My New York Story: The Beginning

Don't forget to look up

When I was 15 years old, I hopped a Greyhound bus outside of Indianapolis, Indiana, and headed to New York City for an academic competition.

This is an archetypical American tale—farm kid hops bus to big city. You can almost hear the headline being shouted from a street corner by a newsie, right after they’ve belted, “Extra, extra, read all about it!”

But it’s archetypical because it’s true. I am but one of many stretching back through the city’s history, a real embodiment of the American Dream.

In 1949, E.B. White wrote Here is New York, and in it told of:

…a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart…[he] embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, [he] absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, [he] generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company. (p. 26-27)

Right before I got on the bus, my mother pulled me into a hug, and then looked me firmly in the eyes. “Don’t forget to look up,” she said.

She, like me, had never been to one of America’s great cities before, and certainly not New York. But she also knew that it’s all too easy for things to become standard, regular, and rote. That it takes a bit of intention to fully experience something. That even people in New York City could lose the feeling of magic they felt welling in their soul the first time they beheld it. That even they could forget about the titanic, vertical majesty of their home, its teeming masses, and its boundless ambition.

Not then, and never since, have I forgotten to look up. I fell in love with New York during that trip, and that love endures today. It was a love at first sight, but it was not naive. It was not the blinding sheen of novelty that would come to wear off. It was a true recognition of something great, and something that I wanted help make greater still.

Seeing the City

“Manhattan Bridge” from the musical Next Thing You Know (2011):

I can still remember
That cool day in September 
My first trip on the subway
Across the Manhattan Bridge

I looked outside 
And could not believe my eyes
And I looked around
And much to my surprise
No one else was looking at the bridge
The statue, the sky
No one else was looking
And I could not imagine why

I sat and stared, unblinking
Then got around to thinking
That these people just don’t recognize the view they miss each day
So I took it in, then I took it in again
It made me smile, I made a promise then
That the day that I stopped looking
At the way it all seems to glow
The day that I stopped looking
Was the day that I should go

So every day from that day on
I took the time to stop and look
I’d wake myself up from a nap, or take a short break from my book
But today on the subway, after fighting for my seat
I started reading at DeKalb, and didn’t look up—til Canal Street

I blinked to clear my vision
Thought back on my decision, to up and leave the city the day I missed the view
It’s harder now, then I thought it would have been
Did the city break me down, or simply break me in
Today’s when I stopped looking at this place like it was all new
Today’s the day that I’d stopped looking, so now, what do I do?
Do I stay, or do I leave, and change up the view?

This song is heartbreaking in a special way, and it is the exact experience that “Don’t forget to look up” guards against: not falling out of love, but rather settling into indifference.

Here is a nighttime trip over the Manhattan Bridge that I took late last year on my way back from a chemotherapy appointment. The city itself sustained me.

Whether it’s a skill, a relationship, a city, or anything else, the lesson here is universal. Great human feeling is not the perpetuation of a novelty, but rather its conversion into the profound.

So many people, both those who come here and those who grew up here, only experience the city as something to consume, or to shake until their desired prize falls out. As E.B. White put it again in Here is New York:

...Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city's tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale." (25)

But no one has to experience New York this way. There is nothing inevitable about disenchantment.

The physicist Richard Feynman had this to say about beauty increasing beyond the novel and superficial:

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than [the artist] sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.

The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds.

One could say the same about a skyscraper.

The same is true of the Five Boroughs themselves.

Give My Regards to Broadway

When I first came here almost twenty years ago, I saw my first Broadway show: Hairspray.

I can only describe my reaction to it as a pleasant panic attack. My nervous system was overwhelmed completely, and I couldn’t sit still in my seat. I had never experienced the sheer emotional force of that kind of live production. The energy, the coordinated dance, the brilliant harmonies, the skill, the thrill!

It changed me. It changed what I expected of myself and the world.

And New York has done this for me many times since. Its history, civics, government, trains, skyscrapers, art, commerce, people—there is no functional end.

The beginning of my New York story shares a fundamental aspect with its ongoing present: the gift of experiencing the transformative sublime almost every day.

Lady Liberty has lit my soul with her Promethean flame.