Category: Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik

Ever since, New York has existed for me simultaneously as a map to be learned and a place to aspire too–a city of things and a city of signs, the place I actually am and the place I would like to be even when I am here. As a kid, I grasped that the skyline was a sign that could be, so to speak, relocated to New Jersey–a kind of abstract, receding Vision whose meaning would always be “out of reach,” not a concrete thing signifying “here you are.” Even when we are established here, New York still seems a place we aspire to. Its life is one thing–streets and hot dogs and brusqueness–and its symbols, the lights across the way, the beckoning skyline, are another. We go on being inspired even when we’re most exasperated.

Adam Gopnik

I remember looking out the window of the little maid’s room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There’s New York, this wonderful city, I’ll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it–a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don’t LIVE in Oz, do you?

Adam Gopnik

[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios–the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about–was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.