9/24/07

There are many different experiences you can have within one city, particularly New York. It caters to diversity and extremity, you can feel as though you’re living in different places or in different worlds within one place. There are moments when I look back on periods of time i’ve had living here and I can’t believe these experiences happened within the same week, year or place. When in reality they happened in the same city and possibly within the same day. E.B. White talks about asking people why they love New York. Everyone can come up with the same generic answer, or if they thought about it a very different answer, yet it all seems to be rooted in the same place. People can walk through the streets with an overwhelming feeling of unity and belonging or with an overwhelming feeling of awe and wonder, or isolation and displacement. Existing in New York City can be, in many ways, like existing in a heightened reality more extreme and more potent in it’s experience. Taking everything from life and multiplying it by millions. Thanks in part to the extremely of the situation alone, the buildings are extremely high, the population extremely dense and on and on. This creates an extreme reality but at the same time it is a contextual representation of everywhere else. Only more, and all at once, in one place at the same time and entirely manmade. White even mentions that within it’s manmade cavern “it can reproduce any natural phenomenon if in the mood.” No facet of existence is excluded.