23 November '07

On Monday I woke to what looked like rain dropping past my window—I say ‘what looked like’ because the background against which I judged the substance is a brick wall interrupted only by the bathroom windows of people in the apartment building next door (if I wish to see the sky I must press my face to the glass and crane my neck at the gap between the buildings) and thus the substance could just as easily have been air-conditioning fluid, window-cleaners four-floors above, etc—yet there was no sound. I ran downstairs to the street to find that it was snowing. Well, ‘snowing’ is perhaps somewhat generous. There were, indeed, snowflakes but they liquefied six-feet above the ground and gathered in puddles that broke and rolled down the street.

Nonetheless, the snow is here. The season has changed. Winter is coming.

And with it a change in attitude. Gone is the exuberance, the unadulterated flaunting joy with which I first met the city. In its place—and here I speculate as the feeling is still new—is not resignation, is not melancholy but is something akin to the stance of a man who wears a thick jacket and bends forward, hands in pockets and head down, to walk into the rain. A new kind of joy must be sought, a new kind of experience also. This experience will, I hope, be grounded in a deeper appreciation of the city, an appreciation that comes from the changing relationship of stranger to acquaintance to friend to intimate.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that ‘one belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much as five minutes as in five years’. This statement implies that I, along with the eight-million other residents, will continue to plane the surface of this city. Wallowing in the shallows, aware of the depths but not able to reach them. I hope Wolfe is wrong.

This Thursday was Thanksgiving Day, a holiday that is, in this country, of at least equal importance as Christmas (unlike Christmas though, Thanksgiving exists as a bastion of non-commercialisation in a country where even the advertisements have advertisements. So eager are shopkeepers to attract the patronage of New Yorkers that on the night of Halloween shop displays morphed from Jack-o-Laterns and witches to garish Santa Claus dolls, boxes dressed as presents, plastic trees (one had a Hillary Clinton figurine as the ‘angel’), fake snow and spray-painted pleasantries. And today, the day following Thanksgiving, stores ravenously outbid each other to open early—some at 3am—in the hope of luring the bargain-hunters who camped outside the stores with sleeping-bags, pillows and children to save $150 on a Nintendo). This year’s marketing is expected to be even more aggressive than the last. Americans are, apparently, less willing to spend this year because of the depressed economy. That said, there are advertisements on television that urge people to buy new cars for their lovers or spouses or children. New cars! The thought of it is absurd, almost grotesque.

In Harlem, where I live, Christmas thankfully attracts less cheer (thankfully because the neighbourhood, lurid enough already, would be veritably incandescent if shades of green and white and red and gold and silver were added). Save for the token stocking hanging from the display windows of a minority of shops, the few blocks that are my home remain as they always are. One effect of eschewing the tinsel, however, is that emerging from the ground downtown becomes even more assaulting. So garish were the floats and balloons at yesterday’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, for example, that, emerging from the subway, I had to shield my eyes and wear sunglasses.

As the heavy weather comes down, as the snow falls and covers the pavement, as the sun shines from lower and lower in the sky, the reflection of window displays, the impeccable windows themselves, the carols in the stores, the buskers carolling on the street will all add to an atmosphere that has a sulphuric, caustic edge. A wonderland where the wonder is thinly-disguised as rampant blunt-force commercialism. And so it should be, we have little need for saints when we have idols. ‘Tis the season, after all.

P.S: Some of you have asked about school (my lack of discussion on the subject has left some concerned that I’ve stopped going and instead fill my time with sleep-ins, daytime television, and late-nights in the dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen). The truth is that nothing much has changed since I last talked about it. I am still taking five classes, four of which have actual contact time. Of those four classes, two are deeply interesting. The professor of one, for example, is so incisive, so relentlessly interrogative and so rigorous in his analysis that I am often left reeling. His intellect is so well honed—for this particular application, at least—that there is little to be said in the response. Or there is much to be said, but little to add, to contribute. The invocations I would so often bait my classmates with in previous classes—just to elicit a response that I could cut down at the knees—are worthless. As I mentioned last time, such arguments would be refracted with a casual change in angle of the sword. They would glance off the blade, be exposed as fraudulent, and hit the ground without even a whimper.

In contrast, I have another class which is no more challenging that my first year at Victoria. And it’s even worse because there is none of the thrill of a novel way of learning, or the assumption—because of lack of comparison—that this is as good as it gets. Instead, the classes are sluggish, ineffectual, the professor indifferent, many of the classmates, and myself, likewise. Nonetheless, I am scoring fairly well on assignments and should be finished with the MA (sans thesis) in May ’08.