1) On the notions of “success” that bind us to big cities
Success and failure were the terms in which young people who had just moved into the city spoke. It was not a place to live as much as it was a test or a game. I despise both. “Why don’t you leave?” I asked people endlessly, even though I could not yet explain why I didn’t leave. “Because I don’t want to admit that I failed,” one friend said. “Because I have to prove to myself that I can do this.” By the time I left New York, I knew that success and failure are silly terms in which to speak of living a life.
2) On the contradictions of life in New York City
I noticed during my time in New York that many of the people I met there had a habit of describing how miserable they were, then arguing that they couldn’t leave the city because it was so wonderful. When someone who spends the better part of every day in a cubicle and only occasionally makes it out to sit in a loud, dull bar tells me that she is living in the city for “the pace, the excitement, the culture, the — you know — stimulation,” I have trouble fully believing her.
3) On Americans’ complicated relationship with the notion of being “oppressed”
Perhaps seeing ourselves as descendants, in blood or in spirit, of historically oppressed peoples is an important step toward aligning ourselves with our brethren in this country. But if we want a people to identify with, we have our own beautiful losers. And we have their culture already — we live within it. We have blues and jazz and hip-hop, and we have the food and sports and dances and clothing styles made unique to America by black Americans. White suburban teenagers know this, and some of them embrace black culture for that brief moment in which they are powerless in the land of the powerful. But what keeps so many of the rest of us, as adults, from deliberately identifying with our own beautiful losers? Perhaps we are reluctant to discover what that would require of us.
4) On the odd social middle-ground that exists during one’s college years
Like many young people who go to college immediately after high school, I had learned to talk about the real world as if it were an entirely different universe from the one I lived in. With the blind enthusiasm and embarrassing ignorance of a colonial explorer, I left college determined to discover the real world. I didn’t just want to live there — I wanted to be made real myself.
5) On the way universities have a way of undermining true education
The philosophy of education that dominated the University of Iowa, an ideology not unlike the thinking that dominates many other universities, seemed not only to encourage but to depend on the quiet resignation of its students. That is not to say that there were not excellent professors at the university or that the students were without opportunities. But they were at the bottom of an immense hierarchy that was preoccupied with many concerns other than their education. One didn’t need to spend very long at that institution before realizing that the interests of everyone else — the funders, the administrators, the professors, the graduate students — came before the interests of the undergraduate students. And as in any feudal system, the people on whom the entire system depended were robbed, as completely as possible, of their power. The students were, for the most, part, unable to hold inept teachers accountable, to protest the wasting of their own time, the influence the grounds on which they would be evaluated, to demand anything, really, of substance from the institution. There were procedures for such things, of course, but they consisted mostly of misleading paperwork.
6) On the prescient honesty of children
One of the most frightening things about children, in my experience, is their intelligence. They inevitably know more than we suspect them of knowing. They appraise us with devastating accuracy. And they are aware of the injustices we have learned to ignore.
7) On the culture shock that accompanied the advent of telephone poles
By 1889, the New York Times was reporting a “War on Telephone Poles.” Wherever telephone companies were erecting poles, home owners and business owners were sawing them down or defending their sidewalks with rifles. Telephone poles, newspaper editorials complained, were an urban blight. The poles carried a wire for each telephone — sometimes hundreds of wires. And in some places there were also telegraph wires, power lines, and trolley cables. The sky was netted with wires. The war on telephone poles was fueled, in part, by that terribly American concern for private property, and a reluctance to surrender it for a shared utility. And then perhaps there was also a fear that distance, as it had always been known and measured, was collapsing.
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