Thursday, July 1, 2010

Quote of the Day (Gay Talese, on New York)


“New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick's Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants probably were carried there by winds or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans; or the medium in the West Seventies who claims, ‘I'm clairvoyant, clairaudient and clairsensuous.’”—Gay Talese, “New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed,” in The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters (2003)

I’m not sure if it was my imagination or not, but yesterday morning, it seemed that there were an awful lot of tourists out on the streets of midtown Manhattan: traveling in packs, speaking with accents (sometimes not even English), staring up at the buildings.

After I got over my minor sense of annoyance at them for blocking up the sidewalks at a time of day when I had to rush to work, I was glad that these visitors still felt that the city was still worthwhile coming to.

The great majority of foreign tourists will probably be in a mad rush to take in the sights of the city, but maybe, if we’re lucky, at least some will be perceptive enough to see Gotham in the kind of light that Talese did in the above quote.

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