7 April '08

A while ago I mentioned of a German word, Schadenfreude. A word that means, roughly, to take malicious pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. The Germans have an even better word—‘better’ because the meaning is even more nuanced, and the translation into English even more difficult—which describes when something is not as bad as you expected, and you are disappointed. The word, Scheissenbedauern, is an apt sign for the feeling I have about the New York Winter.

Last year, wincing at the heavy air that preceded an early storm, I described a shift in the weather; a shift from fetid, tepid breezes to bracing, bitter winds, a shift from the casual optimism of summer to the reservation and introversion of winter. Unfamiliar with the New York climes, you see, the nascent season in October made me quiver with nervous excitement.

It is with disappointment, then, that as the calendar determines the onset of spring I must let go of my fear of winter. There was snow, sure. The mercury dropped well below zero for a couple of weeks, okay. I saw cars sliding down hills, impotent against the ice, fine. But that all happens in Christchurch. And Christchurch is about as exotic as a haemorrhoid. I wanted doors to be immobile against great flurries of ice, roofs to collapse under the weight of sleet and slush, school to be cancelled because of impassable paths. I wanted to have to remain indoors because roaming outside would, like ninety-seconds in the Arctic, render my feeble body a glaucous blue. I wanted, if I’m being honest, injury and terror, disaster and abject misery. There was none and, hence, Scheissenbedauern becomes appropriate.

(Part of the reason there were no problems is that this city’s inhabitants are proficient—nay, masterful—at managing whatever inclemency the skies divvy out. At the first sign of sediment the pavements were dusted with thick granules of salt, after every inch of snow that fell walkways were cleared with an arsenal of shovels and spades. All these actions were performed with the same monotonous regularity that a factory worker inspects product, they were as natural as).

So, spring’s here, summer’s coming. So it goes. And after four paragraphs on the weather I shall move on.

***

I recently learned that I will be in New York City for at least another two years. Previously I was, in all likelihood, to return to New Zealand this May. To accommodate this extended stay, a significant shift in mindset is required.

I have lived in New York, on Manhattan, in Harlem, for eight months. Every day I have caught the same train from the same subway station, every week I have bought groceries from the same market. Despite this regularity, this routine, there is little that binds me to this city. It is difficult, for example, to think of myself as anything more than a tolerated guest in this neighbourhood.* (Antilogous perhaps—and here we return to the theme of words-in-other-languages-that-have-no-direct-equivalent-in-English— is the example of the Māori word, turangawaewae, which crudely translated becomes ‘place to stand’. Extending the translation, turangawaewae refers to a place where one has a sense of belonging, an ancestral homeland. I find that the best approximation for one’s turangawaewae is the place that, if you were to die tomorrow, you would like to be buried).

While this is no doubt attributable, at least in part, to my non-comprehension of Spanish, there are other factors. I have mentioned previously that New York is a city of transients. In a great tidal movement of blood and tissue, millions of people alight then leave the island every day. Every year millions more come to settle in one of the five boroughs or depart to populate somewhere else.

Even what remains—the buildings, the streets, the sewers—lack permanence (especially since two of the great symbols of the city were razed seven years ago. So it goes). The City is a vehicle, a chaotic junk made from concrete and steel. It lists, careens from one side to the next, is kept afloat by coincidence and coincidence only. It is, for now, a location at which meaning and novelty radiate in ever-widening circles.

* I should mention that while the disconnect between the psyche and City can be disorienting, there is a peculiar—and sometimes exhilarating—freedom in having no roots, something akin to that felt by nomads whose incessant wandering makes them at home everywhere and nowhere.