“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money”, and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of living there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not live at Xanadu.”
(full essay here)
goodbye montreal where it hasn't snowed heavily in over a week and the sidewalks are brimming with ash-coloured snow, hello new york i won't really believe in until i run my hands over fence railings. yesterday i bought a red suitcase for $20 and filled it with books, traipsed over town looking for places to sell other, unloved school books, stood in line at an instant-chequer and watched a man roll and unroll carpets so as to move their dirt onto the floor. "we will have to take a photo of you, for the next time you come in," even though i never will.
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