Answer to Question 3

Joan Didion descirbes New York City as a temporary place where young people go to find themselves and live thier lives in the moment, and dont really worry about the future. It symbolizes a place of discovery and new experiences, as she says in her story Goodbye to All That "...everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curios and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about." It symbolizes discovery, but front a young and naive point of view because she later decribes the feeling of wanting to leave the city once she felt like it had nothing more to offer her. Joan meant this in the sense that once she became so familiar with the city that she knew every person at every party, and had been to all of the places that were once before hidden- she realized her time there was up, and she was too old to live there anymore. She says in one of the opening paragraphs her feeling of being in the city too long "In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later..."