9/16/07

It seems everyone comes to a city to ‘become something’ or if not to make themselves a spectacle at least enjoy the show, or be at least free to be, or maybe rich. With these expectations a disappointment is most likely going to be the result. Joan Didion experiences coming to the excitement and then realizing in reality it might not be what it’s cracked up to be. One friend warned her saying basically that one day she’ll look around and notice there are no ‘new faces’. She later says that the city is ‘only for the very rich, the very poor or the very young’. Irving Howe mentions alienation and Didion experiences it. Howe also mentions the disgust and horror of being in such a populated unnatural environment (subway toilets and ancient bathhouses). If you don’t retreat from the reality of the grotesqueness of the streets alone you may notice one day, that as result of your ambitions, you’ve lost yourself. You have become so wrapped up in the responsibilities imposed upon you, which you have also imposed upon yourself, to survive your social rank and class in such an extreme environment. That you’re crying in chinese laundries’ and avoiding certain areas as Didion did because the glistening circus a city is in the mind of the spectator is revealed as an illusion when the city becomes a reality.