While I work on my big post with photos from this weekend, here's a piece on the op-ed page in the New York Times that caught my eye today. I love this kind of compact, evocative writing that captures so eloquently what we all feel in our day-to-day lives.
The City Life
The Subway Beat
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
It’s nearly always a mistake to think of the subway as a public conveyance. This is a mistake that out-of-towners often make. They overlook the essential privacy of the subway, and by that I don’t mean the young woman at my end of the car who has made up her face in a compact mirror between 86th Street and Times Square. I mean the very fact that this is my end of the car at my end of the train. It’s 7:30 in the morning, and this isn’t just a subway ride. This is going to work. Nearly all the people on this train are in their usual spots, within a few minutes of their usual time, and the ride is not separable from the larger and more complicated rhythms of our private lives. It is possible to be on this train and not yet be in public.
“Please watch the closing doors,” comes the announcement. The doors close. Everyone here knows just how long the delay should last before the train begins to slide forward. We could count it off: the doors close, then comes a single beat, and then we feel that horizontal gravity as the train picks up speed. But on this one train the one beat passes, then another and another before we finally start to slide out of the station. It happens at every stop. Three beats, four beats too many. Perhaps the driver adds these extra beats to allow riders to find a seat. I like to think it’s a tiny, intentional perversity.
This has happened many times before. After the one beat, the whole train leans forward mentally. We are urging ourselves on our way. If the train ran by some kind of synchronous psychological impulsion, we would be moving by now.
We know how to be stoic when stuck between stations. But there is something heartbreaking in this added pause. It interrupts the privacy of our thoughts and shows us what the other passengers are thinking. It holds us back from flinging ourselves headlong into the morning. It shows us, if just for an instant, how deeply we have internalized the pulses of this city.
Showing posts with label NYC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NYC. Show all posts
Monday, June 25, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Smells in the City
I've been devouring Bill Willingham's comic Fables in the trade paperback format (I'm up to Volume Five of eight that are currently published), which depicts a world where the characters of classic children's fables are immortal beings living in New York City. Snow White is the deputy mayor, Little Boy Blue is her assistant, Cinderella runs a shoe store, and the Big Bad Wolf has been transformed into a human named Bigby Wolf, the town sheriff who has to smoke tobacco continuously to dull his senses to over-stimulation in the non-Fable world (referred to as the mundane, or "mundy" world).
One thing I really don't care for in this city are the smells. Scents in New York assault you like muggers used to, lurking around every corner, in subway cars, on sidewalks - everywhere. There's a section of Penn Station that I pass every evening that smells like cheeseburgers that have been left on the grill too long, then wrapped in brown paper bags and left out in the rain for the afternoon. I wish I didn't have to walk past that spot every day, but it's the most direct path from the subway to the New Jersey train gates, and usually I'm in too much of a hurry to take an alternate route.
The worst example of this is when homeless people commandeer a subway car and use it as their personal toilet. This has the effect of emptying the entire car into adjacent cars, which become terribly crowded. It's almost comical when you see a train where one car is nearly empty and both cars on either side are stuffed like cans of sardines. The same thing happened several months back on a NJ Transit train when the woman sitting in front of me vomited all over the floor.
Just walking on the streets you encounter less than pleasant scents, like the incessant cigarette smoking, the garbage piles on sidewalks, charcoal fires from street vending carts, even the heavy cologne and cheap perfumes people wear can be annoying. It all almost makes me wish I could turn off my sense of smell as easily as I can block my hearing with my noise-canceling earbuds connected to my iPod.
One thing I really don't care for in this city are the smells. Scents in New York assault you like muggers used to, lurking around every corner, in subway cars, on sidewalks - everywhere. There's a section of Penn Station that I pass every evening that smells like cheeseburgers that have been left on the grill too long, then wrapped in brown paper bags and left out in the rain for the afternoon. I wish I didn't have to walk past that spot every day, but it's the most direct path from the subway to the New Jersey train gates, and usually I'm in too much of a hurry to take an alternate route.
The worst example of this is when homeless people commandeer a subway car and use it as their personal toilet. This has the effect of emptying the entire car into adjacent cars, which become terribly crowded. It's almost comical when you see a train where one car is nearly empty and both cars on either side are stuffed like cans of sardines. The same thing happened several months back on a NJ Transit train when the woman sitting in front of me vomited all over the floor.
Just walking on the streets you encounter less than pleasant scents, like the incessant cigarette smoking, the garbage piles on sidewalks, charcoal fires from street vending carts, even the heavy cologne and cheap perfumes people wear can be annoying. It all almost makes me wish I could turn off my sense of smell as easily as I can block my hearing with my noise-canceling earbuds connected to my iPod.
