It has not been yet a week since I arrived here in NY and yet the pace of this city has already asserted its rhythm, even eventually overturning my jetlag rudely. This is the city that never sleeps, the accounts manager of Wells Fargo told me on my first day, insomnia and jetlag are not handicaps. With its subway clanking and rolling nonstop in its subterranean veins, New York does not stop to be conscious. It is wide awake, and also aware of the multiplicity of desires, passions, sadness, memories and madness that fuels businesses, relationships, traffic and consumption. I now understand that the spirit behind Lady Liberty, whom I saw first yesterday while on the Staten Island ferry, is really this overarching awareness and this watchful welcome - a gaze to an on all visitors and migrants to this strip of land that has become in many ways the modern center of the world.
Indeed from Paris, the old capital of cultural empire, there is a markedly distinct difference. While I struggled in Paris to find my passage and pace, making myself so small often just to mingle and find my way - a matter of insecurity from not knowing how to speak French well enough. New York, being a nexus of all types of people from all over, I did not feel a stranger, and my command of English provides me with more than enough transactional skill (which was the only application that I can muster in marketplace French) to be discursive at times. While in Paris I was often passive, a mere observer, NY often goads me to think actively, to respond positively and to criticize freely. In Europe the old buildings makes you stand back and be awed. Here, with all its structural blandness compensated with sheer size and number, the edifice of New York makes you feel agitated. In a good way I guess. This city provokes.
Yet, why do I feel this sense of perpetual exhaustion among the residents that I have met so far? Is this because of overexposure to stimuli? I was at Staten Island yesterday and there is a completely different contrast with the suburban communities of the island to that of nearby Brooklyn, Harlem and of course, Manhattan. Yet even in this community, the people look tired but determined. Not less often do I see persons looking like those indulgent Roman emperors whose gaze are glassy from lack of pause in their motions? The Dalai Lama once said that if we define our sense of happiness as a train of pleasurable events and experiences we are bound, not to feel full but to feel exhausted. Is this the air that hangs over New York? Or am I just not used to being pummeled by stimuli and actively responding to it?
New Yorkers seem to play by a game whose rule is simple: find territory and amass (resource, gigs, artifacts, relations) For what? That is the question I am most willing to find out.
Indeed from Paris, the old capital of cultural empire, there is a markedly distinct difference. While I struggled in Paris to find my passage and pace, making myself so small often just to mingle and find my way - a matter of insecurity from not knowing how to speak French well enough. New York, being a nexus of all types of people from all over, I did not feel a stranger, and my command of English provides me with more than enough transactional skill (which was the only application that I can muster in marketplace French) to be discursive at times. While in Paris I was often passive, a mere observer, NY often goads me to think actively, to respond positively and to criticize freely. In Europe the old buildings makes you stand back and be awed. Here, with all its structural blandness compensated with sheer size and number, the edifice of New York makes you feel agitated. In a good way I guess. This city provokes.
Yet, why do I feel this sense of perpetual exhaustion among the residents that I have met so far? Is this because of overexposure to stimuli? I was at Staten Island yesterday and there is a completely different contrast with the suburban communities of the island to that of nearby Brooklyn, Harlem and of course, Manhattan. Yet even in this community, the people look tired but determined. Not less often do I see persons looking like those indulgent Roman emperors whose gaze are glassy from lack of pause in their motions? The Dalai Lama once said that if we define our sense of happiness as a train of pleasurable events and experiences we are bound, not to feel full but to feel exhausted. Is this the air that hangs over New York? Or am I just not used to being pummeled by stimuli and actively responding to it?
New Yorkers seem to play by a game whose rule is simple: find territory and amass (resource, gigs, artifacts, relations) For what? That is the question I am most willing to find out.
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