★★★★★ | Memoir | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A beautiful, poignant essay of White’s return to New York after a 25-year absence. He celebrates the eternal qualities of New York and the people it attracts, while mourning the loss of his New York, which can never be restored for New York is always changing. That’s what makes it special.
Highlights
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.
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 him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.