My new neighborhood is the ever exuberant Washington Square Park. This particular blog entry came at a convenient time as I just this evening had reason to spend 3 critical homework doing hours in the middle of the park with a friend. And while I would typically shy away from the whole Washington Square thing at 1 am I figured it couldn't help to do a little extra research for tonight's homework.
Park wrote, "Every sentiment has a history, either in the experience of the individual, or in the experience of the race, but the person who acts on that sentiment may not be aware of this history." Never could those words make more sense than on a park bench at a most questionable hour. Watching first the man with shopping cart as companion and then a group of all too gregarious NYU students walk by was an interesting lesson in perspective and "sentiment". Park preaches the city as a lesson in humanism and the decline thereof. It seems to me that Park and White both would have wondered at how both students and homeless men could occupy the same place, same pathway but in such ultimately different worlds.