Virtual Flaneurism

In the eight or so months since I left New York, I've found myself struggling to reckon with my seeming abandonment of the city. I'd like to be able to excuse this in some fashion by saying that it is people asking me hard questions that prompted this quandary, quizzing me over whether I miss baseball games in McCarren park or dodging tourists outside the Seaport. Unfortunately, that is not true. On the contrary, most often I am the one bringing up New York, pretending to be bashful about it when I tell people where I came from while immediately careening into an unsolicited explanation of my feelings about leaving the city. I know that much of this is me being defensive about a decision only I could ever judge myself for. I have to wonder: f New York is the American Mecca, the destination of of destinations, who am I to have left it behind? And what does that say about me if I have yet to regret it?

Part of the answer I allow myself revolves around an essay I first read in a creative non-fiction class I took as an undergraduate. The piece is by Joan Didion, and you can find the text here. Didion, who now lives in Los Angeles (or did when she wrote the essay in 1968 - I actually have no clue where she is now), writes about the eight years she spent in New York and her slow disillusionment with the idea of "New York" that had initially drawn her to the city. In my experience, this is a relatively common story.

Having thought about the essay so often over these past eight or so months, earlier tonight I dragged out my Lopate "Art of the Personal Essay" tome and thumbed through to it. I hadn't read the essay in a few years, certainly not since leaving New York, and it was a distinctly different read having now performed the very escape that the essay described. A much more depressing read, I should say, though not for the reasons I might've expected. As much as I miss New York - and I do - the piece wrenched my gut because Didion's reasoning for leaving the city rang so true. I found myself tripping through my own memories about bad parties and vapid people and dirty places in New York, millions of little moments that, added together, led me from loving New York to wondering why I was still there. Correctly, Didion does not pinpoint one reason or one sentiment that turned New York sour. Suddenly one is in the city, meeting the same people, having the same coke-heavy $10 drink, taking weekend visitors to stare at the same Met exhibit with the same stupid suit of armor and wondering when New York became predictable and boring and uninspiring. And wondering how some place so big and so diverse can turn so white bread.

I don't know why I'm rambling like this when Didion's essay says it so much better. I also know that it killed my drive to keep working for the night; being validated in this kind of way is unpleasant and distracting.

Anyway, do read the essay. Here's a particularly good chunk to whet your literary appetite:

And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I 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.