August 14, 2007

Back Home

"I think you know that when an American stays away from New York too long something happens to him. Perhaps he becomes a little provincial, a little dead and afraid."

--Sherwood Anderson

Despite the increasingly condo-ized hell that is debut siecle New York, there is nonetheless a feeling of real contentedness as one hops into the airport cab for the ride back into town. Paris may enjoy more sumptuous beauty, London perhaps is more regal and stately (and, of late, a deadly serious rival in the financial industry), Sao Paolo an even more titanic, jumbled cacophony of urban landscape, and the future beckons ever more insistently in cities like Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai. Yet NYC still feels like the singular city, somehow. Which affords something of a sense of tranquility as the bridges loom and you're 'back home'. As Fitzgerald wrote:

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.