A City Made of Sky

…. this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

- E. B. White, Here is New York

my photo

I first knew I wanted to live in New York City when I was eighteen. My family was visiting my cousins in New Jersey, and while there, I went into Manhattan to see my favorite musical, which is, of course, Les Miserables. I will never forget emerging from Port Authority, like a wave had deposited me onto the bright and bustling shore of the streets of Manhattan. There were so many people and noises, summer sun glinting off walls of glass and taxis blurring across the road. The energy and excitement simultaneously grounded me like gravity and lifted me like thermal currents. When I returned that night, my aunt took one look at my face and said, "I can tell you liked it.” I had been to Boston a few days before, and it had been lovely, but it hadn’t made me feel the way New York City did. Despite the warnings I was handed about this city’s evil and pagan ways—“Don’t you know it’s full of liberals?” “Are there even any churches there?”—I moved here after that visit, and it was one of the best decisions of my life.

E. B. White’s essay Here is New York is precious to me because it gives me the language to explain what it is I felt that day and what I still feel, after five years of living here. He describes the city’s "supplementary vitamin,” the antidote to its inconvenience and chaos, which are just as real as the infamous rats: “the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.” Maybe it sounds cheap to say it, but my first, gut reaction to New York was the desire to be at the center of where it all happens. Hamilton gets it: “History is happening in Manhattan / and we just happen to be / in the greatest city in the world.”

Now that I have lived here, I understand better White’s other descriptions of the pull of New York. He describes New York's “queer prizes:” “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” He connects these offerings with my initial delight in the buzz of the city: “New York blends the gift of privacy with excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.” I'm an introvert and cherish my alone time, so it may seem strange that I feel so at home here. But White understands—there is a way that you can be more alone here than you can in the suburbs or a small town, where people might know you and will certainly judge you. In the city, there are too many strange people and too many strange happenings for you to attract the notice of others.

White mentions later on the loneliness of office buildings on a Saturday, but I think that's a different kind of loneliness. That is a loneliness that could lead to despair. The loneliness that is a gift must be accompanied by the potential to participate in all the excitement. Loneliness is a gift precisely because you can break it at any moment. I love sitting in parks watching the people all around me, knowing there is no obligation to engage with them, but also knowing that there are friends I could reach out to or strangers to get to know the minute the desire arises.

There is another reason people come to the city, according to White. It's related to the loneliness and the excitement; it is, as he says, to “escape, not face, reality.” New York is “the city of final destinations, the city that is a goal.” My first instinct is to defend this escapism against the cloud of naysaying witnesses in my mind. I think of what J. R. R. Tolkien says in “On Fairy-Stories” against the condemnation of fantasy as an “Escape from Real Life:” “[the critics] are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.” So what if we want to leave the homogeneity or limited opportunities of our home communities? I argue with my mental detractors. Could we not be seeking something truly better?

White doesn’t paint over the negative aspects of the city—its inconveniences and inadequacies, its “greater tension, increased irritability.” He describes our proximity to "the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty.” New Yorkers, he says, “do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere.” It’s because of this that I bristle at the idea of escape because it is not as if we are living in paradise or leaving all our problems behind. In some ways we are confronted with more painful problems than one might see in sanitized suburbia or isolated rurality.

But then I feel the prick of my conscience, and I know that while that may be partially true, it is not the whole story. I read Roberta C. Bondi’s To Love as God Loves in college, and I haven’t been able to forget it. In it she discusses the passions, the word ancient monastics used to describe states of mind or habits that distort how we see others and prevent us from loving them. One of the passions is acedia, “a restless boredom that makes our ordinary tasks seem too dull to bear.” It is a discontent with daily life, a restlessness that drives us to forever seek new experiences and miss the good around us. I see acedia in New Yorkers, always rushing to another existentially important thing and hurtling toward the next show, event, promotion, career. I see it in the structure of the city, with its subways and grids to make sure we never have to slow down or take in the view. I see it in myself. And I do not think it is a good thing.

For better and for worse, White diagnoses the allure of New York correctly. It offers us sweet privacy, with excitement always just around the corner. It drugs our discontent—at least for a while. I felt chilled, as I'm sure all twenty-first-century readers are, by his musings that “the city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy…” I was sobered, too, by his reflections on race. While some things are better than in his time, the “inviolate truce” he describes feels more flimsy than ever.

And yet, while his terrible prediction of destruction by planes came true, and while we have seen more racial violence and injustice than perhaps he imagined, he was wrong that either would end the city forever. In fact, these tragedies seem to have only increased New Yorkers’ “patience and grit,” their “perpetual muddling through.” I do not think New York is as fragile as he feared, despite our brighter lights, bigger planes, and deeper tensions. The past several years have underlined that with bold strokes.

Whenever I think of the city, this is the image I find myself arriving at: the skyline. White describes it like so: “the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up ... the hopes and ferments of so many awakening millions rising—this vigorous spear that presses heaven hard.” He is right, of course, that Manhattan's skyscrapers reach into the sky. He is right that they represent humanity's aspirations, both the beautiful and the depraved. The tower of Babel always hovers around these conversations.

But once, near the beginning of my time here, I was driving in New Jersey near Newark and crested a hill, and the skyline appeared on the horizon line like a revelation. From that distance, the skyscrapers were the exact same color of the clouds. And it did not seem to me that man was reaching to heaven but that heaven had come down. It wasn’t a city intruding into the sky, straining where it didn’t belong, but a city made of sky, of heaven deigning to descend and grace us with a glimpse of its glory.

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It’s been a while since I shared some prose on here, and this piece always haunts the back of my mind. I wrote it originally as a school assignment reflecting on E. B. White’s Here is New York (hence all the quotations; I spared you the in-text citations) for the most marvelous class, Christianity and the City. We explored New York, reading sociological studies of its history and picking a particular neighborhood to walk around and report on. Then we dove into Paul’s epistles, dissecting how he contextualized the gospel for the different cities he wrote to. The class culminated with our own letter to the neighborhood we’d picked. How could we most compellingly articulate the good news to its inhabitants? What would resonate with them? What would challenge them?

It was, like I said, an amazing class.

There’s something sacred about loving a particular place, as I wrote about when Tim Keller died, and I loved this assignment for giving us a chance to wrestle with the ugly and beautiful things about the city we’d come to study in. Here I am, several years later, and I still love it. Not everyone will or should, of course—every place needs its sacred lovers. But I do think that the new Jerusalem will look a lot like the streets of Manhattan, as the top floors of the skyscrapers reflect the sunset and people of all languages mill on the sidewalks below.

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In Other Words…

Goodreads

I might be able to squeak in another book this month but if not, I’m finishing up January with these two wonderful reads (plus one more I haven’t gotten a chance to review yet):

• How the Time Flies: A Collection of Poems by Olivia Gwyn | 4 stars

• The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix | 4 stars

Letterboxd

Only one new movie since last time but it was excellent:

• Conclave (4.5 stars)

• and a link to an incredible review of it

to staying awake—

Aberdeen