a tribute to the bad movies i've slept through

Big Lights, Bright City

I am now at the end of a two-day casual flirtation with New York City. Once again, the City has enticed me, pleasured me, and at the same time left me fed up with its personality and asking for more, for a magical return when I will at last understand what is it that gives life to cities, as they are simultaneously clusters of inanimate objects. I am at last reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and to me, this is a text that gives a matchless interpretation of the beauty of New York: "Unintentional beauty. Yes. Another way of putting it might be 'beauty by mistake.' Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. 'Beauty by mistake' - the final phase in the history of beauty. And Franz adds, "Perhaps New York unintentional beauty is much richer and more varied than the excessively strict and composed beauty of human design."

When I first saw New York, the European snob I was, I forced myself to dislike it: for its coldness, for the fact that it feeds on human personalities, for its denial of what it used to be (go to Central Park and stare at the trees and the rocks; now try to imagine, as I did today, what the island looked like before it started transforming itself into Manhattan). Now that I have turned into an Euro-American snob, I maintain that I am able to see the beauty of New York, as described in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Where there was an attempt for organization and collective purposefulness, however, that beauty dissolves into the air, making it tense and unpleasant - if you don't know what I am talking about, take a ride on the subway.

posted by Dora @ 7:06 PM