For Posterity

The other day, Cee and I walked all the way from Morningside Heights to the Staten Island Ferry. It took us five hours, but we stopped to shop (of course) and to drink egg creams (Cee wasn't as impressed as I was) and to eat dinner at Kati Rolls. It's not that just that we saw the city - its physical self, the charming windows and the dirty sidewalks, the park with its winding, meandering paths - it's that we saw New Yorkers. And that's what this city is about, I think.

I'm reading "This is New York" by E.B. White for class. It was published in 1949 and is, to an extent, just as relevant today as then. At the beginning, he notes,

"On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city's walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill them, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."

At the end, he correctly refers to the city as "this mischevious and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death."

Y'all know I'm never leaving, right?