This City's Tide (Resp. to #1)

Joan Didion wasn't the only once capable of finding harmony in the all too incongruos blend 0f "...soft air blowing from a subway grating...and lilac and garbage and expensive perfume..." In fact, the great City we now all find ourselves in possesses a peculiar power of attraction that is perhap rooted in its ability to make us forget how life in it's simplest form is supposed to behave.
Didion's own experiences in New York express perfectly Fielding's "literary pattern of discovery and withdrawal in regard to the city". For Didion, as for the literary figures of Fielding's work, the City possesses a peculiar tide which draws in the very young and idealistic. The initial allure of New York is evident to all that have ever come from locals famed for their abundance of agricultural products and seeming desregard for the modern world. Didion was not immune to New York' grandeur, the "infinately romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.". In the beginning the City holds no debts, demands nothing in return but the naive admiration of its too often struggling inhabitants. Didion was drawn in, like so many others, by the tide of a city promising "the greatest show on earth,' with 'continuous performances and endlessly changing cast."
In the end it appears that the forces which drew Didion in were ultimately those which cast her out. The multifarious NYC stage began to be too much for a woman looking for a place to hold on to. It was easy in the beginning to wrestle with perpetual stimulation and societal changes, but as Didion herself put it, she "stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair." For Fielding the "City is a necessary stopping point for the education of the emotions, to be encountered, overcome, and left behind." With this model in mind, Didion performed her part perfectly, welcoming the city as a young woman with emotions to test and a mind to expand and leaving it a much older woman with a firmer grip on where she should be.