steel drums played by an invisible pair of hands, and you realize that everyone here is just as far from home as you are.
On this hedonic and literal treadmill we waste time people-watching in cafes on Broadway or nightclubs in Hell’s Kitchen (was ever a neighborhood named so aptly?), dating people who might be good “connections.” Dating people in faux-leather bomber jackets who snap at the waiter and deliver soliloquies directly into their wine glass about how undervalued the visual arts are in our society. People who are far more well read than you—and you realize that you haven’t been keeping up with the The New Yorker or really any of the good culture blogs and by the next day all you’ve gotten out of any of it is the knowledge that The New Yorker’s fiction podcast makes for an informative kind of background noise with which to drown out the cries for help on the subway which are, by the way, omnipresent. You never go out with anyone twice.
In a sense none of this is indicative of anything. In a sense I had really become assimilated not when I learned how to dress well and speak with the clipped indifference that I have come to recognize as the New York lingua franca, but when certain concepts lost meaningful definition altogether: concepts like human dignity and the value of a dollar and what it means for something to be “important.”
Some Tuesday night when the concrete winter is just beginning to thaw you’re drunk again (“alcoholism” is another word with no meaningful definition here) in an Indian restaurant glowing with lights strung so thickly that the whole ceiling is ablaze, lights that suddenly go out as a Bollywood birthday song comes on and people are dancing and it might as well be Bangalore in the summer, but it’s New York in the winter. And this is why people move here, because it is the whole world on a single island, the clinically deranged step sister of Disney’s Epcot center, and this is just one of many times that you were awake all night and eschewed all responsibility but it doesn’t matter because New York is adventure incarnate and that’s what your twenties are for.
But I can’t really blame New York for this. It has more to do with a history of manic cultural fixation with the city—the countless novels and films and television series set here. Their creations were themselves products of the desire of the artists to close that gap, to experience “New York” in the ecstatic way they had always been promised by the vexed artists before them. In this regard New York is more of a pyramid scheme than an actual city, but this, like most other things, is a matter of opinion.
“That just means you belong here,” had been the peculiar and rather sinister response to my admission. In retrospect, it made perfect sense. To love New York unconditionally requires a certain masochistic impulse that New Yorkers necessarily adopt to survive living here. What I mean is that no one moves to New York to be happy. Instead, what we seek is a challenge, peril, exposure to the very best and the very worst that life has to offer. What we seek is a shot at averting the worst fate imaginable: a mundane life. To be satisfied is to stop trying, to become average, to perish.
No other place offers such extreme juxtapositions of obscene wealth and poverty. It is in this climate that the floodlights come on and we are forced to examine what it is precisely that we want. Outside of New York, we have all the time in the world to realize our most deeply held dreams, but here, everyone is already writing or singing or acting, already in touch with an agent, already editing their first screenplay or auditioning for Broadway shows or no-wave queer indie bands in Williamsburg. Here, I have no fear of failure, because I have met the successful and they are no better off than the rest of us.
Because ultimately we are all trapped in the same labyrinth: the streets and the clothes and the noise are all the same for those of us who have won and those of us who have lost. Here we develop sympathy for the Minotaur. Here we learn what happens to the dream deferred. One realizes that the Minotaur never existed, that the labyrinth, for our purposes, is the Minotaur. In our case the labyrinth offers sunrise views of the pink Hudson from atop blue-glass monuments to the greatest accumulation of wealth and power in the history of mankind, but this does not change the fact that we cannot leave. Eventually it becomes apparent that New York looks so good on film because everything is on the surface here, all attention and effort is paid to maintaining the surface, to the meticulous cultivation of a standard so superhuman that everyone playing the game loses their humanity altogether. All of this represents a kind of conspicuous consumption so severe and dark-hued it becomes aggressive ostentation—the New York knee-jerk to the constant sense of cultural alienation. This alienation becomes palpable late one night in Times Square station coming home from another party when you hear the Eastern minor chords of a violin and steel drums played by an invisible pair of hands, and you realize that everyone here is just as far from home as you are.
On this hedonic and literal treadmill we waste time people-watching in cafes on Broadway or nightclubs in Hell’s Kitchen (was ever a neighborhood named so aptly?), dating people who might be good “connections.” Dating people in faux-leather bomber jackets who snap at the waiter and deliver soliloquies directly into their wine glass about how undervalued the visual arts are in our society. People who are far more well read than you—and you realize that you haven’t been keeping up with the The New Yorker or really any of the good culture blogs and by the next day all you’ve gotten out of any of it is the knowledge that The New Yorker’s fiction podcast makes for an informative kind of background noise with which to drown out the cries for help on the subway which are, by the way, omnipresent. You never go out with anyone twice.
In a sense none of this is indicative of anything. In a sense I had really become assimilated not when I learned how to dress well and speak with the clipped indifference that I have come to recognize as the New York lingua franca, but when certain concepts lost meaningful definition altogether: concepts like human dignity and the value of a dollar and what it means for something to be “important.”
Some Tuesday night when the concrete winter is just beginning to thaw you’re drunk again (“alcoholism” is another word with no meaningful definition here) in an Indian restaurant glowing with lights strung so thickly that the whole ceiling is ablaze, lights that suddenly go out as a Bollywood birthday song comes on and people are dancing and it might as well be Bangalore in the summer, but it’s New York in the winter. And this is why people move here, because it is the whole world on a single island, the clinically deranged step sister of Disney’s Epcot center, and this is just one of many times that you were awake all night and eschewed all responsibility but it doesn’t matter because New York is adventure incarnate and that’s what your twenties are for.
// WINSTON MANN is a graduate student in SEAS and a Staff Writer for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected]. Photo courtesy of DeviantArt user Aptiaa.